I was a big fan of the Alpha workstation I had access to at UCSC's CS department in ~94. it was 64-bit and faster than anything else around. Didn't think much of CDE, as I was running FVWM at home and that did what I wanted.
The Unix workstation vendors seemed to often leapfrog each other. For example (not complete):
DECstation 3100 -> various later SPARCs -> RS/6000 -> HP 9000/7xx -> more SPARCs -> DEC Alpha
Yeah, I kept going back to Fwvm for a long time, after trying various things. The only thing that replace it long-term was Xmonad. (I tried i3wm, but went back to Xmonad, which seems a bit more opinionated in a good way for how I want to manage mostly transient windows on laptop.)
