9 ms·

Not So Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE)

130 points by rvieira 4y ago

smm11 4y ago
Did anyone ever dupe OpenLook?
- mhd 4y ago
  As opposed to Motif, you always had one OL implementation freely availablye (XView), so there was little need for it. It's also a bit weirder, so harder to dupe as e.g. a gtk/qt theme. The scrollbar being a prime example. Also, even older. I think CDE was basically Motif's victory lap.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    Scrollbar in OL was cool. And the round (oval) buttons also. The pinning of menu items and automatically selection of first menu item was also a nice concept.
qalmakka 4y ago
CDE was overall ok. The real crime was the terrible palettes they used, stuff like violet and blue, pink and green... '90s kitsch at its highest.
- butz 4y ago
  Back in the day there were not much colors to choose from, in case you even had color monitor.
  - kloch 4y ago
    Especially with Sun where the vast majority of color frame buffers were 8-bit throughout the 1990's
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I was about to respond with "Hey, I'm actually fond of those color palettes...". But, then, I realized really what i have a fondness for is the nostalgia of those times, not necessarily the colors or palettes... Good times!
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  That was VUE, CDE was a further development from this, with input from Sun and IBM. VUE was only from HP. But most of the visual stuff came right from there except the styling. VUE used fruity colours and sans-serif fonts. CDE was businesslike and with serif fonts. I greatly preferred VUE but I can imagine people found it ugly. I wish someone would make an NsCDE port that looks like VUE <3
raintrees 4y ago
I love it: "Author will like to apologize for bad english in docs. A rand() function putting articles (the, a, an) will probably be more accurate." I may start using that for my code doc as well...
RebeccaTheDev 4y ago
One of the big reasons I have always like CDE/Motif was that it, to me, is the epitome of function over form when it comes to a desktop UI and widget toolkit. It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons. Checkboxes look like checkboxes. Contrasting colors are used to separate window frames from window contents. Window frames had actual titles so that you could glance quickly to see the state of your system. You sat down with it, you knew immediately what was what. NextSTEP/OpenSTEP/GnuSTEP feels similar to me. Yes, by modern standards, they are ugly as sin. But they were super, super usable for the users with very little ramp-up time. By contrast, everything else is just so flat now. On my Mac, it's a regular Where's Waldo to figure out what is and isn't clickable sometimes. There is very little contrast between the window frames and window content ... if there is any at all, and I really dislike how they've largely done away with title bars entirely. And so much stuff is hidden in menus or behind obtuse, difficult to reach settings. I'll occasionally go look at Windows and it's not much better. What's really frustrating is watching some of my elderly family members struggle to use newer versions of Windows or macOS because the UX has become so flat that using it can be very obtuse if it's not something that you use all day, every day. It feels like redesigning UIs is becoming a vanity project for companies to show they are "modern" ... rather than trying to make things better for actual human beings that use computers.
- mhd 4y ago
  > It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons. Unless we're talking about toolbar buttons, where the 3D look that was still in Win95 vanished with either Win98 or one of the early office suites. I still think that's wrong, and maybe even the original sin of our current flatness crisis.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  I cannot agree enough. From another comment I made: > one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable. > Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top o' the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window. > The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls. > Drives me crazy. > [1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.
User23 4y ago
It's neat to see FVWM still getting used. I gave up on it when, after converting my exceedingly customized .fvwmrc to fvwm2, I lost it in a move.
IronWolve 4y ago
Older I get, I care less about the desktop I use as long as I have a toolbar, can alt-tab my apps, and has nice looking fonts. I look at windows 11 and osx and amazed how win10 and linux font rendering is still bad. Only reason i bring it up, the screenshot looks like a nice and fun desktop, but the fonts are still horrible. I have win11 in a vm, and its amazingly nice looking fonts, in win10 I use MacType, on linux I can get terminal fonts to look good and ms code, but the gui/desktop still looks meh.
- stronglikedan 4y ago
  Can you drag stuff onto the taskbar in Win11 yet? Like drag a file to a folder icon, the folder window appears, and the file is moved to that folder. Or drag a file onto an app icon to open the file in that app. The fact that I couldn't do that in Win11 blew my mind, and was the deal breaker.
  - IronWolve 4y ago
    Me too, I reverted due to its horrible toolbar behavior. Now I run it in vmware workstation (for nested virt and tpm chip emu), so I can monitor updates and see when things are fixed, then I'll prob upgrade. WSL2/Android emulation works rather well. I was figuring someone will replace a taskbar replacement eventually and work around microsofts stupidity.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  This helps a lot with font rendering in Linux: https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ It's a bit of work but I was a lot happier after making all the tweaks. The biggest thing is that Chrome has its own completely isolated view of anti-aliasing independent from the system and you have to take very specific measures to configure it appropriately. I ended up just switching to Firefox and have had less troubles and more consistent fonts.
  - IronWolve 4y ago
    I've been using the arch wiki on configuring auto hinter and disabling block fonts, works kinda. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration
airocker 4y ago
Novice question to window manager experts: Is it possible to build browser as a window manager? Something like OS -> OpenGL -> socket -> http/websocket -> browser based desktop ? Then be able to easily port all gnu apps. RDP would be a native experience this way over the browser. Excuse my ignorance if I am missing something here but would love to understand if there is a basic flaw in building something like this.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Latency would be horrible, but you could do it. There were a few WMs/DEs that did things like that in the past.
  - airocker 4y ago
    Do you remember which one? What do you think would be the source of latency at least in the local machine setup (not over network). Would not passing window manager commands be much faster than passing video or pixel level information?
    - BirAdam 4y ago
      X11 is already client server and you’ll be adding more client/server. The more layers, the more latency. http://mixu.net/nwm/ http://mixu.net/nwm/ https://github.com/Manjaro-WebDad/jde https://github.com/Manjaro-WebDad/jde https://sparkylinux.org/jade-desktop/ https://sparkylinux.org/jade-desktop/ Historically, Hiweed (now Deepin) was HTML5/JS but it’s now QT based.
scotty79 4y ago
I don't want to offend anybody but for me this kind of graphics is very hard to look at. I wonder why all the progress of aesthetics of desktop environments happened on windows and macs (also chrome) while linux desktop system did not introduce anything pretty. Or am I missing something?
- mcswell 4y ago
  At a guess: you pay for Windows and MacOS (or whatever they call that now). And because they need you to pay, they bring out a new version with a Fresh Look, Clean, Modern, New And Better (until they come out with a Newer And Betterer version). That said, this doesn't explain new versions of Gnome, etc., nor why updating from Windows 7 to 10 was free.
  - kasabali 4y ago
    > this doesn't explain why updating from Windows 7 to 10 was free. Actually it does, because Windows 10 looks like crap compared to 7.
- Kohrokho 4y ago
  Yes. The (not Windows/Mac) did not ever in the history of anything introduce (the pretty thing). My guy, several (pretty things) are out there. Look up 'pretty linux/bsd/(niche here) desktop' and be amazed.
- msla 4y ago
  Hey, Microsoft and Apple have to steal their UIs from somewhere.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
This is great, using actual CDE is abysmal. I didnt get very far installing CDE, but I remember WindowMaker not recognizing full screen YouTube videos, I wouldn’t be he surprised if CDE was the same.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  > I remember WindowMaker not recognizing full screen YouTube videos I'm using Window Maker for years now and full screen YouTube videos work perfectly fine. Perhaps you used some very ancient version? The latest from the official site[0] should work (though getting the "next" branch from git might be better if you want all the latest fixes - and bugs :-P - as releases happen infrequently). [0] https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/
  - pipeline_peak 4y ago
    This was probably 2015, so it was likely that.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      Most likely yeah. In 2015 i used Window Maker as my main WM and at least Firefox worked fine with fullscreen videos and from a quick look via git blame support for the _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN state for _NET_WM_STATE was added in 2009. However AFAIK that was in the CRM fork which became the main/official version somewhere in 2013 so it is possible your distro at the time had some version from 2006 (which AFAIK was when the last version from the previous developers was made).
- hulitu 4y ago
  There is no link between Windowmaker and CDE.
  - pipeline_peak 4y ago
    I’m talking about general experience with using old window managers/desktop env Edit: But now that I think of it, I do remember Motif WM having the same issue with fullscreen, so it's likely CDE does as well.
cosuhi 4y ago
This looks nice, the goals seem to be pretty close to SerenityOS's ones : a "love letter" to 90's UNIX experience, using modern tech (although this is obviously not a full-blown OS like Serenity). I love retro projects like this!
- mhd 4y ago
