On 25/07/2015 10:53, James Powell wrote:
> CDE was the defacto desktop for many UNIX branded systems like IRIX,
> Solaris, HP-UX, and others until many replaced it with Gnome2, Xfce,
> KDE, and others.
>
> Sun/Oracle replaced CDE with Java Desktop Environment back on Solaris 10
> I believe when OpenSolaris was still being developed. I think Solaris
> uses a more traditional DE now though.

I used CDE on Solaris back in 1997-98, and found it to be pretty usable.
It was the default DE on the universities UNIX systems, including all
their HP-UX nodes which were essentially dumb X terminals (via remote X
to a bigger Solaris system). Not much different to XFCE to be honest in
terms of its panel, though it did include a Glade-like UI development
application, a file manager and other facilities as well. At the time I
thought it quite heavyweight, but today it's probably much smaller than
even XFCE.

Solaris was using GNOME2 in the mid 2000s which is why it became much
more polished and usable when the Sun usability folk were involved, and
took a big dive in usability with GNOME3 when they were replaced by
hipsters who only cared about mobile phones. Looks like they are still
using GNOME2 today.

The main sticking point for CDE on modern systems is its lack of support
for UTF-8 font handling. IIRC its maintainers were working on that, but
I'm not aware of its recent status.


Regards,
Roger