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Comment by rnd0 | Hacker News Reader

>CDE is still developed and modern in 2021

I read the article and while I see a pretty good installation guide, I'm left unconvinced that CDE is either currently being developed or that it is "modern".

Anyone else?

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Judging from the repository it has a lot of commits so i guess it is being developed.

Also the releases seem to have changed convention since CDE 2.3.0 which was made a few years ago[0] and there have been a couple of releases per year since then. My guess is that there is a new maintainer/team behind it.

[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/src/

Maybe they meant "modernist", or the "modern era" in Civilization V, which was roughly the 1900-1950 period.

I have to agree, at least on the "modern" part. I compiled it from sources last summer to run on a retro-style Linux LFS I was putting together for fun. It was fun and nostalgic to see CDE running again, but there were parts of the build that didn't work at all (eg. help viewers and documentation), and support for Xft antialiasing was still pretty spotty.

It is still receiving patches AFAIK, and maybe these issues are fixed by now. But I also couldn't help feel it was probably a ticking time bomb regarding security fixes etc.

I also installed it from source somewhat recently and the lack of help viewers and documentation makes me sad. You have to learn by exploration, which is not easy in a system with so many parts.

Yes the config files are described in manual pages though, remember that most of the users that worked on this were working on green-screened text terminals only a few years earlier. So this wasn't a big leap for them and more of a natural transition.

But I also remember it took me some time to figure it out. Especially because it required logging in and out to test it, and if there was a big mistake the login would fail and I'd have to jump into a text shell to fix it :P

Yeah 'modern' implies a lot of things. Anti-aliasing fonts? Nope. Hi-DPI? Desktop notifications? Configurability? Dragging items into menus instead of messing with config files?

But I like that people still maintain it. If I actually wanted to use it I would use NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE It's a CDE skin for a modern FVWM version which does have a lot of mod cons.

Modern is probably a stretch but it is certainly still being developed.

You can see the commit log at https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/9ca0cf7545500a...

I see serif fonts and 3d everything on a screen and think “where is my Bartles and James wine cooler?”

Sun boxes used a serif font for the plain, non-graphical console too.

https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/1...

Compared with Win 10 and Android UI it looks much modern. You can even set the colour of elements which you in Win 10 and Android cannot do.

Given the amount of literature required to do anything usefull with it, the O'Reilly X Windows book series, and how it did so much with text configuration files, I surely never saw it as modern.

Even if I have enough hours using it as the "modern" GUI for Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, during the 1999 - 2005 timeframe.

Depends what they mean by modern. If it’s a GUI, sure. It looks like how I’d imagine a patched NeXTSTEP looks.

The question is if dtksh has been upgraded to David Korn's 2014 release.

CDE must start with a modern shell.

The Firefox icon is rendered with a 1-bit outline mask so some modernity is lacking.

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