5 ms·

CDE – Common Desktop Environment

48 points by chungy 9y ago

thenewwazoo 9y ago
Whoa, crazy, is CDE still alive? I remember back in the day I wanted to build a GUI application, and was utterly defeated by Motif as a toolkit. I wasn't a very sophisticated programmer (I think I was like 12 or 13), but I still remember how opaque it was. Qt was a breath of fresh air! Oddly, I still really, really, really like the aesthetic of the CDE. I think if there were a modern, HiDPI version of it, I might even use it.
- tlburke 9y ago
  You could probably get very close with a well-configured twm or fvwm2
sebnukem2 9y ago
It looks like outdated shit, and that makes me happy. I worked on CDE HP systems for many years, and I liked it. The fact that it looks bad now is proof that we've come a long way and that great progress has been made, hence the happiness.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  It wasn't until relatively recently that software engineers took the opinions of artists and designers seriously. Apple was probably the original and first to do so, with Jobs' own background in artistry. It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you.
  - netbeef 9y ago
    "It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you." I'm sorry, but it's not Steve's artistry, it's his ability to "steal like an artist". Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price. At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price.
    - robbrown451 9y ago
      While I don't think it was his artistry per se, it was, to a good degree, his taste. And I don't think he was so much stealing as he was hiring the very people who produced the Xerox Star, so their work could see the light of day. And it improved pretty dramatically under his management as well.
    - Taniwha 9y ago
      It wasn't just the price of the software - video ram was still expensive, the idea of wasting a whole bit on each pixel was still something you had to decide you could afford, plus you needed to be able to afford hardware that was fast enough to make a GUI work fast enough to be usable The hardware behind the Mac arrived at prices where this was doable (at $2400 1984 $$ still really high), the Lisa bombed largely because of its much higher price
    - acdha 9y ago
      > Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price. You might want to learn more about the history: the work at Xerox PARC was enormously influential but it wasn't happening in a vacuum: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html “Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was incorporating. By showing that other companies considered this kind of work exciting, Raskin hoped to boost the value of the Macintosh's work in Jobs' eyes. Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab.” In particular, pay attention to the details about how much work went into things which might have started somewhere like PARC but required significant work developing affordable and reliable designs, coming up with design metaphors and concepts to make the GUI consistent and appealing to use, etc. Bruce Horn wrote a nice summary years back on all of the refinements which went into things we now take for granted: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... Similarly, look at something as basic as dragging which took time and better mouse hardware to mature: http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Retrospective/Pages/CHI_Retrospective.html#23 http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Retrospective... Again, this is not to dismiss the work which the Xerox team did but simply remember how much was left between an amazing prototype and a mainstream product. Our field is very prone to not taking UI work seriously and it's resulted in a lot of allegedly superior products being passed by. > At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price. This is similarly incomplete: cost was a huge factor but you also forget how hard it can be to recognize the benefit of a big change like the GUI. That exact attitude was not uncommon dismissing things like bitmap graphics and sound as frills which distracted from important business. When I got started in the 90s you could still find people complaining about GUIs being slow, etc. and otherwise ignoring the difference in how many more people could use a GUI or how long it took to learn a new task.
  - lokedhs 9y ago
    The first version of OSX looked horrible. The horizontal lines over the menus made them almost impossible to read. Over the next several major releases the lines became less and less pronounced until it wasn't terrible anymore around 10.5. Also the unbearable sluggishness of the OSX interface during those days, mainly caused my Apple trying to do too much with too weak hardware, made the system objectively worse than CDE. CDE may have been ugly but it was usable and faster.
shams93 9y ago
This was my first exposure to Unix desktop I used CDE on irix in that late 90s with Softimage for 3d animation. CDE had no bells and whistles but it enabled you to devote all your processing power to the task at hand.
- wsh 9y ago
  You may have been using CDE, but the default on IRIX in the 1990s was Indigo Magic Desktop (later called IRIX Interactive Desktop), with SGI’s own port of Motif. This used the 4Dwm window manager, which had window decorations like those of mwm, but with window title bar labels in bold, italic type.
ggm 9y ago
Yea.. click to type. Like.. why. This is why a bunch of us stuck to uwm -> twm -> tvtwm
- drewg123 9y ago
  I'm right there with you, until tvtwm. I went with ctwm. The reason why is lost in the mists of time. Probably because another grad student had already set it up, and had shared a nice .ctwmrc
