18 ms·

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021

149 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

rnd0 5y ago
>CDE is still developed and modern in 2021 I read the article and while I see a pretty good installation guide, I'm left unconvinced that CDE is either currently being developed or that it is "modern". Anyone else?
- kcplate 5y ago
  I see serif fonts and 3d everything on a screen and think “where is my Bartles and James wine cooler?”
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Sun boxes used a serif font for the plain, non-graphical console too. https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/boot-prom-to-cd.png https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/1...
- opencl 5y ago
  Modern is probably a stretch but it is certainly still being developed. You can see the commit log at https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/9ca0cf7545500a7666d69bd133c06e3a9306c4a6/log/ https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/9ca0cf7545500a...
- nineteen999 5y ago
  I have to agree, at least on the "modern" part. I compiled it from sources last summer to run on a retro-style Linux LFS I was putting together for fun. It was fun and nostalgic to see CDE running again, but there were parts of the build that didn't work at all (eg. help viewers and documentation), and support for Xft antialiasing was still pretty spotty. It is still receiving patches AFAIK, and maybe these issues are fixed by now. But I also couldn't help feel it was probably a ticking time bomb regarding security fixes etc.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    I also installed it from source somewhat recently and the lack of help viewers and documentation makes me sad. You have to learn by exploration, which is not easy in a system with so many parts.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Yes the config files are described in manual pages though, remember that most of the users that worked on this were working on green-screened text terminals only a few years earlier. So this wasn't a big leap for them and more of a natural transition. But I also remember it took me some time to figure it out. Especially because it required logging in and out to test it, and if there was a big mistake the login would fail and I'd have to jump into a text shell to fix it :P
- chasil 5y ago
  The question is if dtksh has been upgraded to David Korn's 2014 release. CDE must start with a modern shell.
- toyg 5y ago
  Maybe they meant "modernist", or the "modern era" in Civilization V, which was roughly the 1900-1950 period.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Judging from the repository it has a lot of commits so i guess it is being developed. Also the releases seem to have changed convention since CDE 2.3.0 which was made a few years ago[0] and there have been a couple of releases per year since then. My guess is that there is a new maintainer/team behind it. [0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/src/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/src/
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  The Firefox icon is rendered with a 1-bit outline mask so some modernity is lacking.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Yeah 'modern' implies a lot of things. Anti-aliasing fonts? Nope. Hi-DPI? Desktop notifications? Configurability? Dragging items into menus instead of messing with config files? But I like that people still maintain it. If I actually wanted to use it I would use NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE It's a CDE skin for a modern FVWM version which does have a lot of mod cons.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Depends what they mean by modern. If it’s a GUI, sure. It looks like how I’d imagine a patched NeXTSTEP looks.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Given the amount of literature required to do anything usefull with it, the O'Reilly X Windows book series, and how it did so much with text configuration files, I surely never saw it as modern. Even if I have enough hours using it as the "modern" GUI for Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, during the 1999 - 2005 timeframe.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Compared with Win 10 and Android UI it looks much modern. You can even set the colour of elements which you in Win 10 and Android cannot do.
dang 5y ago
Not that many past threads: CDE – Common Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16300557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16300557 - Feb 2018 (49 comments) OpenBSD 6.2 and CDE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15967446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15967446 - Dec 2017 (58 comments) CDE Open Sourced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353861 - Aug 2012 (37 comments)
satya71 5y ago
CDE had some great concepts. It was super consistent, dtksh allowed programming the GUI, fantastic built-in help. If it were not for the probably security-holy code-base, the missing creature comforts like anti-aliasing and dated look will keep me away from it.
- enjoy-your-stay 5y ago
