Classic Common Desktop Environment coming to OpenBSD
undeadly.org
undeadly.org
> it's old unsecure code
and that seems very unlike OpenBSD.
On the other hand, I'm still quite pleased; CDE holds a special place in my heart. Usually I fire it up when I'm particularly ticked off at the GNOME devs reinventing/deprecating the wheel again... There's something magical about being able to install CDE - not a fork, or a clone, or a replacement, but the actual original (yes, with minor updates, but they are minor) - start it up... and you're back in 199? sitting in front of a unix workstation, and everything is just like you remember (clunky and messy, but familiar). It's a unix* system, and you know this. Nothing has ever changed, and nothing ever will.
(* Using unix as a family and not the actual on-brand UNIX™, of course, but that's also period appropriate.)
>> it's old unsecure code
> and that seems very unlike OpenBSD.
It is going into ports and I am positive there are plenty of worse offenders in terms of insecure software in there already. If this was going into base, I am confident the clean up would be substantial, but there is already cwm[1] and fvwm [2] for your modern and classic window manager needs in base.
https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.3/man5/malloc.conf.5
Hint: https://richardlupton.com/posts/openbsd-malloc-options/
Detox might crash. A lot.
Unless you have a nearly insane amount of resources, vetting all those ports and packages is incredibly hard if not impossible (think Canonical and Red Hat level of funding, when on a good year OpenBSD raises ~USD 500,000 and Red Hat's revenue is in the billions) and even then there will generally be different tiers of support. Thus, the strongest guarantees will always be with the base system as it is installed by everyone and outside of Linux also developed by a single team. Yes, plenty of ports such as Firefox on OpenBSD have some great security patches applied, but expecting all the over 10,000 ports to have the same level of quality and attention applied as what is in base is unrealistic no matter how much security and correctness is a priority.
I have maintained ports and packages across the Linux and BSD ecosystems for a good while now and I have more confidence in what OpenBSD has in ports based on my own experience compared to several Linux package managers. However, that does not mean that I will try to pull out a random OpenBSD package and expose it to the Internet before doing due diligence.
I realise that the way BSDs do things is very different from Linux, but in BSD land the same people write the kernel, user land, and maintain the ports tree. With this I am not saying it is superior, but it does lead to a very different experience both as a developer and user. Yes, there are some exceptions to this like clang, the AMD GPU driver, etc. But the overall picture is true.
Not sure if you are asking these as "Gotcha questions", if not, sorry, reading tone, etc. over the Internet is hard. If you are though, you are missing the point of what OpenBSD is and asking those questions is akin to walking into a Burger King and asking for sushi or how Linux interoperates with proprietary Windows drivers.
OpenBSD is the answer to what happens when a bunch of programmers get together around a shared history (BSD), goals (security, sane defaults, etc.), and very limited resources (Linux may be on the order of magnitude of a million times more users and funds). For example, based on reading tech@ for a few years, I am certain that the OpenBSD developers would love to have a new file system (people on Hacker News love to complain about FFS2), but the problem is that they are acutely aware of their own limitations. Ignoring the licensing issues with say ZFS, they do not have the funds and manpower to bring it into base (and maintain it as well, which everyone conveniently seem to forget is a cost) given how complex and large of a piece of code it is. So, an OpenBSD solution to what a new file system will look like will always be different from what we see out of Windows, Linux, etc. This, to me, is a good thing, because I like software diversity and history has shown that out of the OpenBSD community comes amazing pieces of software that makes its way into the rest of the ecosystem: OpenSSH, OpenSMTPD, tmux, LibreSSL, etc.
As a user, it forces you to rethink the cost of what you run and to some degree change your habits. I, for example, thought I "needed" a media server, but instead I have a directory serving videos over HTTP via httpd(8) and I just use the default directory listing and copy a URL into VLC to watch. Now, you may cry "That is not the same as a media server!" and I am not claiming it is, but I am getting along with no dependencies and fewer lines of code and am happily watching my videos regardless of any objections. Plus, I bet my "media server" upgrades come with a lot less drama.
The daemons in OpenBSD base are all written and maintained by the same team with members who have similar knowledge, expectations and experience with regard to software and security, etc.
Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched to GNOME.
Now you just need that utility that replicates HDD clicking noise through the speaker when your SSD is accessed.
Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4? For extra realism have a script that randomly kills the process every 15 minutes to simulate Netscape crashing.
(Though it does require your computer have a drive access LED.)
For a modern "Netscape", look into Seamonkey.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/OpenIndi...
