The Evolution of the CDE and KDE Desktops


In the early days of Linux, the Linux XFree86 X server (an open-source version of the X Window System) supported a multitude of window managers: FVWM, FVWM95, Afterstep, Window Maker, KDE, and Enlightenment. The two most popular, KDE and Enlightenment, were powerful desktop environments that incorporated a large variety of applications for Linux workstations. Both incorporated a window manager, a file manager, a panel, a control center, and themes. In UNIX terminology a window manager runs on top of a basic X server and manages the window icons and general look and feel of your desktop. Most of the popular UNIX/Linux window managers generate multiple desktops with the capability to have individual windows be unique to a given desktop or be sticky (that is, appear on all desktops). The file manager application gives you an icon-based drag-and-drop capability similar to Windows Explorer; panels and control centers organize the selection of windows applications and desktops as well as the look and feel of the desktops themselves. Themes allow you to select a background that suits your mood of the day, including-if you are so inclined-a Microsoft theme.

Concurrent with these Linux developments, another desktop environment-called CDE-was being developed for existing UNIX systems that had previously only used command-line interfaces. CDE is a proprietary desktop environment for UNIX. It was jointly developed by HP, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Novell as part of the Open Group consortium. The platform was based on HP’s desktop environment for the X Window System, called VUE (Visual User Environment). It was developed using the Motif widget toolkit, a toolkit created by the OSF (Open Software Foundation) in response to Microsoft’s Windows 3.x graphical desktop interface.

Up until around the year 2000, CDE was considered the de facto standard for UNIX desktops. But also around that time, free software desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME were quickly becoming both mature and readily available in the marketplace. The end result was that these two became the de facto standards on the Linux platform, which by then had a larger user base than most commercial flavors of Unix combined.

The following year, HP and Sun announced that they were going to phase out the license-based CDE as the desktop on their workstations in favor of the free GNOME desktop. However, just a few years later, HP decided to return to CDE for HP-UX. It is now also the standard desktop environment on the HP Open VMS platform. Currently Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system includes both CDE and GNOME; however, CDE will not be part of the OpenSolaris platform.

For users coming from a CDE desktop environment under Solaris or HP-UX, KDE should be a good starting point, since KDE has much the same look and feel as CDE. KDE is a QT library-based GUI (QT is a C++ toolkit to develop graphical user interfaces).

There is also another CDE-like desktop interface that runs on Linux, Solaris, and BSD platforms called Xfce (X Forms Common Environment). Two of its main attractions are that

  • Like GNOME, it is based on the GTK+ widget toolkit.

  • It provides the look and feel of CDE but is open source.

If, after reading the description of the CDE desktop, you feel that Xfce might be more appropriate for your use, you can find out more about it by viewing the web page at http://www.xfce.org/.




UNIX. The Complete Reference
UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition (Complete Reference Series)
ISBN: 0072263369
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 316

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