CDE 2.5.1
sourceforge.net
sourceforge.net
[1] https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/RedHat%20v8...
Recently I used Windows 10 a bit because I had to test some things, and it's just so ... chaotic. Buttons everywhere, the "flat" UI just makes it hard to see what's what (including what's a button), and "clippy" is basically built-in now given how often the thing whines and nags notifications at you.
The Windows 2000 UI wasn't perfect, but it clear, simple, and mostly "just worked".
Incidentally, 2000 & ME had a lot of design elements common to them. There was a cleaner zen startup of the famous 4-color artsy shaded logo, an improved taskbar, various desktop shading, inbuilt media slideshow & full screen view option, folder & icon themes, which didn't look pixelated. Windows media player 7 was odd shaped but funky & having some visualization out of the box. There was winamp & Sonic media players too. All running in usually 32MB RAM & 20 GB hard drive. Screensavers & desktop themes could be installed (thanks Chip/Digit magazine!) & they were actually fun.
The teenage me installed a Virtua Girl desktop application out of curiosity & imagine the horrors when it starts stripping on your desktop, "standing" or "sitting" on the taskbar. Good grief! Those were days of having a single PC for the whole family.
Good ol' times.
Edit: The worst offender was Windows 8 with Metro UI. I couldn't figure out how to safely shutdown. The reveal of the power menu to the screen border was purely accidental
The race to customizability & the notion that GUI correspondence could win some Win9x fence sitters over, really did it big time for future Gnome & KDE.
This is the reason behind all the s/C/K naming substitutions within the KDE ecosystem!
It honestly escapes me, given the vast variety of themes out there, that since the RHL era, no other distro has ever coordinated its themes across all desktops that way. It's a great way to bring a coordinated look across a distro.
Ubuntu's old Ambiance and Radiance themes have been a strong part of its brand for a decade or more. Why doesn't Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. modify and adopt the standard Ubuntu house style?
Fedora's GNOME themes are also great looking, even speaking as someone who doesn't like the desktop itself. Jakub Steiner is a design genius: https://jimmac.eu/
The other Fedora respins should adopt the look, and present a unified brand.
Same for openSUSE, Debian and any other distro with multiple desktops.
Theme: https://github.com/Rakksor/Blueshell
As for the font, just use the one named Go.
"Motif was first shipped by OSF in 1989."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)
"Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, and USL announced CDE in June 1993 as a joint development within the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
Because this software was written for 100MHz CPUs, it screams with high-performance on modern systems.
It also includes CWM, but you really have to know what you're doing with that.
Configuring FVWM it's far more difficult, and I did it several times under lots of Linux and BSD's. CWM was a breeze. I just added a bigger border, keyndings for tags, xclock and xload at the bottom-right corner, stacked up. Done.
I have it w/ OpenBSD under a netbook, it flies.
I say this because I use FVWM for old unstable software from the 90's, some computational nature (mandelbrot, chaotic systems, attractors) code. The examples from the book crash CWM. And setting up FVWM it's difficult for different screens...
It was not released.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_...
I really missed that, until I found ReaR.
I actually passed the HP-UX certification exam.
The frustration with Motif's code quality led to the GIMP ToolKit (GTK).
I doubt Motif would have survived, even if it was open. There were obvious problems.
"A GUI toolkit called GTK (at the time known as the GIMP ToolKit) was developed to facilitate the development of GIMP. The development of the GIMP ToolKit has been attributed to Peter Mattis becoming disenchanted with the Motif toolkit GIMP originally used. Motif was used up until GIMP 0.60."
Do you mean Lesstif ? Motif was not available for free. The fact that it crashed can be attributed to code quality. There were a lot of professional programs that used Motif.
The 0.60 version broke all the plugins with the advent of gtk. Nobody liked it for quite a while.
I used an earlier pre-0.60 release on AIX.
The early GTK-based versions did look more modern, in a 90s way, but the benefit was that you could actually build them reasonably. Lesstif was sort of late to the party, and then was soon superceded when real Motif got opened.
KDE (the Kool Desktop Environment) was created as a free clone of CDE[0]. Then GNOME was started because of licensing problems with Qt[1].
Had CDE and Motif been open sourced under a suitable license then, it is likely there would have been a single major desktop environment effort, at least in the start.
Then XFCE 4.2 happened, they switched to GTK2 and killed XFFM for thunar in some release. XFFM was much better than Thunar.
Anyway, what I meant to say is that it makes my nostalgia bone tickle that people are maintaining this software today. I might even try it out sometime.
Anybody know if it works on Wayland? (Just kidding! Or am I?)
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d...
"X will not run in these 4-bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1” thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport."
A big contributing factor to Motif's profligate palette consumption was the bevels to make it look "3-D". I think Motif was actually an inept attempt to ape the aesthetically uninspired Microsoft Windows, which was not very popular yet, but which (relevant here) ran fine on 4-bit displays. Because that's what the VGA gave you in 640×480, and a Windows that limited you to 320×200 or 640×200 on a VGA would have been a non-starter.
Open Look had a bit of a 3-D look to it, but for example (original) Macintosh and Genera were pretty flat-looking. GEOS was mostly pretty flat with the exception of the occasional drop shadow. The Newton GUI (postdating Motif) managed to get quite a bit of visual depth out of grayscale, but I don't think the Newton ever had a 1-bit display. The Palm Pilot (postdating Newton) looked like a less ugly GEOS.
In theory there are all kinds of depth cues you can use to get a comprehensively 3-D look on a 1-bit display, but I haven't found a GUI toolkit that managed it.
Also the silly new toolbar buttons were really hard to find to hide, shouldn't have to google change such basic stuff. Tells me that no one is paying attention to these details. Iterm2, while not perfect is much better at these things. As is gnome/mate-terminal etc.
There was no HTML browser for the early life of CDE. NCSA Mosaic was the first, followed by Netscape for the RISC platforms.
The native terminal app, DTTerm, is not tabbed. Such a GUI element would take another decade.
Don't turn on the server components unless they are patched (ToolTalk specifically).
There is a GUI-enabled Korn shell, dtksh, but it is an ancient version the last time I looked. Most scripting sourced library code from a book by Pendergrast (of which I found a copy after lots of searches). I used dtksh for basic operations dialogs in the past, so I had some interest.
It is fast, though.
How does this kind of GUI work on a 4k monitor? Has anyone tried?
The thing is, CDE predates high DPI monitors by so long that most of the beefy workstations running it were considered particularly high resolution at something like 1152x864 or 1280x1024. Widget scaling really was the last thing on anybody’s mind…