Not So Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE)
github.com
github.com
NextSTEP/OpenSTEP/GnuSTEP feels similar to me. Yes, by modern standards, they are ugly as sin. But they were super, super usable for the users with very little ramp-up time.
By contrast, everything else is just so flat now. On my Mac, it's a regular Where's Waldo to figure out what is and isn't clickable sometimes. There is very little contrast between the window frames and window content ... if there is any at all, and I really dislike how they've largely done away with title bars entirely. And so much stuff is hidden in menus or behind obtuse, difficult to reach settings. I'll occasionally go look at Windows and it's not much better.
What's really frustrating is watching some of my elderly family members struggle to use newer versions of Windows or macOS because the UX has become so flat that using it can be very obtuse if it's not something that you use all day, every day. It feels like redesigning UIs is becoming a vanity project for companies to show they are "modern" ... rather than trying to make things better for actual human beings that use computers.
> one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable.
> Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top o' the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window.
> The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls.
> Drives me crazy.
> [1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.
THIS IS MY BIGGEST⁰ IRRITATION WITH THE MODERN WINDOWS UI. There is no standard window decoration or title formatting, particularly no standard way of differentiating between the active window and others. It is often difficult to tell what application has focus especially if you have two with the same theming on different desktops¹. And it only seems to get worse over time.
I keep thinking of writing a tool that hunts for the top-most window⁴ and draws a nasty great bright green box around it so current input focus is impossible-to-mistake obvious! Ugly but functional.
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[0] of several…
[1] looking at you MS Office, with nothing but a difference in text decorations²³ between focused and non-focused windows, though that is far from the only or the worst offender
[2] from white to off-white
[3] or, for non-maximised windows, for some apps, a slight difference in how dark that 1px border is
[4] excluding those that are set always-on-top, hopefully that is just a visual thing and the top-most on the task stack is actually the one with input focus
(Actually typing this from a NextSTEP-themed FreeBSD laptop with IRIX-like window decorations.)
As far as usability, I do think computers have become easier for non-experts to use, especially for basic tasks. I definitely remember helping some very confused people being completely overwhelmed by what to click on, what deeply nested menu was needed, etc., when just trying to browse the web or check their email. Those basic workflows have gotten better.
In many ways I think modern interfaces are more about mobile first, touch based influences, and moving away from keyboard and multi-button mouse based interfaces. Stripping things down to the very basics is almost required now, given the devices people use. You can't "middle click to paste" on an iPad.
It's even better when the non-obvious shortcuts are documented and standardized so that you don't have to relearn them for each application.
They even had customizable themes back in the day.
Unless we're talking about toolbar buttons, where the 3D look that was still in Win95 vanished with either Win98 or one of the early office suites. I still think that's wrong, and maybe even the original sin of our current flatness crisis.
I may start using that for my code doc as well...
VUE used fruity colours and sans-serif fonts. CDE was businesslike and with serif fonts.
I greatly preferred VUE but I can imagine people found it ugly.
I wish someone would make an NsCDE port that looks like VUE <3
Only reason i bring it up, the screenshot looks like a nice and fun desktop, but the fonts are still horrible.
I have win11 in a vm, and its amazingly nice looking fonts, in win10 I use MacType, on linux I can get terminal fonts to look good and ms code, but the gui/desktop still looks meh.
I was figuring someone will replace a taskbar replacement eventually and work around microsofts stupidity.
serivces.xserver.desktopManager.cde.enable = true;
$ startx `nix path-info nixpkgs#cdesktopenv`/opt/dt/bin/Xsession
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/634141959076a8ab69ca2c...
Does it support accessibility, DPI independence, layouts that automatically resize (important when you need to support different languages), right-to-left text...? Many "modern" toolkits struggle with stuff like this - it'd be really cool (and maybe even useful?) if Motif had that stuff down.
I don't know about that, Motif was used (and in some circles is still used) a lot with government and scientific projects so it might have something but that is just guesswork. If it has it'd be something specific to it.
> DPI independence
Depends on what you mean with this. Motif was made to work in a large number of different systems with different graphics abilities so it can use arbitrary text and gap sizes, a large part of the visual side can be customized to make it work at any DPI. I think it can also use the DPI settings from the X server to adjust sizes too.