  - ggm 9y ago
    I diverted to fvwm and regretted it and my Emacs friendly friends forced tvtwm down my throat? Improved my experience but I stuck with a modal editor! If you do the right magic to bind 'jump sideways' in units of the virtual desk, it's like moving entire panes painlessly. I had to load 3rd party stuff into OSX to get the same experience.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I dislike CDE. IMO, Motif was sabotaged by Microsoft's involvement. This is a very minor point, but I will never accept ALT+F4 as a sensible hotkey for exiting apps. I think macOS picked the best hotkey defaults. Anyone interested in this should also check out OpenStep [0]. I've been researching this area heavily during the past year and I'm constantly amazed by all the revolutionary work that got done at NeXT and Sun. It's a damn shame they didn't win bigger mindshare. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Until you use a non English keyboard. Alt-F4 is perfectly acceptable OSX has its own share of stupid key bindings especially where the browser is concerned.
  - nerflad 9y ago
    The main thing that irks me on Macs is the non-standard behavior of the Home and End keys. I expect them to go the beginning or end of the line I'm typing, and in every other system they do, whereas in MacOS they usually scroll to the top or bottom of the entire page.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Basic emacs keybindings work in most MacOS text boxes. CTRL-A goes to the beginning of the line, CTRL-E the end, CTRL-P prior line, CTRL-F forward, CTRL-B backwards, CTRL-N next line. I think this was originally a NEXTSTEP thing.
      - ycmbntrthrwaway 9y ago
        http://unix-kb.cat-v.org/ http://unix-kb.cat-v.org/
        LukeShu 9y ago
        As that page notes, C-a and C-e are not just Emacs bindings; and are even in Vi. However, the other bindings mentioned are Emacs bindings; and macOS textareas do support Emacs keybindings (on ctrl, not cmd), and that includes C-a and C-e. I believe the comment about NeXTSTEP was not that the keybindings originated there, but that NeXTSTEP implemented Emacs keybindings in textareas, and that macOS inherited that (I don't know about the accuracy of that though). Oh, and the page said "Rob Pike answers in 9fans: “I believe ^H ^W ^U date back at least to TENEX.”"; it seems odd to me that he didn't mention that 'H' with the control bit flipped is literally the ASCII "backspace" control character.
LarryDarrell 9y ago
I feel like there should be a Ubuntu based CDE distro out there. I spent so much time in front of CDE that I can't help but feel nostalgic for it.
- segmondy 9y ago
  I feel nostalgic for it too but only because I'm looking at if for a few seconds. I'm on Unity now, and I rather stare at Unity all day than CDE.
djsumdog 9y ago
I think the last time I used CDE was on a Solaris/Intel box. At least I think it was CDE .. looked like it ... took over 30 minutes to load (literally).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bringtheaction 9y ago
I remember Solaris 10 shipped with CDE as one of two available desktop environments. The other one that it came with was based on GNOME.
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
Man OpenWindows was so much better looking and XView much nicer to program for. And anyways by the time Motif didn't have ridiculous licensing and costs it was already too late. The world had moved on.
malux85 9y ago
The nostelgia is strong with this one. Every 6ish or so months I see a link like this and spend a lazy Sunday trying to get CDE (or another equally retro package or system, my last hit was Desqview) It usually ends up either me aborting because of some dependency hell trying to get all the old versions in sync, or I get the system up, take a pleasant trip down memory lane, then 10 minutes later get annoyed by the impracticalities of it, and go back to my current system with renewed appreciation I don’t know where I’m going with this, I’m not complaining I love doing it, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one, anyone wanna share some stories?
- busterarm 9y ago
  http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2017/12/openbsd-62-cde.html http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2017/12/openbsd-62-cde.html
- CandidlyFake 9y ago
  > It usually ends up either me aborting because of some dependency hell trying to get all the old versions in sync, or I get the system up, take a pleasant trip down memory lane, then 10 minutes later get annoyed by the impracticalities of it, and go back to my current system with renewed appreciation Hah. I go a bit overboard with windows managers/desktop environments from icewm to fluxbox to KDE to GNOME. I've settled on XFCE but I have a VM solely to muck around with desktop environments and get my fix. The worst for me is VIm color schemes. Can't seem to choose one I can stick with.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    > The worst for me is VIm color schemes. Can't seem to choose one I can stick with. http://vimcolors.com/290/CandyPaper/dark http://vimcolors.com/290/CandyPaper/dark Been using for years at this point. Very pleased.
- jokr004 9y ago
  I do the exact same thing. Though I will admit that I gave up the last time I tried compiling CDE on Linux hah.
na85 9y ago
The way they've stylized CDE as (|)E makes it look like an ASCII vagina to me. I can't be the only one.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nickh9000 9y ago
Yeah, but nope. Just get xfce, it has similar ideas and it is so much better.