  Motif is also a bit chunky, and the serif font looks a bit dated, but it is very consistent, and has well designed colour schemes so very easy on the eye. The dock was a really useful tool though, drag and drop printing and workspace short cuts. The version I used on HPUX even had a small green blinking activity light like a disk activity light (probably also network) which I loved.
  - satya71 5y ago
    I used the HPUX version mostly as well. I still miss CDE. They waited too long to open source it. I would take CDE over GNOME any day.
- sprash 5y ago
  Wow, dtksh is very interesting. It looks like tcl/tk just with a POSIX style shell as programming language.
ahartmetz 5y ago
Dunno, I expect antialiased font rendering in modern software. Talk about overselling.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I’m not sure how anybody considers things like CDE or the the old Windows 9x aesthetically pleasing. Say what you want about MacOS/Gnome/Windows at least they are easy on the eyes
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Windows 9x aesthetic is good, except for non antialiased fonts. The same can be said about CDE. Take a look a modern lookalike with AA fonts: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE . Fonts in nscde still look blurry to me, maybe it is missing kerning or hinting... but looks much better to my eyes.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Eh. The beige and green just look ugly to me and the boxiness of the UI isn’t pleasing to the eyes. That’s my opinion, sure, but I’d say there’s a reason why Microsoft and Apple have went with the designs they currently have.
      - marcodiego 5y ago
        CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching Hollywood movies in the 90's it looked modern, almost sci-fi. Maybe the windows aesthetic was influenced by hardware limitations of the time: smaller screens, lower resolutions and somewhat blurry CRTs. Windows on a modern larger, higher DPI e very sharp LCD will look small and hard to differentiate smaller details; CDE on a large high DPI screen makes it very easy to differ smaller details and the borders "better communicate" limits. I like KDE 1.0 appearance. It's got a good balance of influences from CDE, OS/2 and Windows.
ch_123 5y ago
NsCDE is worth a look at for those who want the look and feel of CDE, but implemented with some more up-to-date tech. https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Do people like the "look and feel" of CDE, Motif et al?
  - ipython 5y ago
    Honestly- at least with Motif you knew what is a clickable button and what isn’t. That’s more than what you can say with “modern” flat toolkits
    - drivers99 5y ago
      Same idea: And you can tell where the window borders are, unlike a modern dark gray rectangle on top of another dark gray rectangle.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        And a slight barely-noticeable drop shadow and some transparency with blur effect just light enough not to notice it but still put a big load on your GPU :)
        pcwalton 5y ago
        A modern composited UI with GPU rendering including such effects is far more efficient than a traditional CPU rendered desktop, especially with HiDPI.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
        True but it does need the GPU. I had some issues with my dual-GPU (intel integrated + nVidia) MacBook Pro. Whenever I would start up the desktop it would fire up the external GPU. But my point is that the effects are often so subtle they can't even be noticed. I'm not against them per se. I have most of them on now in KDE in fact but boosted up a bit which I think looks nicer. But you're right, it's not a 'big load' like I said, a modern GPU can handle this with 2 fingers up its nose.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Makes it look like people don't know what they don't know.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Not enough animation? Too easy to distinguish parts of the interface? Needs more ads? Do you have anything material to say?
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Missing the basics of high-quality, high-precision, and high-fidelity rendering. We've learned how to do these things since 1993.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      > high-quality What does that mean? Quality in what sense? > high-precision The UI is just rectangles and lines. Even "modern" UIs like Windows 10 is made up of just flat rectangles and lines. The precision to draw flat rectangles and lines hasn't changed over the decades. > and high-fidelity rendering The fidelity being high or low depends on the source material, GUIs are drawing themselves from scratch and at most copy existing resources (images, etc). Unless you use "high fidelity" as another way to write "good looking", which i hope you understand that is highly subjective.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        Look at the text. Can you see how blocky it is? And how awkward the gaps are between letters? That doesn't represent the definition of the fonts that are being used. It's a low-quality rendering in that it's literally a binary quantisation of the curves in the font. It's low-precision in that the output only considers pixel boundaries. It's low-fidelity in that it doesn't represent the creator's intent for the font. None of that is subjective. In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-precision, high-fidelity). It's not just the text. Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer. Etc etc etc. Given the mathematical input of the curves of the fonts, the colour gradients, the icon definitions, this is objectively a poor rendering as it doesn't match the declared intention.