However it doesn't have automatic and dynamic scaling in mixed DPI scenarios since there isn't any commonly accepted mechanism for X11 toolkits to do that (this is more of a political/social issue than a technical one - the X server already provides all the necessary information and functionality but there needs to be something akin to EWMH -or even a new version of EWMH- to standardize messages and behavior for handling DPI dynamically).
> layouts that automatically resize
It was one of the first toolkits to provide such functionality.
> right-to-left text
AFAIK it has support for both right-to-left and top-to-bottom (for, e.g., Chinese) text layout support. However that is only about layout, i think Motif can only use either core fonts or Xft, so you do not get proper support for Arabic, etc.
Regardless what i had in mind with "pure functionality perspective" was about things like having working GUI elements such as buttons, menus, windows, lists, dialogs, events, etc, etc - i.e. the necessary bits for all toolkits to have to be "GUI toolkits" :-P.
I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. Sadly it was open sourced about a decade too late to gain any momentum.
It is developed but not in the style of say, GTK. The goal is to add more image formats and make it modern without breaking existing functionality. And this is good.
Excuse my ignorance if I am missing something here but would love to understand if there is a basic flaw in building something like this.
https://github.com/Manjaro-WebDad/jde
https://sparkylinux.org/jade-desktop/
Historically, Hiweed (now Deepin) was HTML5/JS but it’s now QT based.
It's very telling that no one at Sun would look at OpenLook and recognize it as ugly. Sun was an engineering company, the entire company, from the CEO on down, had no taste.
Exhibit #2: the Java Metal look and feel, almost repulsively ugly, yet no one at Sun saw anything wrong.
Straight window managers require a lot more tinkering and have steeper learning curves.
CDE rose out of HP Vue window manager.
Motif was considered to be a good choice; some say it is easy to program.
I was always a little upset when Gtk took off in the late 90s, because it had a bunch of similar pointer abuse. It seemed to be heavily influenced by Motif. Qt seemed much better at the time. Java UI (Swing) clearly seemed a big step forward at the time. Tk was pretty nice at the time.
A lot of the X stack back then had this kind of stuff. At some point it probably got cleaned up.
Not sure how IBM fared but I think HP-UX had it for longer until they dropped it in 11i
I'm using Window Maker for years now and full screen YouTube videos work perfectly fine. Perhaps you used some very ancient version? The latest from the official site[0] should work (though getting the "next" branch from git might be better if you want all the latest fixes - and bugs :-P - as releases happen infrequently).
However AFAIK that was in the CRM fork which became the main/official version somewhere in 2013 so it is possible your distro at the time had some version from 2006 (which AFAIK was when the last version from the previous developers was made).
Edit: But now that I think of it, I do remember Motif WM having the same issue with fullscreen, so it's likely CDE does as well.
Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top 'o the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window.
The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls.
Drives me crazy.
90s GUIs were obsessively focused on making the function of something apparent based on its appearance. You learn a few different common controls, and you know how everything works, and it's consistent. [2]
Modern UI has sacrificed discoverability, and to some degree usability, for style. You can have both, but no one seems interested in that.
[1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.
[2] I mean, not always. There are of course a thousand examples of shitty applications not playing nice, but lots of really heavily-used applications did.
The specific aesthetic that matters when you are working and trying to accomplish something are ergonomics. Is what I need where I need it and easily findable?
Below are concrete preferences of mine and likely many others which could lead to a DE prioritizing things other than appearance:
- Can I see at a glance my commands and tools, or are they hidden behind "beautiful" panels and other formerly skeuomorphic metaphors that got rubbed down into large blank areas of color?
- Do all my commands and tools fit on the screen and aren't separated by seas of overly minimalist whitespace or require clicks in weird, unobvious places or require weird mouse gestures that might be misinterpreted from my normal mouse movements?
- I want text labels because I'm literate and can understand words, not impressionistic random icons that look like hieroglyphics.
- When I click on something - is there some immediate feedback to give my brain a sense of interactivity? After all that is why I'm using a graphical toolkit and not a serial terminal. My RAM should go to what I'm using the computer for, which is applications, not the DE.
