Common Desktop Environment

Proprietary UNIX GUI based on the [Motif toolkit]?. Until about 2000, CDE was considered the de-facto standard for UNIX desktops, but at that time, free software desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME were quickly becoming mature, and became almost universal on the GNU/Linux platform, which already had a larger user base than most commercial Unices in total. In 2001, commercial Unix vendors Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX?) and Sun Microsystems (Solaris) announced that they would phase out CDE as the standard desktop on their workstations, in favor of GNOME.