sys_64738 5y ago
Funnily I had downloaded and compiled it just last month on Manjaro. It's pretty cool to use something which I remember being new and shiny in AIX 4.x way back in the day.
amyjess 5y ago
Y'know I love the idea of using a serif font as your system font—I use Noto Serif as my own system font—but good lord, if you're going to use a serif font you need to enable hinting. The unhinted fonts in that title bar look anything but "modern" to me.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Worth mentioning that since this post CDE has switched to autotools, so it's a more common configure && make && make install now
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Funny I felt CDE was too clunky even in... 1996? when I last tried it. Pretty soon I moved to gnome from the redmond/twm thing once gnome hit 2.0ish. Used SGI 4dwm a VFX job. Still using Mate. The CDE dock kinda demands a 4:3 monitor as well, is no one ever going to learn and put them on the side? Make sure the widgets can handle the orientation?
- Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
  > The CDE dock kinda demands a 4:3 monitor as well No it doesn't. From the 1024x768 up to the highest resolution of this days, it works well. Screen ratio matters even less.
marcodiego 5y ago
What impresses me the most in CDE: application builder. In the 90's the "desktop UNIX" had a multi-plaftfom, standardized and (then) modern RAD environment using a multi-plaftfom, standardized and fast programming language. Extremely functional. The same cannot be said about competitors.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Not when compared with Delphi, VB, Interface Builder or Visual Age for Smalltalk.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    None of these are multi platform or use a widely available high performance language.
    - easton 5y ago
      Nor was Application Builder? It only ran on UNIX.
      - marcodiego 5y ago
        Many different unix-like systems, many different architectures, used the C programming language, which is much more widely available than the other listed by pjmlp, and, although it needed some libraries, it is so portable that you can it on modern GNU/linux distros and FreeBSD. You know what the N in GNU means, right? Oh, and it also ran/runs on VMS.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Portable as along as the the OS is UNIX/POSIX, got it. Then Interface Builder or Visual Age for Smalltalk are back into the game. Ah, must be performant as C, then Interface Builder is still into the game. Just remembered about Visual Age for C++, which I forgot to list, and also fulfils the UNIX and fast as C requirements.
sfgweilr4f 5y ago
CDE? That's an acronym I haven't heard in a long time. Still being developed? Very nice. Brings back happy memories of running oddball screen resolutions on X Window. 1000x800 I think. Definitely not 1024. Monitor couldn't do 1024. But it could do 1000. The 800 number is hazy but in the ball park. One thing I did notice was the fonts. Those pixels. Time to fire up CDE for some nostalgia.
- lproven 5y ago
  I used to use 1152×864. It worked well on 17" CRTs, and now I look it up, it just fit into 1MB of VRAM in a 256-colour mode. Also see Sun's 1152×900 and Apple's 1152×870 (albeit that was on a much bigger screen). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#1152_%C3%97_864_(XGA+) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#11... Classic MacOS screen modes always tried to deliver square pixels, in contrast to IBM/PC-compatible screen modes where pixels were rectangular. Apple also tried to stick to a consistent 72dpi for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch#Computer_monitor_DPI_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch#Computer_monitor...
  - sfgweilr4f 5y ago
    The monitor I had wasn't capable of 1024x768. I got that custom resolution using a manually defined modeline determined through experimentation. It wasn't a simple VESA style display setting like the later 15" monitor I got. A flat CRT was quite a sight.
    - lproven 5y ago
      OK, fair enough. I don't think that's one I saw, then. I do recall netbooks with 1024×600 screens, which were a bit of a pain. E.g. in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, LibreOffice dialog boxes wouldn't fit on the screen -- they extended off the bottom. Meaning you couldn't reach the "OK" or "Cancel" buttons. >_< Another fun exercise was configuring an old Dell PowerEdge server I had, connected to a very old mono VGA monitor. *Really* VGA: it maxed out at 640×480 -- but sitting on top of the server, it fit under my table and it didn't draw much power. Every allegedly text-only server Linux distro I tried -- I remember Ubuntu Server & Debian, but probably more -- had an 800×600 graphical splash screen, which sent my monitor into conniptions so that I then couldn't complete the setup process. This was a problem with Windows Server 2008, too. It assumed you had unaccelerated SVGA graphics and couldn't and wouldn't do actual VGA mode. I had to identify my motherboard GPU, find a Vista driver for it, install it, accept a compatibility warning, and then I could forcibly choose the monitor type and pick IBM PS/2 VGA. Then Windows believed me and displayed a 640×480 mode that my screen could show.
