| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |
| CDE released as open source |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-06 00:00:00 |
| We have some very good news for those of us with a love for the Common Desktop Environment. I'm a huge fan of CDE - I've even dedicated an article to it - so I'm excited about this. CDE has been released as open source under the LGPL, and can be downloaded as of today for Debian and Ubuntu. Motif will follow later. |
|
| great! my favorite desktop!! |
| By sergio on 2012-08-06 00:40:41 |
|
I used CDE for years in a Sun Blade workstation running Solaris 8 and I loved it. It was really nice and fast. I think that many ideas from CDE are cool even today, iconification of running applications is one of them (similar to Windows 3.1 but better). Unfortunately GNOME became the "de facto" standard of the majority of unix desktops (Solaris included) and CDE didn't get any major improvement since then. I hope open source put CDE back at the top. :-) |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE: great! my favorite desktop!! |
| By joekiser on 2012-08-06 00:59:51 |
|
> I used CDE for years in a Sun Blade workstation running Solaris 8 and I loved it. It was really nice and fast. I think that many ideas from CDE are cool even today, iconification of running applications is one of them (similar to Windows 3.1 but better). Unfortunately GNOME became the "de facto" standard of the majority of unix desktops (Solaris included) and CDE didn't get any major improvement since then. I hope open source put CDE back at the top. :-) I always liked CDE, and this is positive news. It's been over a decade since you could purchase it for Linux/FreeBSD. There has recently been an effort to create an open-source clone, which has been decently supported on FreeBSD. Regarding the UI, CDE is a stable environment, and I always thought iconify to desktop was superior to a taskbar. If I could design a modern desktop, it would largely resemble the CDE layout, with live thumbnails of the minimized apps as opposed to fixed icons. I don't know how much traction this will gain, except for nostalgic users. The beauty is, we have the option to keep using it. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: great! my favorite desktop!! |
| By zizban on 2012-08-06 01:18:25 |
|
Hi, I am the documentation lead for the CDE project. The people behind OpenCDE are involved with CDE as well. A FreeBSD port is in progress. There is an issue with dthello that is making it impossible for it to run on other distributions other than Debain Squeeze and Ubuntu. It's related to rpcbind and it's being worked on. |
| - Score: 14 |
| Appreciation for CDE, OpenVMS |
| By Hypnos on 2012-08-06 01:38:39 |
|
It was coherently designed, well-documented and almost entirely bug free. Not unlike OpenVMS, which is where I used CDE. Yeah, it's ugly as sin, but managed to stay out of the way let you do your work, which I consider a high compliment for a desktop environment -- or an operating system. Does this mean I'll use it now? No -- XFCE, which has a lot more mindshare, does the job for me, and there are many GTK apps I would miss (e.g., Firefox). Perhaps CDE should have gone open a long time ago to have any hope ... |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE: great! my favorite desktop!! |
| By Morgan on 2012-08-06 01:39:22 |
|
My first experience with it was on an AIX workstation donated to the IT lab when I was in college. I was one of the few students with prior *nix experience so the lab manager asked me to help him with setting it up. It was a blast! Until then I had only worked with FVWM, blackbox and twm and I loved CDE's approach to desktop management. I suppose that's why I took so well to Xfce when I switched to it from Gnome so many years later. |
| - Score: 5 |
| Comment by ssokolow |
| By ssokolow on 2012-08-06 01:45:12 |
|
I've never used CDE and I'll probably stick with LXDE but I'm still very glad to see this and, if I can ever find the time, I'll probably play around with it just for curiosity's sake. It'll also be very nice if the planned LGPL release of Motif prompts Gentoo maintainers (who, last I checked, consider LessTif too much work for too little gain) to offer a fully libre way to run Motif-based apps like GNU DDD. |
| - Score: 2 |
| I'm interested in knowing if... |
| By Jason Bourne on 2012-08-06 01:51:05 |
| I'm interested in knowing if there are more users that feels the same way Thom does, telling that CDE feels much like a dog instead of a cat. I may try this on VirtualBox just to get the feeling, I wonder if it will be outstanding... |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: I'm interested in knowing if... |
| By zizban on 2012-08-06 01:55:05 |
|
For being alpha quality software, it's pretty stable. I use it as my desktop DE now. There are are some quirks and not everything works (dtcreate, dtappbuilder and probably a few other things). Of course the colors are a bit garish but I created a palette how to so you can change that. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Very cool. |
| By UltraZelda64 on 2012-08-06 02:07:51 |
|
I wonder if it will take off now, or at least be picked up by Debian as an official package in the repository. I think Squeeze just froze, so unfortunately it probably won't happen for another two years or so, when the next, next version is released. Still, very cool. I'm interested to see how it turns out and develops, and any specialty Linux distros that are based on it. I've only used it briefly a couple times when I was playing around with Solaris (still owned by Sun at the time). |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by Drumhellar |
| By Drumhellar on 2012-08-06 04:30:33 |
|
CDE was the second *nix GUI I ever used extensively (Afterstep on Red Hat 5 being the first), and was the first I used on an actual Unix (SCO Unixware, baby!) This news pleases me. I still like CDE, and I'm anxious to see what direction it goes now. |
| - Score: 2 |
| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |