7 ms·

CDE 2.5.1

67 points by marcodiego 4y ago

zeruch 4y ago
I haven't used CDE since I was playing with Solaris AT SUN back in the 90s...wow.
jmclnx 4y ago
Too bad Motif and CDE was not opened up 25 years ago, we would be in a totally different world on Linux and the BSDs.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Maybe, but we got XFCE out people wanting CDE but FOSS, so overall I think it turned out okay.
  - senko 4y ago
    We certainly would. KDE (the Kool Desktop Environment) was created as a free clone of CDE[0]. Then GNOME was started because of licensing problems with Qt[1]. Had CDE and Motif been open sourced under a suitable license then, it is likely there would have been a single major desktop environment effort, at least in the start. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Origins [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1
    - anthk 4y ago
      First XFCE releases were not free as in freedom, but free, and they were literal CDE copycats made in XForms. Then XFCE 4.2 happened, they switched to GTK2 and killed XFFM for thunar in some release. XFFM was much better than Thunar.
- chasil 4y ago
  The GIMP was first released on Motif widgets, and it crashed often. The frustration with Motif's code quality led to the GIMP ToolKit (GTK). I doubt Motif would have survived, even if it was open. There were obvious problems. "A GUI toolkit called GTK (at the time known as the GIMP ToolKit) was developed to facilitate the development of GIMP. The development of the GIMP ToolKit has been attributed to Peter Mattis becoming disenchanted with the Motif toolkit GIMP originally used. Motif was used up until GIMP 0.60." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > The GIMP was first released on Motif widgets, and it crashed often. Do you mean Lesstif ? Motif was not available for free. The fact that it crashed can be attributed to code quality. There were a lot of professional programs that used Motif.
    - chasil 4y ago
      The early versions of GIMP only ran on platforms with Motif. The 0.60 version broke all the plugins with the advent of gtk. Nobody liked it for quite a while. I used an earlier pre-0.60 release on AIX. https://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html https://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html
      - hakfoo 4y ago
        I can recall getting statically linked binaries of an early Motif-based GIMP on the "bonus CD" that came with a '90s Linux book which included Slackware on CD. The early GTK-based versions did look more modern, in a 90s way, but the benefit was that you could actually build them reasonably. Lesstif was sort of late to the party, and then was soon superceded when real Motif got opened.
    - anthk 4y ago
      Professional software shipped static builds for the user.
krylon 4y ago
I never used CDE for real, but during my training at a large-ish IT company, I worked on one project where our dev/testing machine was a small Sun server running Solaris 8 (it's been a while). After a while, out of whimsy more than anything else, I installed an X server on my windows desktop and logged into the Sparc server via XDMCP, so I got to experience the full grey-and-pink glory for a short while. Anyway, what I meant to say is that it makes my nostalgia bone tickle that people are maintaining this software today. I might even try it out sometime. Anybody know if it works on Wayland? (Just kidding! Or am I?)
- pedrocr 4y ago
  The apps probably run in XWayland just like any other X apps. The Window Manager is trickier but apparently XWayland has recently gained support for running a full X root so technically yes: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootfull-Desktop https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootfull-Desktop
  - krylon 4y ago
    Huh. I was kidding, but I am amazed. 'tis a brave new world indeed.
  - brirec 4y ago
    Huh, that’s pretty neat! But it’s not able to manage Wayland applications, is it? From the Phoronix post it almost sounds like this might be really intended run X desktops on systems that can only use Wayland?
  - midislack 4y ago
    Wayland has no software other than itself. It's useless.
malux85 4y ago
This is awesome, although CDE was a tiny bit before my time, when I was gifted an AlphaServer 2100A that ran OpenVMS I remember being amazed at CDE and then discovering it had OpenDX (The visualisation software) which was loaded with a bunch of scientific computing examples. I was totally hooked. It was a transformational moment in my young life!
gurjeet 4y ago
It could be just me, but I find that UI repulsive. I had the (mis)fortune of using CDE back in 2005 on the job working on Solaris, and I remember not liking it back then either; slow and ugly is what I remember; but I didn't mind since I didn't have any strong opinions about the UI/UX back then. I was coming from a Windows development environment, so perhaps that's why CDE felt like a severe downgrade in experience.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Yeah, compared to Windows of the time it did come up short in Power User readiness. Especially by 2005. Using it in 2005 seems kinda late in the commercial game for CDE.
- kragen 4y ago
  Yeah, it always kind of sucked. The UNIX-HATERS handbook famously described Motif as looking like the Moscow Airport. But, unlike GNOME and Firefox, it doesn't suck more every release.
  - chasil 4y ago
    You made me look it up. "X will not run in these 4-bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1” thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport."
    - kragen 4y ago