anyfoo 5y ago
I have a grudge against CDE. It superseded OpenLook, which I personally thought was the pinnacle of a clean, professional desktop environment. Some screenshots randomly found on the web: https://www.deviantart.com/sehnsucht94/art/OPENLOOK-SunOS-like-build-on-Pentium4-NetBSD-i386-819933147 https://www.deviantart.com/sehnsucht94/art/OPENLOOK-SunOS-li... http://www.martin-graefe.homepage.t-online.de/xview_en.html http://www.martin-graefe.homepage.t-online.de/xview_en.html I did not only like its look, but also many of its paradigms: That basically everything is started by clicking on the empty desktop, which opens up a menu (you see that menu on the far left in the image); that you can pin menus and other elements to keep them open (even that initial menu mentioned before, it's pinned in the screenshot), that some buttons were "drop down" buttons with multiple actions, and application menus were exactly that (look at the "menu bar" in the File Manager window)... Meanwhile, CDE is ugly as sin and clunky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK#/media/File:CDE_2012_on_Linux.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK#/media/File:CDE_2012...
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Me too but for a different reason. It replaced HP's VUE which had a much 'happier' colour scheme, sans-serif fonts and a nicer-looking 'dock'. HP buried VUE pretty deep after they moved to CDE (which inherited most of the visual design of VUE and some other stuff from the other cooperators IBM and Sun). VUE was what I looked at while studying so it has a strong nostalgic feeling about it for me :) CDE is too different visually to feel 'off'. The colours are too muted and the fonts too traditional. I can see IBM's influence there, VUE was way too 'funky' for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment VUE was never open-sourced sadly and there is no 'remake' of it either like NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE But it's just for nostalgia. I wouldn't use it today. I tried recently (I still own an old HP box with 10.20) but it's just too barebones.
  - Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
    Hi. I don't know why many people here have focus on things which can be easily configured in mentioned environments. All VUE palettes are exactly the same as CDE palettes, and can be imported into CDE either system palettes directory, or in user's ~/dt one. The same is with NsCDE. For font, you probably have to spend some time to figure out how to change it in CDE, but in NsCDE you can use any font available on your Unix/Linux system. That said, you can make CDE look dark, light, serious, funky, whatever. As someone rightly commented in this thread below: usability of XDG standards, integration with the system and various widgets ... this is the topic, not the theme you can change with a few clicks or 1-2 hours of figuring out and editing.
jart 5y ago
When I was young I learned how to use UNIX by telnetting into sdf.lonestar.org and in my mind the flexibility of the shell caused me to imagine UNIX in my head as this powerful thing that made Windows 9x and Mac 9x feel like toys by comparison. So when my school offered UNIX classes I gleefully signed up and they sat me down in front of this. When I saw the CDE Solaris desktop for the first time I thought "what is this? this can't possibly be UNIX, it looks something that was built by people who punched in their time cards and were forced to follow orders to build something that looks like Windows 3.1. A superior operating system deserves a superior graphical user interface. I thought Enlightenment circa 1998 was a much better look for UNIX: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2bcmol/enlightenment_desktop_for_linux_circa_1998/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2bcmol/enlighten... since it felt more true to its hacker base. It's a shame the old enlightenment desktop is no longer maintained, and CDE is. But thankfully, I think Steve Jobs corrected this error for us all with OS X. I felt just as thrilled when I first saw that, as I did when I first saw Enlightenment.
- pram 5y ago
  Enlightenments main problem was using the libraries was an exercise in masochism: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
  - jart 5y ago
    Imagine if Enlightenment was released with Qt's developer API and GNOME's license. We'd be living in a different world today. Shame we couldn't complete the triforce back then.
    - jancsika 5y ago
      There was a neat terminal emulator he wrote that had some prefixed commands for viewing images and videos right in the window. Also, the rant linked above has some responses from the Enlightenment author on page 5 of the comments. Getting some popcorn... :)

