When comparing Common Desktop Environment vs Lumina, the Slant community recommends Lumina for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like Desktop Environments for everyday users?” Lumina is ranked 17th while Common Desktop Environment is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Lumina is:
The desktop works without Systemd, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit or even D-Bus.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Useful for low-end devices
As Linux moves into low-end territory with the likes of Raspberry PI, CDE's level of consumption seems extremely small. When it was first developed, 128MB or RAM was a lot.
Pro Stays out of your way
Has the drawer concept and the middle button on the mouse has a use again.
Pro Mature
CDE was developed more than 20 years ago to work as a unified DE for all the various forms of commercial, proprietary Unix operating systems that dominated the market back then: AIX, TRU64, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX etc...
Nowadays it's released as an open source Desktop Environment for Linux. It comes as a free tested, widely deployed and enterprise-level product even if it's recently re-release as FOSS for Linux.
Pro Does not depend on toolkits
The desktop works without Systemd, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit or even D-Bus.
Pro OpenSource with no copyrights
The whole desktop is licensed under 3-clause BSD license which gives you complete freedom for any reuse
Pro Lightweight
It's fast and responsive.
Pro No dconf or gconf
All desktop configuration files are simple plain-text files on the back-end.
Pro Filemanager Insight fully supports ZFS
As it was initially developed for BSD-systems its file manager "Insight" supports the advanced ZFS features other Unix file managers misses.
Pro Qt-based
A Qt-based desktop.
Pro Modular
Since there are no toolkits all applications are just GUIs to common *NIX applications.
Pro Easy to configure
Pro Completely customizable
Cons
Con Outdated UI
The graphical interface is very outdated and ugly. It's mostly for lower-end machines and for people who want to give their Linux machine a true UNIX feel.
Con Poor support by distributors
It is unavailable from the most distributions so you have to build it from source.
Con Not really beautiful
Functionality comes first.
Con Unthemeable for usual users
As all Qt desktop environments themeing is hard since you need to know C++. There is a workaround using qss, however, it's not as powerful as GTK/CSS, Enlightenment or Windows theming.