CDE Open Sourced 263
First time accepted submitter christurkel writes "CDE, the Common Desktop Project, has been open sourced by the Open Group. CDE was created by a collaboration of Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, SCO, Fujitsu and Hitachi. You can find the source here. It has been tested on Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu. Testers are encouraged to join the project. Motif will follow in a few months once some legal issues are sorted out."
That looks... (Score:4, Informative)
Horrible.
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(Visually speaking of course, I know nothing of the innards)
Re:That looks... (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, I'm left wondering if you'd even heard of CDE [wikipedia.org] before this article. I hate to say it, but you're reading Slashdot - we expect you not to RTFA most of the time but to be blind to something like CDE is fairly unforgivable.
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Did they ever open source SunView?
CDE was a much better interface at the time.
Re:That looks... (Score:4, Informative)
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Did they ever open source SunView?
That takes me back:
http://toastytech.com/guis/sv35.html [toastytech.com]
Suntools (as SunView was originally known) was my first true GUI (I hadn't used a Mac or GEM and Windows 3 hadn't yet been launched). A Sun workstation running this in the 80s, complete with optical mouse and huge monitor, looked about 5 years in advance of anything else I could get time on. Now get off my lawn.
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I've used CDE, I was around in that era. It does look horrible. It looked out of date in the 90s and it looks out of date now. It (and Motif) was based on Windows 3.1.
I do still use NEdit though. Fantastic regex support.
And yeah, if they open-sourced Windows 95, I would say it's out of date. Who wouldn't? Who seriously want to build and run Windows 95 on a computer today?
The only value to open-sourcing CDE now is for historical purposes (Motif at least still has some useful applications, although OpenMotif
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It (and Motif) was based on Windows 3.1.
MicroSoft were even involved in the design of Motif and CDE, which took some of its look and feel from Windows 3.1, although I don't think MS contributed to the actual development. I'm pretty sure the Motif programming manuals from O'Reilly even mentioned MicroSoft in the introductory pages.
I do still use NEdit though. Fantastic regex support.
I use NEdit pretty much every working day - it was even my main programming editor of choice for many years.
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I do still use NEdit though. Fantastic regex support.
I use NEdit pretty much every working day - it was even my main programming editor of choice for many years.
Quiet. You will restart the vi/emacs wars.
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In fact, I'm left wondering if you'd even heard of CDE [wikipedia.org] before this article. I hate to say it, but you're reading Slashdot - we expect you not to RTFA most of the time but to be blind to something like CDE is fairly unforgivable.
To be honest, it was pretty easy to miss. Yes, it was big in certain environments, but outside those environments it didn't make much impact. Sun shops, for example, tended not to use it. And it was very quickly eclipsed in workstation farms by Windows PCs. So if you weren't in just the right environment in just the right window of history I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't see it.
My university was almost entirely a Sun shop, and the only machines that had CDE were a handful of god-awful DEC Alphas run
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Actually, no. Motif looked like shit even compared to Win 3.1
I remember.
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I used CDE back in the day. It sucked.
15 again (Score:2, Funny)
Ah, to be 15 again.
(You have no clue what CDE is or what era it comes from, do you?)
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Re:15 again (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, that pastel color scheme may have looked really high-tech during the Reagan administration, but even by the mid-1990s it was seemed like a museum piece.
However it's too bad the source code wasn't released back in the 1990s, people could have modernized the look and possibly avoided much of the KDE versus Gnome nonsense.
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At the time, it was the prettiest of all. I mean it was so much better than XT or Athena.
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actually i like the clean look of CDE and the fact it uses a fraction of the memory of all of your modern desktops with the memory hogging graphics and disgusting, nauseating, and ugly aqua themes.
Re:That looks... (Score:4, Interesting)
The time it was made it was a different era.
1. Monochrome Displays were quite common (Black and White, Black and Amber, Black and Green, Black and Red (rare)). So they used a rather minimal color scheme. Unix systems were for businesses so they had to get hundreds of displays, and they weren't willing to pay extra for a color display. Windows was designed for the PC, where kids at home played games and spending $100 more for a color monitor was worth it.