149 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

rnd0 5y ago

>CDE is still developed and modern in 2021 I read the article and while I see a pretty good installation guide, I'm left unconvinced that CDE is either currently being developed or that it is "modern". Anyone else?

kcplate 5y ago
I see serif fonts and 3d everything on a screen and think “where is my Bartles and James wine cooler?”
- tyingq 5y ago
  Sun boxes used a serif font for the plain, non-graphical console too. https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/boot-prom-to-cd.png https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/1...
opencl 5y ago
Modern is probably a stretch but it is certainly still being developed. You can see the commit log at https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/9ca0cf7545500a7666d69bd133c06e3a9306c4a6/log/ https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/9ca0cf7545500a...
nineteen999 5y ago
I have to agree, at least on the "modern" part. I compiled it from sources last summer to run on a retro-style Linux LFS I was putting together for fun. It was fun and nostalgic to see CDE running again, but there were parts of the build that didn't work at all (eg. help viewers and documentation), and support for Xft antialiasing was still pretty spotty. It is still receiving patches AFAIK, and maybe these issues are fixed by now. But I also couldn't help feel it was probably a ticking time bomb regarding security fixes etc.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I also installed it from source somewhat recently and the lack of help viewers and documentation makes me sad. You have to learn by exploration, which is not easy in a system with so many parts.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yes the config files are described in manual pages though, remember that most of the users that worked on this were working on green-screened text terminals only a few years earlier. So this wasn't a big leap for them and more of a natural transition. But I also remember it took me some time to figure it out. Especially because it required logging in and out to test it, and if there was a big mistake the login would fail and I'd have to jump into a text shell to fix it :P
chasil 5y ago
The question is if dtksh has been upgraded to David Korn's 2014 release. CDE must start with a modern shell.
toyg 5y ago
Maybe they meant "modernist", or the "modern era" in Civilization V, which was roughly the 1900-1950 period.
badsectoracula 5y ago
Judging from the repository it has a lot of commits so i guess it is being developed. Also the releases seem to have changed convention since CDE 2.3.0 which was made a few years ago[0] and there have been a couple of releases per year since then. My guess is that there is a new maintainer/team behind it. [0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/src/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/src/
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
The Firefox icon is rendered with a 1-bit outline mask so some modernity is lacking.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Yeah 'modern' implies a lot of things. Anti-aliasing fonts? Nope. Hi-DPI? Desktop notifications? Configurability? Dragging items into menus instead of messing with config files? But I like that people still maintain it. If I actually wanted to use it I would use NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE It's a CDE skin for a modern FVWM version which does have a lot of mod cons.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
Depends what they mean by modern. If it’s a GUI, sure. It looks like how I’d imagine a patched NeXTSTEP looks.
pjmlp 5y ago
Given the amount of literature required to do anything usefull with it, the O'Reilly X Windows book series, and how it did so much with text configuration files, I surely never saw it as modern. Even if I have enough hours using it as the "modern" GUI for Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, during the 1999 - 2005 timeframe.
hulitu 5y ago
Compared with Win 10 and Android UI it looks much modern. You can even set the colour of elements which you in Win 10 and Android cannot do.

dang 5y ago

Not that many past threads: CDE – Common Desktop Environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16300557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16300557 - Feb 2018 (49 comments) OpenBSD 6.2 and CDE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15967446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15967446 - Dec 2017 (58 comments) CDE Open Sourced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353861 - Aug 2012 (37 comments)

satya71 5y ago

CDE had some great concepts. It was super consistent, dtksh allowed programming the GUI, fantastic built-in help. If it were not for the probably security-holy code-base, the missing creature comforts like anti-aliasing and dated look will keep me away from it.

enjoy-your-stay 5y ago
Motif is also a bit chunky, and the serif font looks a bit dated, but it is very consistent, and has well designed colour schemes so very easy on the eye. The dock was a really useful tool though, drag and drop printing and workspace short cuts. The version I used on HPUX even had a small green blinking activity light like a disk activity light (probably also network) which I loved.
- satya71 5y ago
  I used the HPUX version mostly as well. I still miss CDE. They waited too long to open source it. I would take CDE over GNOME any day.
sprash 5y ago
Wow, dtksh is very interesting. It looks like tcl/tk just with a POSIX style shell as programming language.

