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⇱ Common Desktop Environment "CDE" 2.5.3 Released After Two Years - Phoronix


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Common Desktop Environment "CDE" 2.5.3 Released After Two Years

Written by Michael Larabel in Desktop on 26 November 2025 at 08:43 PM EST. 64 Comments
Two years and one week since the prior point release, Common Desktop Environment 2.5.3 is now available as the latest iteration of this Unix desktop environment built around the Motif toolkit. CDE has been open-source for more than a decade now but its development not exactly brisk. But for those resisting the likes of Wayland and other modern display tech -- especially with KDE announcing today Plasma 6.8 will be Wayland-exclusive -- CDE 2.5.3 is now available.

CDE 2.5.3 ships with various bug fixes, dtwm now supporting more mouse buttons, some compiler fixes and resolving some warnings, a systemd service file for dtlogin is added, and other mostly minor changes. Besides the dtlogin systemd service file, perhaps most notable otherwise are the fixes for satisfying the GCC 15 compiler.

👁 CDE project sample


CDE 2.5.3 downloads and more details on this new point release can be found via SourceForge. Yes, another sign of its times.

While on the topic of CDE, you may also recall the separate NxCDE as a modern CDE effort. NxCDE hasn't seen any release since June 2023 nor any commits to its GitHub repository now in two years.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.