Many years ago (around '96), a bunch of us used to spend way too much time at the public terminals in university computing centre (SRCE) in Zagreb, Croatia. They had about 10 compatible terminals (VT-220's and IBM-3151's) - and two Sun Sparc workstations that were set up as graphical terminals using CDE.

We had to wait for an hour or two to have one of the text terminals free up (damn MUD players hogged them up all the time, and we IRCers just wanted to chat online!). Getting access to the graphical terminals was nigh impossible unless you were there from the early morning or if you stayed through the night (the place was open 24/7 if you can believe it).

Ah the wonders of graphical Unix! Multiple workplaces! I fondly remember the doplhin wallpaper - my fave. And you could use Mosaic to browse the web (Netscape was running pretty sluggish)! Nevermind one of the workstation had a b/w monitor, it was still an amazing experience.

Fond memories.

I completely skipped that CDE is GPL now [1]!? Wow! I want this to run on Linux! Digging, deeper, it apparently is already working on Ubuntu [2].

[1] from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment:

"After a long history as proprietary software, CDE was released as free software on 6 August 2012, under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2 or later.[3] Since its release as free software, CDE has been ported to Linux and BSD derivatives."

[2] https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/SupportedPlatform...

During my training I had the opportunity to work at a Sun workstation running Solaris and CDE. I did not find it to be a very comfortable working environment, but I loved the look. Even though I am too young to have been around when CDE was the desktop for Unix systems, I was infected with instant nostalgia.

I have been trying to build CDE myself a few times, but it always failed, and I never bothered to investigate. But I think I know what I will be doing over Christmas on my ancient OpenBSD laptop. ;-)

Had never heard of CDE before. I guess this is what my nephew feels when he sees a floppy disk and connects it to the save icon on PCs :-)

As an aside, it would be a treat to have a GUI environment that is started from scratch with the Unix philosophy at core. GNOME is not it, for it is so heavily packaged with stuff I don't need, and is slow and heavy.

What a treat! OpenBSD was my daily driver years and years ago—version 2.something I think?—and I set up my desktop environment to mimic CDE as much as I could. It was obviously a pale imitation, but I totally get the “gravitational pull” the author mentions. Sounds like I have something fun to do while my partner is visiting family!

As someone who only knows these interfaces from movies (i think "Eraser" with Arnold Schwarzenegger had a terminal like this), what were the main advantages of CDE compared to other DEs at the time? Or to WfW/Windows9x/OS2/System7?

I think the decision to host the source on Sourceforge is the most humorous touch...

One nice thing I liked about Motif desktops back in the days was that different applications were easily "themable" to have a different base background, which made differentiating windows very easy.

I honestly don't see why anyone would want to use this DE today.

Rewind 15 years and I had a laptop with 256M RAM and would use a very bare bones tiling window manager to keep resource use down.

But today my Linux system is much more close to a replacement of a Windows or Mac OS system. I'm quite happy with the resources available and the advances made in Gnome/KDE.

I would never go back to using bare bones DE's or OpenMotif.

I used to like using CDE on Solaris. There was something very quiet about the ui. I mainly used it for running x-terms though. The only gui app I used frequently was Nedit (still my favourite text editor of all time - light, fast and good looking!)

OpenVMS shipped with CDE for a long time. I wonder if it still does?

I've got a brand new X270 coming that's getting OpenBSD, and while I'm a 99% terminal guy, I can't wait to install this for the occasional times I need a DE.

Didn't XFCE start out as an attempt at emulating this UI?

Some of my first professional web development work back in the late 90s was writing perl using emacs on a CDE desktop.

(I don't remember exactly why we were using this setup, but locally I was running Linux, but was running a X session from a shared Solaris box.)

Lovely to see this. I used CDE when I was on work experience at Rover and they had a tonne of Sun pizza boxes connecting to their SunOS mainframes.

I remember using early KDE (KDE 2) with a CDE colour scheme to emulate the look.

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and we make uis in html that look worse than this.

Doesn't look very sexy