IRIX 4Dwm was like the Rolls Royce of desktops. It didn't get in the way of what you were trying to do. This was in a time when you only ran one application on

IRIX 4Dwm was like the Rolls Royce of desktops. It didn't get in the way of what you were trying to do. This was in a time when you only ran one application on your SGI machine, e.g. 3D modelling. Compared to Windows, Sun and other desktops it was just nicer to use. The responsiveness, the cool fonts and the 3D bits with no anti-virus pop ups or other nonsense made it a joy to use. The icons were Susan Kate originals done in vectors before SVG was a thing. Things like the CPU performance monitor were a joy to see and haven't been improved on. Same goes for the screen savers, not that we have them now. There was nothing clunky about the magical desktop and normally your applications were tools that cost tens of thousands. Mere mortals thought they were seeing the future and what a brilliant future that was. The web was going to be VRML 3D in those days but we ended up with 2D bloat. The tools you have shape how you think and SGI just made your thinking creative and imaginative. Everyone else was on Windows which had great apps like MS Office but an SGI machine had none of those civilian programs. IMHO Ubuntu has a desktop that falls short of what SGI had even though it is an environment that doesn't distract in the way that Windows does. How I see it is that you have consumer operating systems such as Windows, ChromeOS and OSX and you have professional operating systems such as what classic UNIX machines had. Linux desktops are in this professional mould.