      Yeah, Xaw and I think SunView would run on a 1-bit-deep display (though my recent quest for 1-bit-deep OpenWindows/OpenLook/XView screenshots came up empty), but Motif is less accommodating in that sense. And, although it looks worse than SunView, it's not nearly as shitty as Xaw. A big contributing factor to Motif's profligate palette consumption was the bevels to make it look "3-D". I think Motif was actually an inept attempt to ape the aesthetically uninspired Microsoft Windows, which was not very popular yet, but which (relevant here) ran fine on 4-bit displays. Because that's what the VGA gave you in 640×480, and a Windows that limited you to 320×200 or 640×200 on a VGA would have been a non-starter. Open Look had a bit of a 3-D look to it, but for example (original) Macintosh and Genera were pretty flat-looking. GEOS was mostly pretty flat with the exception of the occasional drop shadow. The Newton GUI (postdating Motif) managed to get quite a bit of visual depth out of grayscale, but I don't think the Newton ever had a 1-bit display. The Palm Pilot (postdating Newton) looked like a less ugly GEOS. In theory there are all kinds of depth cues you can use to get a comprehensively 3-D look on a 1-bit display, but I haven't found a GUI toolkit that managed it.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
CDE makes me happy because it's really old but still actively maintained. Sometimes, when I get fed up with GNOME's latest "innovations" and Firefox's endless UI changes and all the other endless churn and change of modern software, I pull the latest version of CDE and start a session and just... relax. Because this is the same CDE that was around in the 90s, this is the same CDE that ran on Solaris and AIX, that outlived HPUX, that has had zero UX changes in living memory, that you could come back to after a 20-year break and find everything where right you left it. And I think that stability is beautiful.
- criddell 4y ago
  And it's still on SourceForge. I'm still mad at SourceForge for bundling adware in things you download from them.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    Even after they changed ownership?
    - FreeFull 4y ago
      It stopped after the change in ownership, but by then the damage was already done, and sourceforge lost a ton of popularity.
  - TillE 4y ago
    When a project is on SourceForge these days I assume it's because they never felt like migrating away from Subversion, but no, CDE uses Git.
    - criddell 4y ago
      They are still using SourceForge. Click through the link at the top of this page to see for yourself. Or google "cde desktop" and follow those links to SourceForge. Or check the CDE Wikipedia page and notice how they link to SourceForge.
cpach 4y ago
Oh, neat. How does this kind of GUI work on a 4k monitor? Has anyone tried?
- brirec 4y ago
  I am pretty sure there is support for changing the size of fonts and titlebars, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else that scales. I doubt anything scales _well_. The thing is, CDE predates high DPI monitors by so long that most of the beefy workstations running it were considered particularly high resolution at something like 1152x864 or 1280x1024. Widget scaling really was the last thing on anybody’s mind…
  - hulitu 4y ago
    I ran linux on a monitor at 1600x1200
publicola1990 4y ago
Any one using it as their daily driver?Is it a fully viable alternative to KDE for example?
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Are you comparing it to KDE as in the software ecosystem / integrated desktop experience? "Fully" would be a misleading way to compare in that case. Someone who lives in a given text editor and needs a pleasant, lightweight host with extra nostalgia built in may really love it. Grass-is-greener holistic consumer software critics probably not so much.
- inetsee 4y ago
  I used CDE professionally back in the day (a long time ago). It was very good in its day, but I use KDE now, and I would never go back to using CDE. If I were feeling nostalgic for old software I'd rather go play with TOPS-20.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  CDE was not great, but KDE still has major UI issues. Was just trying out the new Konsole and the "show menu" setting changes places between the menu <--> context menu, depending on whether it is set or not. Also the silly new toolbar buttons were really hard to find to hide, shouldn't have to google change such basic stuff. Tells me that no one is paying attention to these details. Iterm2, while not perfect is much better at these things. As is gnome/mate-terminal etc.
- chasil 4y ago
  There is no font compositor; text is less attractive. There was no HTML browser for the early life of CDE. NCSA Mosaic was the first, followed by Netscape for the RISC platforms. The native terminal app, DTTerm, is not tabbed. Such a GUI element would take another decade. Don't turn on the server components unless they are patched (ToolTalk specifically). There is a GUI-enabled Korn shell, dtksh, but it is an ancient version the last time I looked. Most scripting sourced library code from a book by Pendergrast (of which I found a copy after lots of searches). I used dtksh for basic operations dialogs in the past, so I had some interest. It is fast, though.
josteink 4y ago
Anyone have any opinion on how this stacks up against NsCDE[1] these days? [1] https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
- lproven 4y ago
  I compared them recently on the Reg: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_desktops/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d...
indigodaddy 4y ago
Can anyone with the latest version post some screenshots of their desktop, or point to some links?
- hulitu 4y ago
  The screenshots are on sourceforge.
edem 4y ago
I love CDE. I first saw it in Solaris and I still have fond memories of it.
pharaohgeek 4y ago
I absolutely LOVED running Solaris 7/8 on my x86 desktop in college. It made me feel like a "real" developer. Even though CDE and MWM look positively ancient by today's standards, there's still something about them I really enjoy. They feel like you're using your computer to do "work". I enjoy macOS, but there's still something about that UI that makes it feel like a consumer-focused machine (understandably). The old-school Linux/Unix UI always felt like it was designed for someone different. I wish that there were a more modern version of CDE/MWM that maintained that same feel. Updated rendering, compositing, etc. but without the sad attempts at "commercial appeal" like I see in Gnome and KDE now.