  The Win95 interface, being rather well-known, was a frequent emulation target and generally easier to do than OS X, although the finer details are usually missing from both (e.g. good keyboard control). https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpde/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpde/
  - jszymborski 4y ago
    I've used this theme on xubuntu daily for like a year, it's pretty great.
ilaksh 4y ago
I don't want to enrage anyone, but.. is there a Docker image or Dockerfile?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nathan_compton 4y ago
  There is an AUR package and you can base a Docker image off Arch, so its pretty straightforward to set one up.
mananaysiempre 4y ago
Note that the original versions of CDE[1] and Motif[2] are released as FOSS these days and apparently receive a modest amount of maintenance, though I don’t know how hard it is to actually get them to work (and whether their internals are of any interest—I haven’t heard much praise for Motif). [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ [2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Two things that Motif has going for it is that nowadays it is very lightweight without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective) and the API has been stable since the 90s, so code breakage is rare (though it can still happen since AFAIK some Unix vendors did make customizations that weren't 100% compatible).
  - wk_end 4y ago
    > without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective) Does it support accessibility, DPI independence, layouts that automatically resize (important when you need to support different languages), right-to-left text...? Many "modern" toolkits struggle with stuff like this - it'd be really cool (and maybe even useful?) if Motif had that stuff down.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      > accessibility I don't know about that, Motif was used (and in some circles is still used) a lot with government and scientific projects so it might have something but that is just guesswork. If it has it'd be something specific to it. > DPI independence Depends on what you mean with this. Motif was made to work in a large number of different systems with different graphics abilities so it can use arbitrary text and gap sizes, a large part of the visual side can be customized to make it work at any DPI. I think it can also use the DPI settings from the X server to adjust sizes too. However it doesn't have automatic and dynamic scaling in mixed DPI scenarios since there isn't any commonly accepted mechanism for X11 toolkits to do that (this is more of a political/social issue than a technical one - the X server already provides all the necessary information and functionality but there needs to be something akin to EWMH -or even a new version of EWMH- to standardize messages and behavior for handling DPI dynamically). > layouts that automatically resize It was one of the first toolkits to provide such functionality. > right-to-left text AFAIK it has support for both right-to-left and top-to-bottom (for, e.g., Chinese) text layout support. However that is only about layout, i think Motif can only use either core fonts or Xft, so you do not get proper support for Arabic, etc. Regardless what i had in mind with "pure functionality perspective" was about things like having working GUI elements such as buttons, menus, windows, lists, dialogs, events, etc, etc - i.e. the necessary bits for all toolkits to have to be "GUI toolkits" :-P. I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. Sadly it was open sourced about a decade too late to gain any momentum.
frankzander 4y ago
Can someone explain to me, why someone would use such an (in my opinion) ugly looking DE? I think it could be very fast. But using some pretty looking DE doesn't have to be slow. So it looks like some "nerds" sit down and did something like an graphical user interface without anything like prettiness in mind. I always ask myself the whole time why anyone would use something unpretty? I know the history ... it looks like something I used on some old unixes but I'm glad that it's been replaced by KDE or Gnome or XFCE ... something what the eye pleases. Why doesn't not everybody strive for prettiness?
- frankzander 4y ago
  Thank you for voting a honest question down. I just wanted to understand.
  - jagger27 4y ago
    > (in my opinion) ugly There's your answer.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  Speaking personally, I see what you mean, but one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable. Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top 'o the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window. The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls. Drives me crazy. 90s GUIs were obsessively focused on making the function of something apparent based on its appearance. You learn a few different common controls, and you know how everything works, and it's consistent. [2] Modern UI has sacrificed discoverability, and to some degree usability, for style. You can have both, but no one seems interested in that. [1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there. [2] I mean, not always. There are of course a thousand examples of shitty applications not playing nice, but lots of really heavily-used applications did.

