It helped to influence early implementations of successor projects such as KDE and GNOME, which largely replaced CDE following the turn of the century.

Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, and USL announced CDE in June 1993 as a joint development within the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative.

In 2001, Sun Microsystems announced that they would phase out CDE as the standard desktop environment in Solaris in favor of GNOME.

[11] The original release of Solaris 11 in November 2011 only contained GNOME as standard desktop, though some CDE libraries, such as Motif and ToolTalk, remained for binary compatibility but Oracle Solaris 11.4, released in August 2018, removed support for the CDE runtime environment and background services.

[19] In 2006, a petition was created asking The Open Group to release the source code for CDE and Motif under a free license.

The free software project OpenCDE had been started in 2010 to reproduce the look and feel, organization, and feature set of CDE.

As of March 2023, CDE is also included in the NuTyX GNU/Linux distribution which offers an ISO download image with it,[27] in FreeBSD[28] and in source form in pkgsrc[29] which is the default package manager of NetBSD.

[31] Since version 2.3.0, released in July 2018, CDE uses TIRPC on Linux, so that the portmapper rpcbind does not need to be run in insecure mode.