2. Low Color depth. Most systems supported 4 bit color (16 colors), so you didn't have that many colors to choose from. If you had 8 bit color then there was a lot a pallet shifting to get different colors... Every app you ran once you switched the window you colors would change.
3. Slow Bandwidth. What a lot of people forgot or don't even realize X-Windows is designed to display graphics over a network connection. This was its huge features. (and today it can be considered it biggest drawback) CDE was designed on 1 Megabit or less networks and usable over dial up.
Plus we have difference in styles that change over time...
We tend to go with more 3D and back to 2D and back to 3D again. CDE was made when 3dish styles were more attractive.
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You were on an Alpha, which probably had TGA graphics. You were one of the lucky ones.
A lot of us poor saps were using Sparcs with 8-bit color.
Sun seemed to think no one cared about color depth until '97 or so. They did sell a few systems with 24-bit color, but they were expensive as hell. They'd charge twenty times the price for the same features a PC user would get with a discount Trident card.
Either way, it makes little to no difference as far as remote X displays. The only time the increased color d
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Speaking as a former CDE user, I can assure you that it is horrible. I used it when I worked at Sun in in 1998, and it drove me crazy. Eventually, Sun replaced it with GNOME (branded as "Java Desktop" of all stupid names).
From there, I went to using KDE and GNOME. The change was a powerful argument for the advantages of Open Source development as opposed to the committee-based design model used to create CDE. Not that KDE and GNOME didn't have their problems (and still do) but they showed creativity, cohere
Re:That looks... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:That looks... (Score:5, Insightful)
CDE came out during the computer Stone Age. At that time, CDE was cutting edge, blowing away Windows 3.1 (yeah, it goes that far back!!) as a GUI. This was the 90's, guys. The 'decent' GUI for Linux at the time was FVWM/FVWM2. Compare screenshots of the two, and you'll know why I was envious as hell of the 'commercial *nixes' at the time. XFCE came out as a CDE lookalike/workalike. And today it looks nothing like it used to Back In The Day. Motif? Uglier than my ex-wife, but back then, it was THE widget set, nobody else had come out with anything remotely like it.
Today we have all kinda stuff we can drop in. More widget sets than ticks on a dog, 90 zillion different window managers/desktop environments. Even Windows doesn't look the same. This is a piece of computer history on the level of the old Xerox PARC GUI that mutated into MacOS and Windows. The 'genetics' are there for you to see, warts and all, in its pristine prehistoricalness.
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Re:That looks... (Score:5, Funny)
CDE! GOD YES!
They say that good things come to those that wait, I have WAITED for 20 years, to see this day!
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But they did release it via Git which makes it trivial for anyone (including you!) to simply make a github repo for it.
small missing bit of information (Score:5, Interesting)
"CDE was created by a collaboration of Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, SCO, Fujitsu and Hitachi" in 1993. It's interesting historically, but even commercial Unices have phased it out. Sun dumped it from Solaris ten years ago.
Open-sourcing Motif at least makes it easier to maintain some legacy apps, though sucks for the LessTif [sourceforge.net] guys that they put so much work into cloning it that could've been avoided if Motif had been open-sourced years ago.
CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? (Score:2)
Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? (Score:5, Informative)
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CDE would run kind of OK on pretty old machines, so maybe it will enjoy a renaissance. But probably not.
Motif being released for free is way more exciting than CDE. I actually paid for CND back in the day to get a Motif license...
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Trust me, you shouldn't waste your time evaluating CDE. Not with a gazillion Linux desktops under active development — as opposed to legacy software that's going OS because its creators can't be bothered to maintain it.
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Sun dumped it from Solaris ten years ago.
I was just going to say that they're only about 10 years too late!
Re:small missing bit of information (Score:4, Interesting)
You could use CDE today, Why not? It uses a fraction of the memory and is still completely functional. The age of something has no impact on its usefulness. If someone likes to use CDE, it doesnt matter how old it is. Many people like CDEs modern solid coloured graphics over the nuasiating aqua themes and memory hogging 3d nonsense. It is often the case that newer software is worse. Back when CDE was written, programmers were much more careful since they had to be to make something that was memory efficient. Nowadays everyone is sloppy and lazy today leading to buggy memory wasting software.
