I’m personally fond of Motif, even going so far as to hold XEphem as the epitome of timeless user interface design; I wish I had an entire OS following those blocky UI conventions. While normally using emwm, CDE would be productive and welcome on any of the BSDs and illumos distributions, IMHO.

Now if only OpenLook/XView could be made to lose its 32-bit cruft and become more portable. What a wonderful pair of desktop environments CDE and OpenLook would be to choose from—and perhaps add more functionality to—in 2025.

I was surprised when the 64bit fork appears in github.

The OpenLook 64bit fork is available at [1], it has 64bit & X11R7 patches. It has a miriad of changes related to ids sizes, %ul, function casts, and a migration from X11R4 to X11R7.

Sadly, if a legacy applications is old enough to be linked to OpenLook, it surelly require adaptation. They need their own migration to transition to 64 bits and X11R7. This openlook fork is the start of the journey to resurect them.

[1] https://github.com/ggodd/xview-64bit

Install lxappearance, get the CDE icons from https://gnome-look.org and the matching GTK2/3/4 one. Then your setup will look close enough.