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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

CDE makes me happy because it's really old but still actively maintained. Sometimes, when I get fed up with GNOME's latest "innovations" and Firefox's endless UI changes and all the other endless churn and change of modern software, I pull the latest version of CDE and start a session and just... relax. Because this is the same CDE that was around in the 90s, this is the same CDE that ran on Solaris and AIX, that outlived HPUX, that has had zero UX changes in living memory, that you could come back to after a 20-year break and find everything where right you left it. And I think that stability is beautiful.

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I could be slightly opinionated but Gnome v2.2 which shipped with Redhat 7/8/9 in early 2000s was my peak desktop experience. Bluecurve icons felt beautiful, polished & didn't look all flat for e.g. [1]. In comparison, Gnome3 was a mess, buggy and somehow cinnamon/xfce desktop couldn't ever bring back the elegance & sheer joy of early RedHat GUI

[1] https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/RedHat%20v8...

I never used Gnome (any version) all that much, but I have similar feelings about Windows 2000.

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".

I can agree. Windows 2000 had 15,000+ minor-major issues pre-release. But Microsoft really did churn to get that right quickly before release & over service packs, minor updates etc. Especially with the flak Windows ME got & antitrust lawsuit of late 2000-mid 2001, they were really serious about the existential crisis of their cash cow. Windows was the major money pull before Office & further, cloud services took over.

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 situation was also comparable with KDE, I think KDE 3 was for me peak Desktop. It seems afterwards the race to be like Windows started. Although the common Linux Desktop environments were far more advanced than Windows especially in terms of flexibility - just the application variety was lacking behind.

The design aesthetics of early Gnome, KDE was influenced a lot by classic Macintosh, BeOS and the likes. And classic UI was genuinely great. It never came in the way - agreed that you had to live with the defaults most times - but the defaults were mostly good.

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.

KDE 1.x in particular took a lot of influence from CDE. See the design of the taskbar, virtual desktop switcher, window decorations, scrollbars etc in these screenshots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1

This is the reason behind all the s/C/K naming substitutions within the KDE ecosystem!

I wasn't a big GNOME fan even back then, but I agree, the Bluecurve theme was lovely, and it looked great on both GNOME and KDE. KDE has never looked so good, before or since.

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.

On the GTK/QT3 icons, Tango/Tango2 have a similar design.

Theme: https://github.com/Rakksor/Blueshell

As for the font, just use the one named Go.

Yeah, it was really nice. I ran one of those Redhat versions (8.1?) for a while and Gnome just felt great.

The Motif Window Manager and widget set are older, and incorporated into CDE.

"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.

FVWM was MWM like but much faster. With Rxvt it screamed against CDE. Pentium PC's felt faster than some Sparc machines...

/me sees FVWM referred to in the past tense from his FVWM desktop, and scowls

FVWM also remains the default windows manager in OpenBSD.

It also includes CWM, but you really have to know what you're doing with that.

Actually you have to know less ;)

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...

And it's still on SourceForge. I'm still mad at SourceForge for bundling adware in things you download from them.

Even after they changed ownership?

It stopped after the change in ownership, but by then the damage was already done, and sourceforge lost a ton of popularity.

When a project is on SourceForge these days I assume it's because they never felt like migrating away from Subversion, but no, CDE uses Git.

They are still using SourceForge. Click through the link at the top of this page to see for yourself. Or google "cde desktop" and follow those links to SourceForge. Or check the CDE Wikipedia page and notice how they link to SourceForge.

HP-UX is still being actively developed.

Huh, you're right; Wikipedia puts the EOL of the current version at 2025-12-31. I wonder if they changed that or I misremembered; I was quite sure that I'd read of it being EOLed years ago. (Or perhaps I did read an EOL notice but they were announcing it on Enterprise timelines, i.e. "heads up that it'll finally die in a mere 8 more years"...)

It’s only on Itanium hardware now which is super dead, which limits the ability for anyone to experience it

There was actually an x86 port of HP-UX.

It was not released.

https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_...

Such a pity. HP-UX was pretty nice.

Um. So I think you're the first person I've ever encountered who had anything good to say for it. I never had the pleasure, so I'm working from second-hand accounts; what was good about it?

One nice thing was Ignite.

I really missed that, until I found ReaR.

I actually passed the HP-UX certification exam.

Their roadmap document is the most enthusiastic thing I’ve read about Itanium in the last decade: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/collaterals/collateral.4aa3-9071.H...

Coincidentally CDE dropped its support in this very release.

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