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You'd have to completely rewrite it from scratch, possibly using something like Cairo, for it to work at a tolerable speed on modern hardware. CDE expects everything to be a flat unaccelerated bitplane. It's slow as hell.
15 years too late. (Score:4, Informative)
Open Sourcing CDE? Seriously? Would have possibly made a difference in 1998. But now? Except for historical interest, there's no point.
Was a so-so environment on HP-UX back in the day. Gloriously ugly.
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Historical interest is worthwhile.
Plus, this allows the possibility of open-sourcing additional software that was built on top of this stuff back in the day. In the late 80s and early 90s, I worked on library automation software, and the Unix version of it was built on top of the libraries that were part of CDE. That code can in theory now be dusted off and released.
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You are wrong. Many people would like to use CDE because onlike modern stuff it does not use a lot of memory. Everything old is new again. CDE works fine and there is no reason someone could not use it.
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Open Sourcing CDE? Seriously? Would have possibly made a difference in 1998. But now? Except for historical interest, there's no point.
I see the historical interest exactly as the main point here. Source code releases are an excellent addition to preserving the history of computers and software.
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Open Sourcing CDE? Seriously? Would have possibly made a difference in 1998. But now? Except for historical interest, there's no point.
Was a so-so environment on HP-UX back in the day. Gloriously ugly.
Unfortunately, some companies only see Open Source as a way to gain good will or prestige by releasing code that's no longer of value to them. It's better than nothing, but it's entirely missing the main goals of both the Free Software and Open Source movements.
Oh good. (Score:3)
Wow. CDE is one of those things that... yeah, it was better than the nothing or the OpenWindows we had before it... kinda... but has there been anything done with it that's in any way an improvement to anything going on today? Or in the past decade?
Same with MOTIF. It used to be the only game in town, but we have stuff like gtk and qt now. Are these things even relevant anymore?
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Are these things even relevant anymore?
Motif was modernized to use the new X font mechanism while maintaining compatibility.
There are other relatively minor steps that can be taken that will dramatically improve the visual experience.
The compelling advantage of this, is a code base that runs well on 30 MHz SPARC machines of 1993. Just imagine how snappy it would run on a Raspberry Pi.
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The fact it is not GTK and not modern desktops loaded down with hundreds of megabytes of graphics is its appeal. I think people want to use it becasue it is not modern and that it does things the old way, like, not using 100s of megabytes. Not everyone wants to spend tons of memory on some poorly written Gnome UI so they can have some ugly looking graphics.
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So use XFCE, Fluxbox, or one of the other lightweight windows managers.
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You do realize that some people would rather use that RAM to power the applications they're working on, rather than some magpie's wet dream of a DE getting in their way, right?
'BOUT TIME (Score:2)
Does anyone still use CDE? (Score:3)
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GroupWise still exists?
There are still people using it?
Full Circle (Score:2)
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CDE is not making a comeback. It was open sourced because it has no commercial value.
Install XFCE if you want something lightweight, nothing to see here.
CDE? Ewww... (Score:2)
I remember having that as the default desktop when I first got my account at university. One of the first things I did was replace it with something else because it was so frustrating.
At least now that it's open source, someone may find some small gem of code in the base that is genuinely useful and can be ported to another project.
Hooray! More life for old systems! And new! (Score:5, Interesting)
In its time, CDE was a reasonably fast desktop environment on a 75 MHz processor. CDE and Dillo would be great for the DSL/Puppy crowd.
CDE also includes a Korn shell ('93 version) that Novell hacked with Motif extensions. Everybody should start bundling that, assuming that the licensing is reasonable. It would be a great addition to pdksh, and is hands-down better than bash.
DSL/Puppy crowd??? (Score:2)
I've been running customized DSL implementations on my older PC's as well as the odd Puppy VM for a while now and JWM is quite fine for these mini distros (as is Flux/OpenBox which both include).
