From the article [1] linked in the post: "CDE has achieved something that no other desktop environment has ever given me: a complete and total dedication to ex

From the article [1] linked in the post: "CDE has achieved something that no other desktop environment has ever given me: a complete and total dedication to expected behaviour - or, put differently, a complete absence of unexpected behaviour." "Another important aspect of CDE is the magical word "consistency". CDE is highly consistent (as long as you avoid the slow Java-based applications Sun ships with Solaris 9); it uses only only one theme with only a few colours (grey, greyer, and 'Solaris purple'), and buttons are re-used in different places only there where they do exactly the same thing. The dash and dot buttons on the dock do exactly the same thing to the dock as they do to windows (yes, you can actually iconify the dock). This consistency also stems from the fact that CDE is so spartan: it has few GUI elements that could actually be inconsistent." I think when CDE would have been open-source, there might not have been KDE or Gnome (which was developped, because of QT's license at the time of the KDE inception. At this time there was a need to have a desktop environment for Linux - and the existing Unix desktop environment, CDE was proprietary. [1] http://www.osnews.com/story/18969/pt_VII_CDE/page2/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18969/pt_VII_CDE/page2/