Xfce was first developed in 1996 by Olivier Forudan. It started as an open-source clone of CDE or, Common Desktop Environment, a desktop environment that was popular on Unix workstations from HP ...

It is derived from Mwm, adding support for UTF-8 / Xft , Xinerama and Extended Window Manager Hints. EMwm is made by alx210 who is also a contributor of the CDE (common desktop environment) project.