CDE (Common Desktop Environment) it's an old desktop environment you've probably heard of. Now with big projects like GNOME, Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE, Pantheon, Unity, Xfce, LXDE, etc., little is said about CDE, which seems to have fallen into oblivion. But for lovers of retro or vintage, here we present this graphical environment that deserves a mention due to its importance in the past and that you can use in your distro if you wish, since it can be installed in Debian, Ubuntu, ...
It has to be said that CDE was created for Unix, although it was also used by OpenVMS, DEC's system for VAX systems (although it was later ported to other architectures such as DEC Alpha and Intel Itanium). Well, sticking with it, without straying too far, CDE was based on the Motif library and was jointly developed by IBM, NOvell, Sun Microsystems (now bought by Oracle), and Hewlett-Packard. From 1996 it became the responsibility of The Open Group to the present day.
So important was it that until about the year 2000, CDE would be considered the standard environment for Unix systems. Honestly, I have not tried it on GNU / Linux, but I have been lucky enough to handle it under Solaris 10. At first glance, seen what we have seen in the competition we are used to, it may seem somewhat primitive, but it has its charm. Little by little, many Unix developers were discarding it and moving to other environments such as GNOME, KDE (Plasma), etc., due to the maturity that these projects reached.
If you remember Xfce in the past, its first steps, it may remind you of what Xfce looked like when it started CDE. CDE was also used in the Linux worldNot only can you install it in some distros like the ones mentioned above, but Red Hat, in 1997 considered it for its RHEL and ported it to work under GNU / Linux, although it would later be released so that it could be used in other distros a from 2012. So as I say, if you like history, if you like retro, vintage or just tired of current graphic environments, CDE test.
did virtual desktops already exist for that environment?
there I see one, two, three four etc
Yes, my first contact with this environment was in the mid-90s and by then I had virtual desktops.
better motif burn in hell along with tk / tcl
I have been using that environment in my work until 2 years ago (it was not the only environment that I used, but for certain tasks it was ...)
How do I install it on a current distro?
If you have SparkyLinux, you simply open Aptus, go to "Desktop", select it, click "Install" and run.
Alternatively, it can be downloaded here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/