130 points by rvieira 4y ago

smm11 4y ago

Did anyone ever dupe OpenLook?

mhd 4y ago
As opposed to Motif, you always had one OL implementation freely availablye (XView), so there was little need for it. It's also a bit weirder, so harder to dupe as e.g. a gtk/qt theme. The scrollbar being a prime example. Also, even older. I think CDE was basically Motif's victory lap.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Scrollbar in OL was cool. And the round (oval) buttons also. The pinning of menu items and automatically selection of first menu item was also a nice concept.

qalmakka 4y ago

CDE was overall ok. The real crime was the terrible palettes they used, stuff like violet and blue, pink and green... '90s kitsch at its highest.

butz 4y ago
Back in the day there were not much colors to choose from, in case you even had color monitor.
- kloch 4y ago
  Especially with Sun where the vast majority of color frame buffers were 8-bit throughout the 1990's
mxuribe 4y ago
I was about to respond with "Hey, I'm actually fond of those color palettes...". But, then, I realized really what i have a fondness for is the nostalgia of those times, not necessarily the colors or palettes... Good times!
GekkePrutser 4y ago
That was VUE, CDE was a further development from this, with input from Sun and IBM. VUE was only from HP. But most of the visual stuff came right from there except the styling. VUE used fruity colours and sans-serif fonts. CDE was businesslike and with serif fonts. I greatly preferred VUE but I can imagine people found it ugly. I wish someone would make an NsCDE port that looks like VUE <3

raintrees 4y ago

I love it: "Author will like to apologize for bad english in docs. A rand() function putting articles (the, a, an) will probably be more accurate." I may start using that for my code doc as well...

RebeccaTheDev 4y ago

One of the big reasons I have always like CDE/Motif was that it, to me, is the epitome of function over form when it comes to a desktop UI and widget toolkit. It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons. Checkboxes look like checkboxes. Contrasting colors are used to separate window frames from window contents. Window frames had actual titles so that you could glance quickly to see the state of your system. You sat down with it, you knew immediately what was what. NextSTEP/OpenSTEP/GnuSTEP feels similar to me. Yes, by modern standards, they are ugly as sin. But they were super, super usable for the users with very little ramp-up time. By contrast, everything else is just so flat now. On my Mac, it's a regular Where's Waldo to figure out what is and isn't clickable sometimes. There is very little contrast between the window frames and window content ... if there is any at all, and I really dislike how they've largely done away with title bars entirely. And so much stuff is hidden in menus or behind obtuse, difficult to reach settings. I'll occasionally go look at Windows and it's not much better. What's really frustrating is watching some of my elderly family members struggle to use newer versions of Windows or macOS because the UX has become so flat that using it can be very obtuse if it's not something that you use all day, every day. It feels like redesigning UIs is becoming a vanity project for companies to show they are "modern" ... rather than trying to make things better for actual human beings that use computers.

mhd 4y ago
> It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons. Unless we're talking about toolbar buttons, where the 3D look that was still in Win95 vanished with either Win98 or one of the early office suites. I still think that's wrong, and maybe even the original sin of our current flatness crisis.
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
I cannot agree enough. From another comment I made: > one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable. > Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top o' the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window. > The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls. > Drives me crazy. > [1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.

User23 4y ago

It's neat to see FVWM still getting used. I gave up on it when, after converting my exceedingly customized .fvwmrc to fvwm2, I lost it in a move.

IronWolve 4y ago

Older I get, I care less about the desktop I use as long as I have a toolbar, can alt-tab my apps, and has nice looking fonts. I look at windows 11 and osx and amazed how win10 and linux font rendering is still bad. Only reason i bring it up, the screenshot looks like a nice and fun desktop, but the fonts are still horrible. I have win11 in a vm, and its amazingly nice looking fonts, in win10 I use MacType, on linux I can get terminal fonts to look good and ms code, but the gui/desktop still looks meh.

