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rhabarba

This is actually nice. Desktops were much less annoying back in the day.

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I'm curious how you mean? I'm mainly on PopOs nowadays, and it seems largely fine? What are the main annoyances?

Rounded corners and huge paddings

I'll take filled rounded corners over the window border bulge atrocity seen in IRIX.

Also keep in mind IRIX (and most classic desktops) assumed 72 DPI displays rather than 96 DPI displays. That means when you view a screenshot or render them unadjusted they look 75% the size they did back in the day. Still plenty denser in many ways... just not as much as loading it up on a modern "96 DPI is 100%" screen would imply.

I miss real window borders that you could see and drag—what a concept.

This. The very reason I use KDE (I have tried tiling wm's, and they are horrible if I use my drawing tablet, which I use a LOT), then customize it in a way to minimize wasted space (taskbar on the left, take out window borders padding, etc).

Then I go and enable compact look on firefox, take out a bunch of useless icons for things I don't use, and bam my 4K screen is able to accommodate all my work. Even though I do still use 125% DPI scale, not via KDE mind you, because I love eyes.

And even then, it still looks slick and modern. It's crazy how much space we waste with flat design on desktop. Crazyyy.

Out of curiosity, what was the showstopper on dwm?

I tend to have one hand holding a pen on a drawing tablet. I could customise any wm to be controlled with just the left side of the keyboard obviously but I fear I would have arthritis from doing that.

I'm half joking, I did use i3 for a few years, and have tried many others (bspwm comes to mind). But currently it makes no sense to use keyboard centric wms of any kind.

> dwm is customized through editing its source code

Sounds scary but it's giving you some compile-time guarantees about correctness.

StumpWM and XMonad do the same and they are quite easy to use, especially the former.

They also lead to very space-efficient setups. Windows can be tightly packed.

StumpWM is in a special position here as "compile-time" on Common Lisp is roughly the same thing as "runtime".

Sure, my statement referred to dwm, and it also applies to XMonad.

The only compile time guarantee you'd have by making changes is that it would run, not it being correct nor functional.

Static types do provide some guarantees as they rule out an entire class of runtime errors. In case of XMonad, since Haskell's type system is more expressive, the class of runtime errors ruled out at compile-time is broader.

OpenLook would like to have a word about those corners…

(But yes, in general it's all custom "cards" and list views. HTML didn't allow a good set of GUI widgets, so people adapted, and now the cruel circle has closed with desktop UIs being "informed" by web and mobile views)

Funny, I'll have to look when back at a computer in a few days. I don't recall the padding being that bad. Granted... I do largely use it as an emacs machine. I'm sure that colors what I notice.

Well, they didn't serve you ads on the start menu...

They did (sort of). They were called demos and trials. But there was no DRM. FlexLM was easy to crack. The WWW was largely plaintext.

I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)

(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)

I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).

One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.

FlexLM dev tools were supplied as part of the operating system distribution.

One could make a simple app to parse, check in, out, licenses and work from there.

Sure beats breaking out the low level tools!

Indy sound is great! I agree and had one playing music for years.

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