CDE Unix desktop open sourced

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Ben Walton <bdwalton-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I still remember thinking cde was a  klunky user experience even when
> stacked against really early kde releases...
>
> We used to build kde for our sparc stations to avoid using cde. :)

My favorite part is that people might want CDE for
"use in some lightweight distributions."

At the time...

a) CDE and Motif were considered horribly heavyweight;

b) One of the points of using a "DE" was supposed to be that since
widgets and services would be widely reused, they ought to be lighter
weight than their alternatives.

Unfortunately, things went down a counter-Unix-Philosophy trail, where
things became less scriptable, and everything got statically compiled
into everything, to a fault.  (Sure, there are dynamic libraries, but
if you want to install a newer app, you need new dynamic libraries, so
they might as well be statically linked, and you have the worst of
worlds...)
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