“For the purposes of feuding over desktops, CDE is, to Linux
users, a non-issue. KDE and GNOME are the acknowledged primary
competitors in the Linux world, and the recent opening of Motif and
CDE have done nothing to shake that. For purposes of feuding over
standards, CDE is more often used as the poster child for the
standards process running amok. If ever an interface managed to
bring to computing the same design standards that went into, say,
the platypus, CDE is it. The fact that some of the same heavies
that tried to inflict it on us once upon a time are now behind
GNOME speaks volumes about where they stand on it today. Chalk that
one up to a victory for Free Software or, if you aren’t as sanguine
as I am about the future of Linux on the desktop, the utter and
abject failure of industry pointing a loaded standard at our
heads.”
“CDE’s consignment to the dustbin of UNIX history, though,
didn’t stop Xi Graphics from making a game effort to remarket it to
a new generation of Linux users as “the” industry standard, and
their arguments for why we should adopt it (noted above) play to
the fears of some that Linux is headed for the sort of disastrous
fragmentation that allowed Microsoft to walk over the back of UNIX
in the 90s.”
“The problem here isn’t that someone’s trying to sell a product
that isn’t going to be very popular. The problem is that the
standard Xi Graphics would like to front is based on the premise
that we’ll turn our backs on GNOME and KDE (which seems unlikely)
and the XFree project (which moves out of the realm of “unlikely”
and straight into “loony.”)”