48 points by chungy 9y ago

Whoa, crazy, is CDE still alive? I remember back in the day I wanted to build a GUI application, and was utterly defeated by Motif as a toolkit. I wasn't a very sophisticated programmer (I think I was like 12 or 13), but I still remember how opaque it was. Qt was a breath of fresh air! Oddly, I still really, really, really like the aesthetic of the CDE. I think if there were a modern, HiDPI version of it, I might even use it.

tlburke 9y ago
You could probably get very close with a well-configured twm or fvwm2

sebnukem2 9y ago

It looks like outdated shit, and that makes me happy. I worked on CDE HP systems for many years, and I liked it. The fact that it looks bad now is proof that we've come a long way and that great progress has been made, hence the happiness.

ashleyn 9y ago
It wasn't until relatively recently that software engineers took the opinions of artists and designers seriously. Apple was probably the original and first to do so, with Jobs' own background in artistry. It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you.
- netbeef 9y ago
  "It's why Mac OS looked above and beyond better than anything else in 1984, an era still typified by command-line interfaces and overwhelming GUIs that simply vomited everything at you." I'm sorry, but it's not Steve's artistry, it's his ability to "steal like an artist". Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price. At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price.
  - robbrown451 9y ago
    While I don't think it was his artistry per se, it was, to a good degree, his taste. And I don't think he was so much stealing as he was hiring the very people who produced the Xerox Star, so their work could see the light of day. And it improved pretty dramatically under his management as well.
  - Taniwha 9y ago
    It wasn't just the price of the software - video ram was still expensive, the idea of wasting a whole bit on each pixel was still something you had to decide you could afford, plus you needed to be able to afford hardware that was fast enough to make a GUI work fast enough to be usable The hardware behind the Mac arrived at prices where this was doable (at $2400 1984 $$ still really high), the Lisa bombed largely because of its much higher price
  - acdha 9y ago
    > Look at the Xerox Star, it had everything the Mac had (and more) years earlier. The difference was in its price. You might want to learn more about the history: the work at Xerox PARC was enormously influential but it wasn't happening in a vacuum: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html “Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was incorporating. By showing that other companies considered this kind of work exciting, Raskin hoped to boost the value of the Macintosh's work in Jobs' eyes. Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab.” In particular, pay attention to the details about how much work went into things which might have started somewhere like PARC but required significant work developing affordable and reliable designs, coming up with design metaphors and concepts to make the GUI consistent and appealing to use, etc. Bruce Horn wrote a nice summary years back on all of the refinements which went into things we now take for granted: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... Similarly, look at something as basic as dragging which took time and better mouse hardware to mature: http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Retrospective/Pages/CHI_Retrospective.html#23 http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Retrospective... Again, this is not to dismiss the work which the Xerox team did but simply remember how much was left between an amazing prototype and a mainstream product. Our field is very prone to not taking UI work seriously and it's resulted in a lot of allegedly superior products being passed by. > At the time, nobody needed convincing that GUIs would be great to work with, they needed convincing that they were worth the price. This is similarly incomplete: cost was a huge factor but you also forget how hard it can be to recognize the benefit of a big change like the GUI. That exact attitude was not uncommon dismissing things like bitmap graphics and sound as frills which distracted from important business. When I got started in the 90s you could still find people complaining about GUIs being slow, etc. and otherwise ignoring the difference in how many more people could use a GUI or how long it took to learn a new task.
- lokedhs 9y ago
  The first version of OSX looked horrible. The horizontal lines over the menus made them almost impossible to read. Over the next several major releases the lines became less and less pronounced until it wasn't terrible anymore around 10.5. Also the unbearable sluggishness of the OSX interface during those days, mainly caused my Apple trying to do too much with too weak hardware, made the system objectively worse than CDE. CDE may have been ugly but it was usable and faster.

shams93 9y ago

This was my first exposure to Unix desktop I used CDE on irix in that late 90s with Softimage for 3d animation. CDE had no bells and whistles but it enabled you to devote all your processing power to the task at hand.

wsh 9y ago
You may have been using CDE, but the default on IRIX in the 1990s was Indigo Magic Desktop (later called IRIX Interactive Desktop), with SGI’s own port of Motif. This used the 4Dwm window manager, which had window decorations like those of mwm, but with window title bar labels in bold, italic type.

ggm 9y ago

Yea.. click to type. Like.. why. This is why a bunch of us stuck to uwm -> twm -> tvtwm

drewg123 9y ago
I'm right there with you, until tvtwm. I went with ctwm. The reason why is lost in the mists of time. Probably because another grad student had already set it up, and had shared a nice .ctwmrc
- ggm 9y ago
  I diverted to fvwm and regretted it and my Emacs friendly friends forced tvtwm down my throat? Improved my experience but I stuck with a modal editor! If you do the right magic to bind 'jump sideways' in units of the virtual desk, it's like moving entire panes painlessly. I had to load 3rd party stuff into OSX to get the same experience.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

