Java Desktop System
More info
- Creator
- Sun Microsystems
- Released
- 2003
- Type
- Desktop environment
- Predecessor
- CDE
Sun's GNOME-based desktop from 2003, sold as a corporate alternative to Windows and named after Java despite containing hardly any.
The project was called Mad Hatter and shipped in December 2003 as Sun Java Desktop System, Release 1: a Linux distribution on a SUSE base with GNOME 2, StarOffice 7, a Mozilla browser, the Evolution mail client and a Java runtime, all under a single theme meant to look familiar enough to someone arriving from Windows. The price was 100 dollars per desktop per year, and the pitch was that an organisation could replace Windows and Office in one go. The name was a branding decision: Sun put Java on everything that year, and the desktop was written in Java in no sense other than being able to run it. A deal in China that was to deliver millions of seats made big headlines and little visible difference.
The Linux version went through two releases and was then set aside as Sun turned inward. Release 3 followed in 2005 with Solaris 10 and became the default desktop there in place of CDE, after a decade of Motif. That was the role in which the system actually mattered: Sun poured resources into GNOME in those years, into accessibility, internationalisation and the Orca screen reader, which was written there. When OpenSolaris arrived in 2008 the desktop was simply called GNOME again, and the Java Desktop System name went away about as quietly as the Java in it had ever been.