This is bizarre, given the project (and the host) I kept looking for the date this actually came out on...nope it just got released from the looks of it. I haven't run CDE since Solaris 9 on a Blade 100 and even then that was only when JDS/Gnome was being annoying and slow.
OpenCDE is also a thing, though it's a bit of a hack in some regards. I quite enjoy running its panel under XFCE, hiding the XFCE stuff.
My gosh, I remember the first time I tried this out. On the one hand, it was refreshing to see over the command line, on the other, even then, it was pretty ugly. I thought it was a really bad combination of colors and ugly looking "widgets."