Submitted by CDE 2.5.0 is now available on SourceForge. This is a significant release compared to the previous one with, among many other things, a replacement of the build system from ancient Imake to somewhat less ancient Autotools.
There’s also a ton of bug fixes, as well as new features and other changes.
Missing some modern features but still offers a better workflow than Gnome.
Dtfile is still a mostly useless fm. It does some basic operations okay. But yes, CDE rocks. Great desktop, clean and consistent.
I used CDE by the mid 90’s at the university, on X Terminals connected to a shared HP9000 computer.
There was no official way to opt for another less ugly, clumsy and resource hungry environment.
Initially, as most geeky students, I used to kill CDE’s window manager right after starting my user session, and ran some self-compiled FVWM variant instead (maybe also kill -STOP some other process to avoid the session to fall apart).
Then one day I found out that one of the cascaded system scripts which was used to start the user’s X session actually _sourced_ a config file in the user’s home directory (I think it was .viewprofile, but can’t google any reference to this).
One “exec ~/bin/fvwm” later, I had a very clean way to hijack the X session, and became a star in my classroom.
At this time, I think CDE was used on virtually any UNIX system with graphics, such as Sun and SGi workstations at my dad’s work.
I couldn’t believe companies payed a premium price for high end workstations and ended up working with this… thing.
I don’t know what CDE looks like today — well I guess I do — but that’s clearly not my best memory from the nineties.
By the same time, Windows 95 brought a welcomed clean and fresh take on desktop GUIs (though it curiously never looked as good on your screen as it did on computer magazines).
CDE was totally a design-by-committee product, created by IBM, HP, and USL to be the official standard UNIX desktop (It was part of the UNIX98 specification). It was provided with about10 different UNIX systems, from HP, IBM, DEC, SCO, and others. SGI interestingly was one of the holdouts – they included it in some IRIX releases, but kept their own WM as standard. Red Hat Linux was the only Linux that had a commercial release of CDE on it.
> CDE was totally a design-by-committee product
That’s true. OTOH, so is xNix itself.
There is a very good FOSS clone of CDE now:
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
I compared the clone and the real thing, and the clone took about 1/4 as much RAM as the real thing, which ran on machines with 32MB of RAM 30 years ago. That was a surprise.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_desktops/
lproven,
Your link says “from a fresh boot, CDE used a whopping 892 MiB of RAM, over three times as much as NsCDE.”. It clearly got bigger over time. Naturally some resources are bigger, more pixels, more colors, 64bit code all increase size although to be honest CDE’s modern footprint still seems very high. Counterintuitively people may want to avoid CDE on low ram computers today despite originating decades ago, haha.
That’s very interesting… I’ve ran KDE1 on my Tyan KGPE-D16 for awhile I actually liked it a lot… but it doesn’t have a few nice things modern desktops have. I think feature wise KDE probably peaked in the 1.x-2.x days…. and everything after that was fluff even in 3.x series… it was mostly just getting fancier and not more capable (I’m sure there are exceptions to that of course).
Along about KDE 2.x memory and CPU requirements ballooned due to truetype fonts…
I believe this is also one of the primary resource hogs on Haiku (and was causing thier ISO and and installer requirments to be unreasonably high when all languages were enabled) Not sure how they cope with this now.
Yes, Yes. I rarely want to diss kde 3 as lots of people loved it and was quite functional. But.. But KDE 2.0 was the one I really loved.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I didn’t use KDE at the time, not necessarily because I wouldn’t have liked it, but because I really liked Gnome 2. Gnome 3 had me searching for alternatives. I used cinnamon for a while to keep elements of gnome 2, but it lacked maturity and wasn’t as good. Instead of going with Mate, XFCE and afterwards KDE became my desktop of choice.
I tend to agree with this guy’s overview of Gnome releases…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMak0R_fE2g
It just goes to show, making big waves isn’t always the best way to endear users. Consistency isn’t fun, but it sure is appreciated by some of us.