ahartmetz 5y ago

Dunno, I expect antialiased font rendering in modern software. Talk about overselling.

edgyquant 5y ago
I’m not sure how anybody considers things like CDE or the the old Windows 9x aesthetically pleasing. Say what you want about MacOS/Gnome/Windows at least they are easy on the eyes
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Windows 9x aesthetic is good, except for non antialiased fonts. The same can be said about CDE. Take a look a modern lookalike with AA fonts: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE . Fonts in nscde still look blurry to me, maybe it is missing kerning or hinting... but looks much better to my eyes.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Eh. The beige and green just look ugly to me and the boxiness of the UI isn’t pleasing to the eyes. That’s my opinion, sure, but I’d say there’s a reason why Microsoft and Apple have went with the designs they currently have.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching Hollywood movies in the 90's it looked modern, almost sci-fi. Maybe the windows aesthetic was influenced by hardware limitations of the time: smaller screens, lower resolutions and somewhat blurry CRTs. Windows on a modern larger, higher DPI e very sharp LCD will look small and hard to differentiate smaller details; CDE on a large high DPI screen makes it very easy to differ smaller details and the borders "better communicate" limits. I like KDE 1.0 appearance. It's got a good balance of influences from CDE, OS/2 and Windows.

ch_123 5y ago

NsCDE is worth a look at for those who want the look and feel of CDE, but implemented with some more up-to-date tech. https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

formerly_proven 5y ago
Do people like the "look and feel" of CDE, Motif et al?
- ipython 5y ago
  Honestly- at least with Motif you knew what is a clickable button and what isn’t. That’s more than what you can say with “modern” flat toolkits
  - drivers99 5y ago
    Same idea: And you can tell where the window borders are, unlike a modern dark gray rectangle on top of another dark gray rectangle.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      And a slight barely-noticeable drop shadow and some transparency with blur effect just light enough not to notice it but still put a big load on your GPU :)
      - pcwalton 5y ago
        A modern composited UI with GPU rendering including such effects is far more efficient than a traditional CPU rendered desktop, especially with HiDPI.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
        True but it does need the GPU. I had some issues with my dual-GPU (intel integrated + nVidia) MacBook Pro. Whenever I would start up the desktop it would fire up the external GPU. But my point is that the effects are often so subtle they can't even be noticed. I'm not against them per se. I have most of them on now in KDE in fact but boosted up a bit which I think looks nicer. But you're right, it's not a 'big load' like I said, a modern GPU can handle this with 2 fingers up its nose.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Makes it look like people don't know what they don't know.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Not enough animation? Too easy to distinguish parts of the interface? Needs more ads? Do you have anything material to say?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Missing the basics of high-quality, high-precision, and high-fidelity rendering. We've learned how to do these things since 1993.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    > high-quality What does that mean? Quality in what sense? > high-precision The UI is just rectangles and lines. Even "modern" UIs like Windows 10 is made up of just flat rectangles and lines. The precision to draw flat rectangles and lines hasn't changed over the decades. > and high-fidelity rendering The fidelity being high or low depends on the source material, GUIs are drawing themselves from scratch and at most copy existing resources (images, etc). Unless you use "high fidelity" as another way to write "good looking", which i hope you understand that is highly subjective.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Look at the text. Can you see how blocky it is? And how awkward the gaps are between letters? That doesn't represent the definition of the fonts that are being used. It's a low-quality rendering in that it's literally a binary quantisation of the curves in the font. It's low-precision in that the output only considers pixel boundaries. It's low-fidelity in that it doesn't represent the creator's intent for the font. None of that is subjective. In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-precision, high-fidelity). It's not just the text. Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer. Etc etc etc. Given the mathematical input of the curves of the fonts, the colour gradients, the icon definitions, this is objectively a poor rendering as it doesn't match the declared intention.

sys_64738 5y ago

Funnily I had downloaded and compiled it just last month on Manjaro. It's pretty cool to use something which I remember being new and shiny in AIX 4.x way back in the day.

