2022-09-29

I saw an article on the internet that said that CDE (Common Desktop
Environment) was recently updated to version 2.5. I believe a few
years ago, CDE and motif were finally released as open source
software.  Since then some people have tried to maintain it and
make it buildable on linux.

I have very fond memories of CDE. I went to university in the very
early 2000s and I recall one of my computer labs had an entire row
of Sun Ultra 5 workstations for the students to use. Now at this
time, I believe these workstations were only really being used for
the CADENCE program used to do VLSI layouts. That was what I used
them for anyways for classes. However outside of classes, these
Sun Ultra 5's had one other special property: no one wanted to use
them.

Imagine it's a busy weekday and you need to go to the computer lab
and do your homework or print or just surf the high speed internet.
Of course on busy days the computer labs will be full and you can't
get a computer to to do your thing. At the time, Windows NT4 and
Windows 2000 computers were what were available for students and
in the early 2000s, Windows was pretty much the only thing that
young college kids knew how to use.  But the Sun Ultra 5 workstations
were almost always available because they were weird. At the time
I didn't understand that these were really the last days of dedicated
unix workstations but I did know that people really didn't like
using the Sun systems. When you logged into the Ultra 5's you were
presented with CDE which was frankly quite ugly. The non-aliased
fonts are particularly memorable especially compared to windows
which had superior font rendering.

But looking back, I can see that the seeds for my eventual switch
away from Windows operating systems started right there in college
using good old CDE. Since I was like most kids and grew up in a
Wintel PC gaming world I really had no idea what Unix was and how
to use it. So I painstakingly surfed the early web and tried to
learn it. Afterall, the computer labs were almost always full in
the early 2000s since believe it or not it still wasn't really an
expectation that you needed to actually own your own computer for
college back then. So I was stuck using the Ultra 5s quite a bit.
This was also before youtube as well. I would read FAQs and HOWTO
guides to figure out how to do stuff on Solaris unix..using Netscape
Navigator of course.

I actually came to really like CDE. It is ugly as heck of course
but when you really dig into it, it really is a fully featured
desktop environment. It had every tool you needed to use and GUI
configuration applications as well. The bottom drawer boxes were
always fun and I thought were way cooler than the Windows Start
menu. I was really fond of it. Later on after I graduated from
college I eventually did run linux in the mid-2000s using XFCE
which is kind of like a spiritual offspring of CDE in a way.

I'm glad that CDE is staying alive. I've recently gained a sort of
nostalgia for the early XWindows looks and applications.