When comparing Equinox vs Common Desktop Environment, the Slant community recommends Equinox for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like Desktop Environments for everyday users?” Equinox is ranked 19th while Common Desktop Environment is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Equinox is:
Equinox only consumes and needs tiny memory space.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro LIghtweight
Equinox only consumes and needs tiny memory space.
Pro Customizable through a user-friendly control panel
The control panel lets you customize Equinox through various applets with which you can customize everything from the wallpaper to the fonts to use.
Pro Uses FLTK
It uses the lightweight and stable Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK).
Pro Conservative look
Pro Useful for low-end devices
As Linux moves into low-end territory with the likes of Raspberry PI, CDE's level of consumption seems extremely small. When it was first developed, 128MB or RAM was a lot.
Pro Stays out of your way
Has the drawer concept and the middle button on the mouse has a use again.
Pro Mature
CDE was developed more than 20 years ago to work as a unified DE for all the various forms of commercial, proprietary Unix operating systems that dominated the market back then: AIX, TRU64, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX etc...
Nowadays it's released as an open source Desktop Environment for Linux. It comes as a free tested, widely deployed and enterprise-level product even if it's recently re-release as FOSS for Linux.
Cons
Con Not very stylish
It's not a very stylish desktop.
Con Poor support by distributors
Most distributions don't ship Equinox so you have to build it from source.
Con Outdated UI
The graphical interface is very outdated and ugly. It's mostly for lower-end machines and for people who want to give their Linux machine a true UNIX feel.