I used it (Score:2)
I used it, as "early" as 2003, on HP-UX. Not sure what happened to HP-UX after that, our projects switched mostly to Solaris, which also had CDE but soon switched to Gnome.
Let me be the first to say: GOOD JOB (Score:5, Interesting)
So many negative posts here. So let me be the first to say: Good job!
It's very good they open source it, even if only for legacy apps (Motif). The open-source code base for CDE is also nice to have in Patent lawsuits for prior art mining. It's nice they went out of their way to clear the legal issues, now that no money can be made anymore with either.
So thanks to the Open Group!
Re:Let me be the first to say: GOOD JOB (Score:5, Insightful)
The open-source code base for CDE is also nice to have in Patent lawsuits for prior art mining.
Yeah but not very useful without the full commit history so dating the prior art would be problematic.
Submitter/Documentation Lead (Score:5, Informative)
1. CDE wasn't open sourced years ago because The Open Group had a steady income stream from it. Losing that income stream would have meant people losing their jobs.
2. This The Open Group's CDE, without any code from Sun/HP/IBM.
3. Motif will be open sourced soon. We couldn't get contributor agreements from everyone so that's still to do. CDE builds with OpenMotif just fine.
4. A FreeBSD port is in progress
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I know Motif has modern font support, but is there any roadmap for support of modern rendering? The look could be much more modern and stylish without breaking APIs...
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What about support for "eye-candy" type visual effects that can only be done with cairo-style rendering?
Back then it was too heavy on the graphics, but today's GPUs handle this stuff in stride, and the user interface is more responsive and more intuitive as a result.
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Better than GNOME 3 (Score:5, Funny)
I really hate to say it, but CDE, the clunkiest desktop environment in the history of computing, is still better than GNOME 3.
Wow, only 15 years too late to matter at all (Score:2)
(if we are generous about things).
I would have killed for CDE on Linux in 1996. But now?
What could possibly be the point? And Motif next? Seriously?
Wow (Score:2)
It's like stepping back into 1997 (Score:2)
Wonderful (Score:2)
That's just wonderful. Now all we need is a time machine to take the now open source back to 10 years ago.
CDE may have been great a few years ago but in 2012 this code is obsolete. It's light years behind KDE, GNOME, and most of the lightweight windows managers.
CDE was horrible (Score:3)
Back in 1999 I started working on a project using a Sun computer running CDE. It was so bad I worked on getting KDE to work on Solaris (I wrote the Solaris ARTS sound support). In the next several years I supported KDE running on Solaris and many people in my group installed KDE rather than use the horrid CDE interface.
Re:AH AH AH AH (Score:5, Funny)
Re:AH AH AH AH (Score:4, Insightful)
And people who have legacy apps who use Motif. This is a good move for those, and the people who need to support them.
And Historians, don't discount that. Engineers have short memories and we are loosing important artifacts all the time...
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We only loose them if they were tighter than specification to begin with.
(Seriously, why is the lose/loose typo so damned common here? I see it more than mixing up its/it's or there/their/they're.)
Well, its because if you give people free reign, they loose their lose change.
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Well in my case it is because I am dyslexic, and despite four and a half decades of teaching myself tricks and compensation techniques, some things just fall thought.
But, you know, thanks for pointing that out...
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Yes I made a typo, and if /. let me edit a post I would. But that being said, it was also clear from context.
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Yes I made a typo, and if /. let me edit a post I would.
This is an excellent point here. Why doesn't Slashdot allow you to edit posts anyway? Reddit does. Slashdot's UI is so inferior to Reddit's it's not even funny.
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Yes for the love of god I made a typo, one that lots of people make all the time. Good for you.
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Re:AH AH AH AH (Score:5, Informative)
It is still used for some things. For example Philips Pinnacle radiation therapy planning system uses Sun/CDE and sells for 80k a pop ~1-2M for a typical sized cancer centre to have a dozen or so stations). Yes it is ugly, but it works and saves people in highly regulated industries from having to rewrite a crapload of things and suffer through FDA, few generations of serious bugs (always bugs but when you change widget framework/potentially OS flavor you are asking for it) etc.