stronglikedan 4y ago
Can you drag stuff onto the taskbar in Win11 yet? Like drag a file to a folder icon, the folder window appears, and the file is moved to that folder. Or drag a file onto an app icon to open the file in that app. The fact that I couldn't do that in Win11 blew my mind, and was the deal breaker.
- IronWolve 4y ago
  Me too, I reverted due to its horrible toolbar behavior. Now I run it in vmware workstation (for nested virt and tpm chip emu), so I can monitor updates and see when things are fixed, then I'll prob upgrade. WSL2/Android emulation works rather well. I was figuring someone will replace a taskbar replacement eventually and work around microsofts stupidity.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
This helps a lot with font rendering in Linux: https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ It's a bit of work but I was a lot happier after making all the tweaks. The biggest thing is that Chrome has its own completely isolated view of anti-aliasing independent from the system and you have to take very specific measures to configure it appropriately. I ended up just switching to Firefox and have had less troubles and more consistent fonts.
- IronWolve 4y ago
  I've been using the arch wiki on configuring auto hinter and disabling block fonts, works kinda. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration

airocker 4y ago

Novice question to window manager experts: Is it possible to build browser as a window manager? Something like OS -> OpenGL -> socket -> http/websocket -> browser based desktop ? Then be able to easily port all gnu apps. RDP would be a native experience this way over the browser. Excuse my ignorance if I am missing something here but would love to understand if there is a basic flaw in building something like this.

BirAdam 4y ago
Latency would be horrible, but you could do it. There were a few WMs/DEs that did things like that in the past.
- airocker 4y ago
  Do you remember which one? What do you think would be the source of latency at least in the local machine setup (not over network). Would not passing window manager commands be much faster than passing video or pixel level information?
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    X11 is already client server and you’ll be adding more client/server. The more layers, the more latency. http://mixu.net/nwm/ http://mixu.net/nwm/ https://github.com/Manjaro-WebDad/jde https://github.com/Manjaro-WebDad/jde https://sparkylinux.org/jade-desktop/ https://sparkylinux.org/jade-desktop/ Historically, Hiweed (now Deepin) was HTML5/JS but it’s now QT based.

scotty79 4y ago

I don't want to offend anybody but for me this kind of graphics is very hard to look at. I wonder why all the progress of aesthetics of desktop environments happened on windows and macs (also chrome) while linux desktop system did not introduce anything pretty. Or am I missing something?

mcswell 4y ago
At a guess: you pay for Windows and MacOS (or whatever they call that now). And because they need you to pay, they bring out a new version with a Fresh Look, Clean, Modern, New And Better (until they come out with a Newer And Betterer version). That said, this doesn't explain new versions of Gnome, etc., nor why updating from Windows 7 to 10 was free.
- kasabali 4y ago
  > this doesn't explain why updating from Windows 7 to 10 was free. Actually it does, because Windows 10 looks like crap compared to 7.
Kohrokho 4y ago
Yes. The (not Windows/Mac) did not ever in the history of anything introduce (the pretty thing). My guy, several (pretty things) are out there. Look up 'pretty linux/bsd/(niche here) desktop' and be amazed.
msla 4y ago
Hey, Microsoft and Apple have to steal their UIs from somewhere.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

This is great, using actual CDE is abysmal. I didnt get very far installing CDE, but I remember WindowMaker not recognizing full screen YouTube videos, I wouldn’t be he surprised if CDE was the same.

badsectoracula 4y ago
> I remember WindowMaker not recognizing full screen YouTube videos I'm using Window Maker for years now and full screen YouTube videos work perfectly fine. Perhaps you used some very ancient version? The latest from the official site[0] should work (though getting the "next" branch from git might be better if you want all the latest fixes - and bugs :-P - as releases happen infrequently). [0] https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  This was probably 2015, so it was likely that.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Most likely yeah. In 2015 i used Window Maker as my main WM and at least Firefox worked fine with fullscreen videos and from a quick look via git blame support for the _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN state for _NET_WM_STATE was added in 2009. However AFAIK that was in the CRM fork which became the main/official version somewhere in 2013 so it is possible your distro at the time had some version from 2006 (which AFAIK was when the last version from the previous developers was made).
hulitu 4y ago
There is no link between Windowmaker and CDE.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  I’m talking about general experience with using old window managers/desktop env Edit: But now that I think of it, I do remember Motif WM having the same issue with fullscreen, so it's likely CDE does as well.