amyjess 5y ago

Y'know I love the idea of using a serif font as your system font—I use Noto Serif as my own system font—but good lord, if you're going to use a serif font you need to enable hinting. The unhinted fonts in that title bar look anything but "modern" to me.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

Worth mentioning that since this post CDE has switched to autotools, so it's a more common configure && make && make install now

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Funny I felt CDE was too clunky even in... 1996? when I last tried it. Pretty soon I moved to gnome from the redmond/twm thing once gnome hit 2.0ish. Used SGI 4dwm a VFX job. Still using Mate. The CDE dock kinda demands a 4:3 monitor as well, is no one ever going to learn and put them on the side? Make sure the widgets can handle the orientation?

Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
> The CDE dock kinda demands a 4:3 monitor as well No it doesn't. From the 1024x768 up to the highest resolution of this days, it works well. Screen ratio matters even less.

marcodiego 5y ago

What impresses me the most in CDE: application builder. In the 90's the "desktop UNIX" had a multi-plaftfom, standardized and (then) modern RAD environment using a multi-plaftfom, standardized and fast programming language. Extremely functional. The same cannot be said about competitors.

pjmlp 5y ago
Not when compared with Delphi, VB, Interface Builder or Visual Age for Smalltalk.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  None of these are multi platform or use a widely available high performance language.
  - easton 5y ago
    Nor was Application Builder? It only ran on UNIX.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Many different unix-like systems, many different architectures, used the C programming language, which is much more widely available than the other listed by pjmlp, and, although it needed some libraries, it is so portable that you can it on modern GNU/linux distros and FreeBSD. You know what the N in GNU means, right? Oh, and it also ran/runs on VMS.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Portable as along as the the OS is UNIX/POSIX, got it. Then Interface Builder or Visual Age for Smalltalk are back into the game. Ah, must be performant as C, then Interface Builder is still into the game. Just remembered about Visual Age for C++, which I forgot to list, and also fulfils the UNIX and fast as C requirements.

sfgweilr4f 5y ago

CDE? That's an acronym I haven't heard in a long time. Still being developed? Very nice. Brings back happy memories of running oddball screen resolutions on X Window. 1000x800 I think. Definitely not 1024. Monitor couldn't do 1024. But it could do 1000. The 800 number is hazy but in the ball park. One thing I did notice was the fonts. Those pixels. Time to fire up CDE for some nostalgia.

lproven 5y ago
I used to use 1152×864. It worked well on 17" CRTs, and now I look it up, it just fit into 1MB of VRAM in a 256-colour mode. Also see Sun's 1152×900 and Apple's 1152×870 (albeit that was on a much bigger screen). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#1152_%C3%97_864_(XGA+) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#11... Classic MacOS screen modes always tried to deliver square pixels, in contrast to IBM/PC-compatible screen modes where pixels were rectangular. Apple also tried to stick to a consistent 72dpi for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch#Computer_monitor_DPI_standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch#Computer_monitor...
- sfgweilr4f 5y ago
  The monitor I had wasn't capable of 1024x768. I got that custom resolution using a manually defined modeline determined through experimentation. It wasn't a simple VESA style display setting like the later 15" monitor I got. A flat CRT was quite a sight.
  - lproven 5y ago
    OK, fair enough. I don't think that's one I saw, then. I do recall netbooks with 1024×600 screens, which were a bit of a pain. E.g. in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, LibreOffice dialog boxes wouldn't fit on the screen -- they extended off the bottom. Meaning you couldn't reach the "OK" or "Cancel" buttons. >_< Another fun exercise was configuring an old Dell PowerEdge server I had, connected to a very old mono VGA monitor. *Really* VGA: it maxed out at 640×480 -- but sitting on top of the server, it fit under my table and it didn't draw much power. Every allegedly text-only server Linux distro I tried -- I remember Ubuntu Server & Debian, but probably more -- had an 800×600 graphical splash screen, which sent my monitor into conniptions so that I then couldn't complete the setup process. This was a problem with Windows Server 2008, too. It assumed you had unaccelerated SVGA graphics and couldn't and wouldn't do actual VGA mode. I had to identify my motherboard GPU, find a Vista driver for it, install it, accept a compatibility warning, and then I could forcibly choose the monitor type and pick IBM PS/2 VGA. Then Windows believed me and displayed a 640×480 mode that my screen could show.