I dislike CDE. IMO, Motif was sabotaged by Microsoft's involvement. This is a very minor point, but I will never accept ALT+F4 as a sensible hotkey for exiting apps. I think macOS picked the best hotkey defaults. Anyone interested in this should also check out OpenStep [0]. I've been researching this area heavily during the past year and I'm constantly amazed by all the revolutionary work that got done at NeXT and Sun. It's a damn shame they didn't win bigger mindshare. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

dogma1138 9y ago
Until you use a non English keyboard. Alt-F4 is perfectly acceptable OSX has its own share of stupid key bindings especially where the browser is concerned.
- nerflad 9y ago
  The main thing that irks me on Macs is the non-standard behavior of the Home and End keys. I expect them to go the beginning or end of the line I'm typing, and in every other system they do, whereas in MacOS they usually scroll to the top or bottom of the entire page.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Basic emacs keybindings work in most MacOS text boxes. CTRL-A goes to the beginning of the line, CTRL-E the end, CTRL-P prior line, CTRL-F forward, CTRL-B backwards, CTRL-N next line. I think this was originally a NEXTSTEP thing.
    - ycmbntrthrwaway 9y ago
      http://unix-kb.cat-v.org/ http://unix-kb.cat-v.org/
      - LukeShu 9y ago
        As that page notes, C-a and C-e are not just Emacs bindings; and are even in Vi. However, the other bindings mentioned are Emacs bindings; and macOS textareas do support Emacs keybindings (on ctrl, not cmd), and that includes C-a and C-e. I believe the comment about NeXTSTEP was not that the keybindings originated there, but that NeXTSTEP implemented Emacs keybindings in textareas, and that macOS inherited that (I don't know about the accuracy of that though). Oh, and the page said "Rob Pike answers in 9fans: “I believe ^H ^W ^U date back at least to TENEX.”"; it seems odd to me that he didn't mention that 'H' with the control bit flipped is literally the ASCII "backspace" control character.

LarryDarrell 9y ago

I feel like there should be a Ubuntu based CDE distro out there. I spent so much time in front of CDE that I can't help but feel nostalgic for it.

segmondy 9y ago
I feel nostalgic for it too but only because I'm looking at if for a few seconds. I'm on Unity now, and I rather stare at Unity all day than CDE.

djsumdog 9y ago

I think the last time I used CDE was on a Solaris/Intel box. At least I think it was CDE .. looked like it ... took over 30 minutes to load (literally).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bringtheaction 9y ago

I remember Solaris 10 shipped with CDE as one of two available desktop environments. The other one that it came with was based on GNOME.

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

Man OpenWindows was so much better looking and XView much nicer to program for. And anyways by the time Motif didn't have ridiculous licensing and costs it was already too late. The world had moved on.

malux85 9y ago

The nostelgia is strong with this one. Every 6ish or so months I see a link like this and spend a lazy Sunday trying to get CDE (or another equally retro package or system, my last hit was Desqview) It usually ends up either me aborting because of some dependency hell trying to get all the old versions in sync, or I get the system up, take a pleasant trip down memory lane, then 10 minutes later get annoyed by the impracticalities of it, and go back to my current system with renewed appreciation I don’t know where I’m going with this, I’m not complaining I love doing it, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one, anyone wanna share some stories?

busterarm 9y ago
http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2017/12/openbsd-62-cde.html http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2017/12/openbsd-62-cde.html
CandidlyFake 9y ago
> It usually ends up either me aborting because of some dependency hell trying to get all the old versions in sync, or I get the system up, take a pleasant trip down memory lane, then 10 minutes later get annoyed by the impracticalities of it, and go back to my current system with renewed appreciation Hah. I go a bit overboard with windows managers/desktop environments from icewm to fluxbox to KDE to GNOME. I've settled on XFCE but I have a VM solely to muck around with desktop environments and get my fix. The worst for me is VIm color schemes. Can't seem to choose one I can stick with.
- busterarm 9y ago
  > The worst for me is VIm color schemes. Can't seem to choose one I can stick with. http://vimcolors.com/290/CandyPaper/dark http://vimcolors.com/290/CandyPaper/dark Been using for years at this point. Very pleased.
jokr004 9y ago
I do the exact same thing. Though I will admit that I gave up the last time I tried compiling CDE on Linux hah.

na85 9y ago

The way they've stylized CDE as (|)E makes it look like an ASCII vagina to me. I can't be the only one.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nickh9000 9y ago

Yeah, but nope. Just get xfce, it has similar ideas and it is so much better.