That's an interesting take. It would've been interesting if Motif were open sourced a few years earlier, as there would've been fewer wars about the correct Lin

That's an interesting take. It would've been interesting if Motif were open sourced a few years earlier, as there would've been fewer wars about the correct Linux X11 toolkit (amongst the commercial Unices, this was just settled with Motif/CDE being the winner). The first Gimp version even was written in Motif, before its developers started Gtk (and bikeshedding Xt)... (I wouldn't start with a 2021 vision, as that seems to imply bad versions of over-stylized web and app interfaces, being almost as bad as the worst of the skeuomorphic UIs) So, looking at CDE, what was specifically "Motif" about it? I don't think the file management was as special and intrinsic as the spatial Finder, Win95s tree+file view explorer or even NextStep's Miller columns. Prominent virtual desktop usage? More "active" use of color? I think the dtksh part could be something interesting. Bridging the gap between regular Unix shell scripting (still more common than VBS or Rexx usage on other platforms) and UI creation. Now, I don't think this is the way of the future, but it's not like anything will come out of the Mac clones (Etoile, hello, Airyx) either, and this seems like a more original thought experiment.