Common Desktop Environment
Sign in to saveAlso known as CDE
desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS operating systems
Key facts
- Original author
- The Open Group
- Developer
- CDE Project (modern)
- Initial release
- June 1993 ; 33 years ago ( 1993-06 )
- Stable release
- 2.5.3 / November 25, 2025 ; 6 months ago ( 2025-11-25 )
- Written in
- C, C++
- Operating system
- Unix , Unix-like , OpenVMS
- Size
- 54.9 MB (source code)
- Available in
- English, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Spanish, Swedish
- Type
- Desktop environment
- License
- 2012: LGPL-2.0-or-later , Original: Proprietary
- Website
- sf .net /projects /cdesktopenv /
- Repository
- sf .net /p /cdesktopenv /code /
via Wikipedia infobox
~7 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. It helped to influence early implementations of successor projects such as KDE and GNOME, which largely replaced CDE following the turn of the century.
After a long history as proprietary software, CDE was released as free software on August 6, 2012, under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.0 or later. Since its release as free software, CDE has been ported to Linux and BSD derivatives.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Common Desktop Environment” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.