Adjusted for the inevitable progress of time, the Common Desktop Environment or CDE is the best desktop environment of all time, and no, I will not be taking question at this time. OpenBSD wasn’t yet graced by CDE’s presence, but this is currently changing as the first commit for porting CDE to OpenBSD has appeared.
It’s still rough around the edges and very slightly tested. I wouldn’t use is as a daily driver, it’s old unsecure code but it’s fun if you want to bring back memories.
↫ Antoine at the openbsd-ports mailing list
On top of that, this being the initial commit also means there’s probably bugs and other issues lurking in the code, so caution is definitely advised.
Funny, for me it is with a huge margin the worst desktop environment ever. The only one i would get grumpy while using.
Even in the 90s, it was ugly, SUUUPPPEEERRR slow, just opening a drawer took forever where you would sit and look at that annoying flashing “i am working” light. Minimized windows were hard to find (yes, i know minimizing to a desktop icon was normal back then, but it was just worse in CDE), customization was difficult, and it was generally just in the way. I would rather use TWM or FVWM2, and i never liked those either. Even Windows 3.0 would be better.
The interesting part is that Windows 3 GUI style/guidelines were about to keep parity/familiarity with motif 😉
CDE was the perfect example of a “designed by committee” project. The took HP’s VUE, and managed to make it slower, less functional, and even uglier… somehow.
I think only SGI and NeXT were the Unix vendors with a passing interest in making their unix desktop experience somewhat user friendly and/or visually ergonomic.
It was mind-blowing how atrocious Unix desktop(s) has been during most of its history. Almost like one of its constants.
I mean, by today’s standards it’s super fast and resource efficient, so maybe it’s only when using it on modern hardware that one could even imagine appreciating it.
My first encounter with CDE was in the 2000s, as I recall while testing out one of the free releases of Solaris back in the day. Msybe it’s just rose colored nostalgia, but I found it quaint and pleasing to look at, from the moment I laid eyes on that purple color scheme and those pixel-perfext 90s-style icons. Maybe it was just that it reminded me of my childhood using Windows 3.1 and Netscape 3.0, but I was instantly charmed.
Interesting, i was using it in the late 90s, at about the same time as KDE 1.0 was released. To me the icons in CDE were bland and blurry and with low contrast to the background. Even now, looking at screenshots, i feel it is hard to focus, just like i remember it it.
Sure the KDE screenshot also looks dated now, but it is much sharper, and it was much snappier. At the university i compiled my own KDE 1.0, or maybe it was 1.1, from source code and had it in my home directory so i could start it instead of CDE on their Sun workstations.
CDE felt the worst on Sun, because OpenWindows that was before it was much faster.
Screenshots of all 3 from Wikipedia below, kde in a beta version as the 1.0 screenshot just shows an empty desktop,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment#/media/File:CDE_Application_Builder.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1#/media/File:KDE_Beta3.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWindows#/media/File:Openwindows.jpg
There was a port to OpenBSD in the early days, but it was broken a long time ago and no one stepped up to fix it.
Don’t know about the port, but I did a bunch of QA and wrote the docs on the wiki for a manual build/install.
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/OpenBSDBuild/
RogerB had some prebuilt packages on sourceforge for OpenBSD 7.1. Those haven’t been updated since 2022 I think.
This is actually very exciting. I’ve been using a copy of dtterm I had to build myself for OpenBSD for a long time, it will be nice to have it just work and be managed by the system.