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
>The “drag-and-drop” metaphor tries to cover up the Unix file system, but so little of Unix is designed for the desktop metaphor that it’s just one kludge on top of another with little holes and sharp edges popping up everywhere. Maybe the “sag-and-drop” metaphor is more appropriate for such ineffective and unreliable performance.
>A shining example is Sun’s Open Windows File Manager, which goes out of its way to display core dump files as cute little red bomb icons. When you double-click on the bomb, it runs a text editor on the core dump. Harmless, but not very useful. But if you intuitively drag and drop the bomb on the DBX Debugger Tool, it does exactly what you’d expect if you were a terrorist: it ties the entire system up, as the core dump (including a huge unmapped gap of zeros) is pumped through the server and into the debugger text window, which inflates to the maximum capacity of swap space, then violently explodes, dumping an even bigger core file in place of your original one, filling up the entire file system, overwhelming the file server, and taking out the File Manager with shrapnel. (This bug has since been fixed.)
>But that’s not all: the File Manager puts even more power at your fingertips if you run it as root! When you drag and drop a directory onto itself, it beeps and prints “rename: invalid argument” at the bottom of the window, then instantly deletes the entire directory tree without bothering to update the graphical directory browser.
David Rosenthal (author of ICCCM) summed it up nicely in this leaked email:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050165
That's right, he's a great down-to-earth guy (but he can still write like a passionate punk rocker -- see below), and there's a wealth of interesting thoughtful stuff on his blog. I've known him since the days of the X10 / X11 / NeWS window system wars. He worked with James Gosling on Andrew at CMU and NeWS at Sun, and on X10 as well as X11 and ICCCM, and he implemented the original X10 compatibility layer that was in NeWS 1.0, before X11 was a "thing".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal
One of my favorite classics is his Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, developer of the Andrew Window Manager, X10, X11, and NeWS, employee #4 and chief scientist at Nvidia):
https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html
[...]
Here's David Rosenthal's notorious Sun Deskset Environment flame that some rogue leaked to the Unix-Haters mailing list (inspiring the Unix-Haters Handbook's X-Windows chapter), in which he poignantly concluded:
"It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.":
[...]
PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out
that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM
doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind
of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show -
they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of
screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do
their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have
to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time?
They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with
fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient,
elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may
look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools
screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like
having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.I'll give you elegant, maybe. Perhaps you were thinking of a Mini Electric?
I only consider NeXTSTEP and Irix as well on this box, from all big iron UNIX.
https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
No vector icons for XFile, but at least you can set SGI-like ones once you extract the TGZ in the correct place.
And some tools like the Fluxbox-Blackbox like slit from this guy:
https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html https://github.com/luke8086/pmdock
Or all the other UNIX clones that were basically UNIX System V (or BSD derived) + twm, latter CDE, with the only visible difference being the vendor's name.
Especially at a time on dialup, where people weren't willing to spend an hour or more downloading an updated browser.
There used to be a really great one called FOXSCAPE, but it was killed off by Firefox's “Australis” UI re-engineering in 2014:
I don't know what the status of CDE in NixOS is today: it doesn't appear to be marked broken, so hopefully it's still working. If there was unlimited resources I'd love to have stuff like CDE supported forever, but even though that can't be done it's still cool to see it still being kept up for now. Hopefully with the new Wayback option on the horizon, even if distros do wish to stop supporting X.org as a display server option soon, you'll be able to boot classic desktop environments as though nothing changed... Maybe worth testing weird old stuff like CDE early to see if we can iron out some kinks ahead of time.
oneko-1.1b is from 1995, and yet I was still able to build and run it natively on an M1 Pro MacBook unchanged, with XQuartz as the X server.
(I just tried again on a more recent Mac, and while it still happily builds, running it crashes the X server. That seems to be an X server bug, though.)
Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.
One for UNIX is MaCoPiX:
https://rosegray.sakura.ne.jp/macopix/index-e.html
It still works, I used it a few years ago.
> And on a serious note, while I kind of get why these sorts of things fell out of favor, it did add some whimsy and variety to the experience of using a computer. It would be kind of neat to see a resurgence of that sort of thing. Doesn't have to specifically be desktop mascots or pets, either; there was a gold mine of gimmicky software in the 90s and 2000s.
> Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.
The more and more prepackaged and restrictive computing becomes the more it's seen in the realm of "serious business" and consumed blandly and soullessly than something that's inherently fun and worth playing with.
I'm sure you can still find the old SUNSITE repos archived on the 'net - tons of neat stuff to play with. I'm not sure anything requiring imake would still build, though.