Footnote: Some who work in sales or marketing and use computers in front of others, such as paying clients, might actually need to "look pretty" while doing their tasks. Their DE requirements would be different.
The remaining points you listed are good point's I'll think over. Thx
I think it's more likely that someone had to justify their position as a developer somewhere along the line by taking a fat dump on the work of predecessors and poorly reimplementing the lost functions, calling the inevitable bastardization a 'UI refresh'.
Since when has a modern 'invested in' toolkit allowed, for example, to even move the 'X' to close a window elsewhere? Or to set your own background image on the titlebar? Or even... color UI elements? Not long since Chicago!
Seems clear to me the tools to 'make things pretty' are being removed, not maintained, if we can say prettiness is based on the artistry of the user. And otherwise, the prettiness that remains is ephemeral and by another's whim.
Perhaps as long as it is still pretty, it's not bothersome, and yeah, aesthetic has commercial value. But these days I look at things like Windows's flat looks and ask, 'what the hell is this aesthetic?' They must be spending millions, but I don't find the results appealing at all.
I'm sure some people buy plugins because how they look, but people also buy wine because the bottle, and books because the cover. Personally I'd rather buy audio plugins because they sound good and get the job done.
I hear ProTools and Ableton Live disparaged all the time for having simpler "ugly" UIs. Both programs remain popular because many people enjoy them for reasons other than eye candy. Perhaps it isn't that others don't have an eye for style, but simply that their exist other factors that people prioritize over style.
Another way to think of that is that your taste is not the same as others' - do not let that difference blind you and make you think yours is somehow superior, accept that what you dislike can be something that others do like and this isn't about them lacking something you do not.
Counterpoint: Gnome, in its failed attempts to be like MacOS but "better" for me ends up looking and feeling like "Fisher Price, My First Computer." I'm a grown-up who can handle and appreciate both complexity and customization. Stop trying to make decisions for me and get out of my way.
I will however concede that I always make it a point to configure my terminal to display green text on a black background.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. People tend to like the fact that all shapes and UI controls were clearly defined and very easy to tell apart from one another, plus there is a giant nostalgia factor in play. See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/ktz5v3/just_made... for an example of this behavior.
And that scope is arbitrary and each person has their own threshold, so we go back to "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" :-P.
I didn't grew up or have any sort of nostalgia for CDE/Motif myself but i think it looks fine. I prefer Window Maker / NeXTStep myself though.
"Prettiness", while desirable, is also/can be expensive in terms of everything: CPU, RAM, IO, none of which the machines these were deployed on had in any abundance.
It's really hard to appreciate how slow older hardware was.
Today, if you wanted a DE on a small machine with 1G of RAM, something like CDE might be a really good fit. Especially if you could get away with something like Lynx for a browser.
There's your answer.
For some of us, computers are tools, not manifest expressions of our self-important concepts of 'good taste'. I could not possibly care less about rounded corners, transparent windows so I can see some pretentious background picture through my code, animated anything or whatever else the latest UX fad is. I want my window manager simple, consistent, functional, fast, familiar and out of the way of the actual work I'm doing. Simplicity is it's own kind of 'pretty'.
I want to tell my GUI how I want it to look, feel and work, not the other way around. In my opinion, although CDE is nice and functional, and definitely more so than any recent desktop I see, I'm not sure if I can hold it up as 'the way', if it won't let me decide what that would be. I can just say it works, and well, but it's not 'optimal' if I don't get to change it, just like I can't reach in and rip out every little hamburger menu in modern apps by the seams.
To me a fundamental control problem still exists. CDE restores lost functionality, but I am left to wonder: what do I control?
All that aside, this is a great project, just for proving that someone can get all the modern engines to behave and show consistency again. That's a gift.
Also, even older. I think CDE was basically Motif's victory lap.
I wonder why all the progress of aesthetics of desktop environments happened on windows and macs (also chrome) while linux desktop system did not introduce anything pretty.
Or am I missing something?
My guy, several (pretty things) are out there. Look up 'pretty linux/bsd/(niche here) desktop' and be amazed.
That said, this doesn't explain new versions of Gnome, etc., nor why updating from Windows 7 to 10 was free.
Actually it does, because Windows 10 looks like crap compared to 7.