CDE 2.5.1

67 points by marcodiego 4y ago

zeruch 4y ago

I haven't used CDE since I was playing with Solaris AT SUN back in the 90s...wow.

jmclnx 4y ago

Too bad Motif and CDE was not opened up 25 years ago, we would be in a totally different world on Linux and the BSDs.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Maybe, but we got XFCE out people wanting CDE but FOSS, so overall I think it turned out okay.
- senko 4y ago
  We certainly would. KDE (the Kool Desktop Environment) was created as a free clone of CDE[0]. Then GNOME was started because of licensing problems with Qt[1]. Had CDE and Motif been open sourced under a suitable license then, it is likely there would have been a single major desktop environment effort, at least in the start. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Origins [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1
  - anthk 4y ago
    First XFCE releases were not free as in freedom, but free, and they were literal CDE copycats made in XForms. Then XFCE 4.2 happened, they switched to GTK2 and killed XFFM for thunar in some release. XFFM was much better than Thunar.
chasil 4y ago
The GIMP was first released on Motif widgets, and it crashed often. The frustration with Motif's code quality led to the GIMP ToolKit (GTK). I doubt Motif would have survived, even if it was open. There were obvious problems. "A GUI toolkit called GTK (at the time known as the GIMP ToolKit) was developed to facilitate the development of GIMP. The development of the GIMP ToolKit has been attributed to Peter Mattis becoming disenchanted with the Motif toolkit GIMP originally used. Motif was used up until GIMP 0.60." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
- hulitu 4y ago
  > The GIMP was first released on Motif widgets, and it crashed often. Do you mean Lesstif ? Motif was not available for free. The fact that it crashed can be attributed to code quality. There were a lot of professional programs that used Motif.
  - chasil 4y ago
    The early versions of GIMP only ran on platforms with Motif. The 0.60 version broke all the plugins with the advent of gtk. Nobody liked it for quite a while. I used an earlier pre-0.60 release on AIX. https://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html https://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html
    - hakfoo 4y ago
      I can recall getting statically linked binaries of an early Motif-based GIMP on the "bonus CD" that came with a '90s Linux book which included Slackware on CD. The early GTK-based versions did look more modern, in a 90s way, but the benefit was that you could actually build them reasonably. Lesstif was sort of late to the party, and then was soon superceded when real Motif got opened.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Professional software shipped static builds for the user.

