EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a simple and fast desktop environment for *nix-like systems. It uses the FLTK GUI toolkit and offers a familiar look and feel. EDE is designed according to the UNIX philosophy, which means it offers seperate executables for each component to “do one job and do it good”. This makes EDE very modular and also easy to alter for any user's special needs and requirements.

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

These facts makes EDE an excellent desktop environment for both older computers and embedded devices. But of course you can use it on your everyday hardware, too.

EDE does not follow the “provide everything” philosophy. On the contrary, our goal is to provide a desktop environment only, leaving it to the user which programs to install alongside with it. When it comes to applications and tools for daily use, everybody has his own preferences, anyway. There's no need to waste system resources for programs which are never used at all or to have the user remove them after installation. And why, for example, create yet another browser when Firefox, Seamonkey or Chromium can nicely cooperate with EDE?

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

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