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It is still used for some things. For example Philips Pinnacle radiation therapy planning system uses Sun/CDE and sells for 80k a pop ~1-2M for a typical sized cancer centre to have a dozen or so stations).
That's why CDE is being open sourced now. It's just a means for the Unix vendors to keep these expensive applications going. They have no real interest in getting out of the 80s/90s.
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I remember that IBM was obligate to support AIX 1.2 on its PS/2 workstations for at
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I think you are right on there. Open sourcing things sometimes is just a matter of saying "hey we don't want to be responsible for this anymore it's been ~20 years now it is your turn". Supporting something that has little in the way of generating new press releases with shinny new toys that draw new revenue is just a cost centre.
Re:AH AH AH AH (Score:5, Funny)
1. Create ugly environment
2. ???
3. Profit
4. Become irrelevant
5. Open source it
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Re:AH AH AH AH (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know. It seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to Gnome3 or Unity.
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That's why they open-sourced it. Last chance to keep it from dying.
Xtreme Kool Letterz (Score:2)
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Welcome back to 1991 everyone! We hope you really like our old style interface on your futuristic *nix...who needs that moden look and feel anyway,
This is just one step. Next month they will release a raw X interface where everything has to be launched from the command line.
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That would be an improvement over both Gnome 3 and Windows 8
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Please do, I'd love to use such an interface.
I suppose most people here know about ratpoison [nongnu.org] already, but I encourage every modern-day UNIX geek trying it at some point.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Buh? The open sourcing of this was pursued by an external volunteer. It's purely for historical interest. I don't see how opening it is a disrespect to the "community" more than keeping it closed and letting it fester further.
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Buh? The open sourcing of this was pursued by an external volunteer. It's purely for historical interest. I don't see how opening it is a disrespect to the "community" more than keeping it closed and letting it fester further.
This is not just being done by an 'external volunteer' and there is nothing historical about it, I can assure you. A lot of insanely expensive applications still run on a CDE/Motif environment and I can only see this as a way of maintaining the status quo on Unix platforms. We still haven't got out of the 80s/90s.
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Wrong. Not everyone likes your ugly aqua UIs which gobble up 100s of megabytes. Actually CDEs user interface has a clearnnes which many like, in fact many like me prefer it because it does not look like modern UIs and prefer its appearance. You seem to think that if you don't like something that no one else could like it either, what an arrogant and idiotic way of thinking that everyone has the same preferences as you.
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This looks like a calculated corporate "FUCK YOU" from the big corporations to the Open Source community.
It's nothing of the sort, it's a gift not a liability. Giving this gift does not imply an obligation on the part of the receiver.
If the open source world doesn't want to use it they don't have to. As it's pretty old now I don't see any of the Linux distros being remotely interested.
Having said that it would be really funny if everyone with a redhat support contract would request this.
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XFCE (was Re:Hideous) (Score:2)
Yes, XFCE initially looked very CDE-like. In fact, that's why I started using it: I was using CDE on Solaris at work and wanted a similar desktop at home so I wouldn't have to make the mental switch between desktops.
XFCE evolved and (as you say) kept getting better, so I kept it as my desktop.
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OSF1 is still a a money-making product for HP, they call it "Tru64" now.
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This headline would have gotten 2000 replies.
Back when the internet was 2000 people..
Now it will get 2000 replies saying they misspent 'KDE'.
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CDE was the desktop enviro on the Sun workstations I used in college. I may have to download it and use it just for nostalgia's sake... and, that sort of thing is probably the only useful thing about this release.
What was it? Solaris 9 when they started giving people the choice of CDE or GNOME. GNOME was a lot better and everyone dumped CDE.
CDE was a limited and annoying window manager, but it was better than no window manager which is the only reason people used it.
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It's still there in Solaris 10
Some old Sun apps still don't work right in GNOME, you have to boot up CDE for them.
CDE is no more or less annoying than any other window manager if you go in and tweak it to do what you want.