anyfoo 5y ago

I have a grudge against CDE. It superseded OpenLook, which I personally thought was the pinnacle of a clean, professional desktop environment. Some screenshots randomly found on the web: https://www.deviantart.com/sehnsucht94/art/OPENLOOK-SunOS-like-build-on-Pentium4-NetBSD-i386-819933147 https://www.deviantart.com/sehnsucht94/art/OPENLOOK-SunOS-li... http://www.martin-graefe.homepage.t-online.de/xview_en.html http://www.martin-graefe.homepage.t-online.de/xview_en.html I did not only like its look, but also many of its paradigms: That basically everything is started by clicking on the empty desktop, which opens up a menu (you see that menu on the far left in the image); that you can pin menus and other elements to keep them open (even that initial menu mentioned before, it's pinned in the screenshot), that some buttons were "drop down" buttons with multiple actions, and application menus were exactly that (look at the "menu bar" in the File Manager window)... Meanwhile, CDE is ugly as sin and clunky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK#/media/File:CDE_2012_on_Linux.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK#/media/File:CDE_2012...

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Me too but for a different reason. It replaced HP's VUE which had a much 'happier' colour scheme, sans-serif fonts and a nicer-looking 'dock'. HP buried VUE pretty deep after they moved to CDE (which inherited most of the visual design of VUE and some other stuff from the other cooperators IBM and Sun). VUE was what I looked at while studying so it has a strong nostalgic feeling about it for me :) CDE is too different visually to feel 'off'. The colours are too muted and the fonts too traditional. I can see IBM's influence there, VUE was way too 'funky' for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment VUE was never open-sourced sadly and there is no 'remake' of it either like NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE But it's just for nostalgia. I wouldn't use it today. I tried recently (I still own an old HP box with 10.20) but it's just too barebones.
- Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
  Hi. I don't know why many people here have focus on things which can be easily configured in mentioned environments. All VUE palettes are exactly the same as CDE palettes, and can be imported into CDE either system palettes directory, or in user's ~/dt one. The same is with NsCDE. For font, you probably have to spend some time to figure out how to change it in CDE, but in NsCDE you can use any font available on your Unix/Linux system. That said, you can make CDE look dark, light, serious, funky, whatever. As someone rightly commented in this thread below: usability of XDG standards, integration with the system and various widgets ... this is the topic, not the theme you can change with a few clicks or 1-2 hours of figuring out and editing.

jart 5y ago

When I was young I learned how to use UNIX by telnetting into sdf.lonestar.org and in my mind the flexibility of the shell caused me to imagine UNIX in my head as this powerful thing that made Windows 9x and Mac 9x feel like toys by comparison. So when my school offered UNIX classes I gleefully signed up and they sat me down in front of this. When I saw the CDE Solaris desktop for the first time I thought "what is this? this can't possibly be UNIX, it looks something that was built by people who punched in their time cards and were forced to follow orders to build something that looks like Windows 3.1. A superior operating system deserves a superior graphical user interface. I thought Enlightenment circa 1998 was a much better look for UNIX: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2bcmol/enlightenment_desktop_for_linux_circa_1998/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2bcmol/enlighten... since it felt more true to its hacker base. It's a shame the old enlightenment desktop is no longer maintained, and CDE is. But thankfully, I think Steve Jobs corrected this error for us all with OS X. I felt just as thrilled when I first saw that, as I did when I first saw Enlightenment.

pram 5y ago
Enlightenments main problem was using the libraries was an exercise in masochism: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
- jart 5y ago
  Imagine if Enlightenment was released with Qt's developer API and GNOME's license. We'd be living in a different world today. Shame we couldn't complete the triforce back then.
  - jancsika 5y ago
    There was a neat terminal emulator he wrote that had some prefixed commands for viewing images and videos right in the window. Also, the rant linked above has some responses from the Enlightenment author on page 5 of the comments. Getting some popcorn... :)