Xwayland is likely to be a completely static environment. The Wayback compositor will evolve with Wayland of course, but Xwayland itself probably will not. That means that desktop environments that run on Xwayland will probably continue to run for a long, long time.
X11 evolution is about to stop. Perhaps that means that nothing will break.
I've always been a fan of the X resource database, and I think it's a shame it never carried over to QT or GTK+. We'd have much better tools for working with it, and the theming possibilities have only ever been matched by Enlightenment. I remember Netscape let you set pixmap backgrounds for every UI element.
Same here, but we know why. NIH Syndrome, or people did not realize how great it worked so they did their own thing, making things far more complicated then necessary.
I remember that time period, people were begging Motif/CDE to open up the source. Back then if that happened, many people would have jumped in and fixed a lot of issues. Now is a far different time :(
That was part of Xt (X Toolkit). Of course, GTK and Qt were built on xlib, because they wanted to be hardcore. /s
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
One of my mentors when I was very young gave me an Alphaserver 2100A running OpenVMS with CDE on it, and I remember using the installed scientific software (cant remember the name) to do 3D graphs, and so began a lifelong love of scientific computing!
EMWM it's like a micro-CDE but without the panel, almost like the Irix interface.
And it will run really fast on ATOM n270 netbooks and the like.
Looks like I now get to "enjoy" CDE on the OpenBSD partition as well!
It is well known that Steve Jobs got his inspiration for the Apple UI from Xerox PARC, but I think we've found the inspiration for the Apple Marketing strategy.
Now if only OpenLook/XView could be made to lose its 32-bit cruft and become more portable. What a wonderful pair of desktop environments CDE and OpenLook would be to choose from—and perhaps add more functionality to—in 2025.
The OpenLook 64bit fork is available at [1], it has 64bit & X11R7 patches. It has a miriad of changes related to ids sizes, %ul, function casts, and a migration from X11R4 to X11R7.
Sadly, if a legacy applications is old enough to be linked to OpenLook, it surelly require adaptation. They need their own migration to transition to 64 bits and X11R7. This openlook fork is the start of the journey to resurect them.
> connect.c: In function 'd_connect':
> connect.c:87:19: error: initialization of 'LONG' {aka 'int'} from 'void *' makes integer from pointer without a cast [-Wint-conversion]
> 87 | DB_ADDR mdba = NULL; /* db address of current member record */> I wouldn't use is as a daily driver, it's old unsecure code but it's fun if you want to bring back memories.
For Gopher browsers there's XMosaic but it's still propietary, a shame.
XGopher might do far better if you link-LD_PRELOAD it against Xaw3D, which can be Motif-ish, or at least a bit closer to that era, or an alpha Motif build of Netsurf.
https://github.com/revmadison/netsurf-motif
As for IM'img, any IRC client written against Lesstif will do the trick building it against OpenMotif.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nebula-irc/
Then you can just use Bitlbee as a bridge to anything.
On word processor, Ted against Motif can do really well; I could even use the Spanish translation with Metric sized toolbars and such. Ditto with xfig with 'xfig -metric'. Not Motif, but it matches the environment, kinda like GV for PostScript files.
Or Emacs with Org-Mode.
Emacs linked against Motif will look perfect under EMWM and you'll get:
- A Mail/Usenet client
- An IRC client
- Telegram client with Telega
- A gopher/gemini client (Elpher)
- NNRSS and another builtin RSS reader
- OFC, both handle podcasts fine
- File manager with SSH and rclone support
- A Z-machine interpreter to play text adventures (Malyon)
- Video/music player thru EMMS
- Org-Mode/Org-Agenda-Org-Babel and friends
- Emacs' builtin spreadsheet
- pdf-tools to read and anotate PDF's.
- M-x calc with Gnuplot for plots
- Nov.el to read Ebooks.
For GTK and QT themes, you can use the CDE theme for GTK and the builting one for QT with qt5ct/qt6ct and set
EXPORT QT_PLATFORM_THEME=qt5ct
https://www.pling.com/p/1920644/
It needs JS; but I can just posts a TGZ in my gopher site with both the themes and icons if you like them, or better, with Bittorrent, then aria2c would do the job.
I think that Motif support has been removed from latest Emacs, it is still there in v29.
In a way I would be surprised if motif is removed, I think FSF still wants to support proprietary UN*X and for that you really need to support motif.
FWIW, lucid and athena is still allowed too.
I checked because a person in LQ/Slackware always recompiles Emacs with motif support. He/She would have complained in the group if motif was removed :)