EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is simple and fast desktop environment with familiar look and feel. EDE uses FLTK toolkit for GUI presentation and UNIX philosophy for it's design, where EDE splits each component in separate executable entity to do one job and do it good. This makes EDE very easy to alter for user needs and requirements.

EDE is light and fast. It uses C++ carefully yielding fast startup, low memory usage and great portability. Also, we care not only about how fast EDE runs, but how much time is needed to compile it.

These facts makes EDE a perfect desktop environment for older computers and embedded devices. But, you can use it on your everyday hardware too.

EDE does not comes with “provide-everything” philosophy. Our goal is to provide desktop environment only, leaving specialized tools and applications outside. For example, why to create yet another browser when Firefox, Seamonkey or Chromium can nicely cooperate with EDE.

Until freedesktop.org initiative was started, EDE implemented many common approaches in own way. This was mostly noticeable in 1.x versions. From version 2.0, EDE is trying to closely follow freedesktop.org standards, making it not only cooperative with modern applications but with other desktop environments too.

EDE is licensed under GPL 2.0 license. edelib is licensed under LGPL 2.0 license.