CDE 2.5.3 released

So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn’t exactly a secret, so let’s talk about the project’s latest release, CDE 2.5.3, released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE’s window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bugfixes.

Ever since CDE was released as open source over thirteen years ago, and while considerable work has been done to make it build, install, and run on modern platforms, that’s kind of where the steam ran out. CDE isn’t being actively developed to build upon its strengths and add new and welcome features and conveniences, but is instead kept in a sort of buildable stasis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this – it keeps CDE accessible on modern platforms, and that’s a huge amount of work that deserves respect and gratitude – but it’d be nice if we lived in a world where there was enough interest (and time and money) to have people work on actually improving it.

Of course, the reality is that there’d be very little interest in such an improved CDE, and that’s exactly why it isn’t happening. On top op the current work the CDE team is doing, you’d need to not only develop new features, but also improve the Motif toolkit to make such new features possible, and make sure such improvements don’t break anything else. With such an old codebase, that can’t possible be an easy task.

Still, I will continue to daydream of a slightly more modernised CDE with some additional niceties we’ve come to expect over the past 30 years, even if I know full well it’s futile.