cosuhi 4y ago

This looks nice, the goals seem to be pretty close to SerenityOS's ones : a "love letter" to 90's UNIX experience, using modern tech (although this is obviously not a full-blown OS like Serenity). I love retro projects like this!

mhd 4y ago
The Win95 interface, being rather well-known, was a frequent emulation target and generally easier to do than OS X, although the finer details are usually missing from both (e.g. good keyboard control). https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpde/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/xpde/
- jszymborski 4y ago
  I've used this theme on xubuntu daily for like a year, it's pretty great.

ilaksh 4y ago

I don't want to enrage anyone, but.. is there a Docker image or Dockerfile?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nathan_compton 4y ago
There is an AUR package and you can base a Docker image off Arch, so its pretty straightforward to set one up.

mananaysiempre 4y ago

Note that the original versions of CDE[1] and Motif[2] are released as FOSS these days and apparently receive a modest amount of maintenance, though I don’t know how hard it is to actually get them to work (and whether their internals are of any interest—I haven’t heard much praise for Motif). [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ [2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/

badsectoracula 4y ago
Two things that Motif has going for it is that nowadays it is very lightweight without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective) and the API has been stable since the 90s, so code breakage is rare (though it can still happen since AFAIK some Unix vendors did make customizations that weren't 100% compatible).
- wk_end 4y ago
  > without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective) Does it support accessibility, DPI independence, layouts that automatically resize (important when you need to support different languages), right-to-left text...? Many "modern" toolkits struggle with stuff like this - it'd be really cool (and maybe even useful?) if Motif had that stuff down.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    > accessibility I don't know about that, Motif was used (and in some circles is still used) a lot with government and scientific projects so it might have something but that is just guesswork. If it has it'd be something specific to it. > DPI independence Depends on what you mean with this. Motif was made to work in a large number of different systems with different graphics abilities so it can use arbitrary text and gap sizes, a large part of the visual side can be customized to make it work at any DPI. I think it can also use the DPI settings from the X server to adjust sizes too. However it doesn't have automatic and dynamic scaling in mixed DPI scenarios since there isn't any commonly accepted mechanism for X11 toolkits to do that (this is more of a political/social issue than a technical one - the X server already provides all the necessary information and functionality but there needs to be something akin to EWMH -or even a new version of EWMH- to standardize messages and behavior for handling DPI dynamically). > layouts that automatically resize It was one of the first toolkits to provide such functionality. > right-to-left text AFAIK it has support for both right-to-left and top-to-bottom (for, e.g., Chinese) text layout support. However that is only about layout, i think Motif can only use either core fonts or Xft, so you do not get proper support for Arabic, etc. Regardless what i had in mind with "pure functionality perspective" was about things like having working GUI elements such as buttons, menus, windows, lists, dialogs, events, etc, etc - i.e. the necessary bits for all toolkits to have to be "GUI toolkits" :-P. I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. Sadly it was open sourced about a decade too late to gain any momentum.

frankzander 4y ago

Can someone explain to me, why someone would use such an (in my opinion) ugly looking DE? I think it could be very fast. But using some pretty looking DE doesn't have to be slow. So it looks like some "nerds" sit down and did something like an graphical user interface without anything like prettiness in mind. I always ask myself the whole time why anyone would use something unpretty? I know the history ... it looks like something I used on some old unixes but I'm glad that it's been replaced by KDE or Gnome or XFCE ... something what the eye pleases. Why doesn't not everybody strive for prettiness?

frankzander 4y ago
Thank you for voting a honest question down. I just wanted to understand.
- jagger27 4y ago
  > (in my opinion) ugly There's your answer.
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
Speaking personally, I see what you mean, but one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable. Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top 'o the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window. The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls. Drives me crazy. 90s GUIs were obsessively focused on making the function of something apparent based on its appearance. You learn a few different common controls, and you know how everything works, and it's consistent. [2] Modern UI has sacrificed discoverability, and to some degree usability, for style. You can have both, but no one seems interested in that. [1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there. [2] I mean, not always. There are of course a thousand examples of shitty applications not playing nice, but lots of really heavily-used applications did.