I was so eager when CDE became free software. One year has passed now.
  Sadly, I never really used CDE. :-(

  I'm striving for minimalism and simplicity. Given that,  CDE  is  just
  not  the  right thing. It's very buggy and hard to configure. A lot of
  things just don't work. Other things  don't  work  very  well  anymore
  *today*. It has a terribly complex architecture.

  And,  of  course, it doesn't have a good tiling window manager which I
  *really* do need. This is what I learned from trying CDE (and others).

  I don't want to say goodbye to CDE. It still is *the* UNIX GUI.

  At the  end  of  the  day,  one  has  to  acknowledge  that  computing
  technologies  evolve.  You can't keep using all the old treasures. You
  can indeed keep *some* of them (for example, I still use ed from  time
  to  time)  and  you can learn from them. But some things inevitably do
  change.