krylon 4y ago

I never used CDE for real, but during my training at a large-ish IT company, I worked on one project where our dev/testing machine was a small Sun server running Solaris 8 (it's been a while). After a while, out of whimsy more than anything else, I installed an X server on my windows desktop and logged into the Sparc server via XDMCP, so I got to experience the full grey-and-pink glory for a short while. Anyway, what I meant to say is that it makes my nostalgia bone tickle that people are maintaining this software today. I might even try it out sometime. Anybody know if it works on Wayland? (Just kidding! Or am I?)

pedrocr 4y ago
The apps probably run in XWayland just like any other X apps. The Window Manager is trickier but apparently XWayland has recently gained support for running a full X root so technically yes: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootfull-Desktop https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootfull-Desktop
- krylon 4y ago
  Huh. I was kidding, but I am amazed. 'tis a brave new world indeed.
- brirec 4y ago
  Huh, that’s pretty neat! But it’s not able to manage Wayland applications, is it? From the Phoronix post it almost sounds like this might be really intended run X desktops on systems that can only use Wayland?
- midislack 4y ago
  Wayland has no software other than itself. It's useless.

malux85 4y ago

This is awesome, although CDE was a tiny bit before my time, when I was gifted an AlphaServer 2100A that ran OpenVMS I remember being amazed at CDE and then discovering it had OpenDX (The visualisation software) which was loaded with a bunch of scientific computing examples. I was totally hooked. It was a transformational moment in my young life!

gurjeet 4y ago

It could be just me, but I find that UI repulsive. I had the (mis)fortune of using CDE back in 2005 on the job working on Solaris, and I remember not liking it back then either; slow and ugly is what I remember; but I didn't mind since I didn't have any strong opinions about the UI/UX back then. I was coming from a Windows development environment, so perhaps that's why CDE felt like a severe downgrade in experience.

themodelplumber 4y ago
Yeah, compared to Windows of the time it did come up short in Power User readiness. Especially by 2005. Using it in 2005 seems kinda late in the commercial game for CDE.
kragen 4y ago
Yeah, it always kind of sucked. The UNIX-HATERS handbook famously described Motif as looking like the Moscow Airport. But, unlike GNOME and Firefox, it doesn't suck more every release.
- chasil 4y ago
  You made me look it up. "X will not run in these 4-bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1” thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport."
  - kragen 4y ago
    Yeah, Xaw and I think SunView would run on a 1-bit-deep display (though my recent quest for 1-bit-deep OpenWindows/OpenLook/XView screenshots came up empty), but Motif is less accommodating in that sense. And, although it looks worse than SunView, it's not nearly as shitty as Xaw. A big contributing factor to Motif's profligate palette consumption was the bevels to make it look "3-D". I think Motif was actually an inept attempt to ape the aesthetically uninspired Microsoft Windows, which was not very popular yet, but which (relevant here) ran fine on 4-bit displays. Because that's what the VGA gave you in 640×480, and a Windows that limited you to 320×200 or 640×200 on a VGA would have been a non-starter. Open Look had a bit of a 3-D look to it, but for example (original) Macintosh and Genera were pretty flat-looking. GEOS was mostly pretty flat with the exception of the occasional drop shadow. The Newton GUI (postdating Motif) managed to get quite a bit of visual depth out of grayscale, but I don't think the Newton ever had a 1-bit display. The Palm Pilot (postdating Newton) looked like a less ugly GEOS. In theory there are all kinds of depth cues you can use to get a comprehensively 3-D look on a 1-bit display, but I haven't found a GUI toolkit that managed it.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

CDE makes me happy because it's really old but still actively maintained. Sometimes, when I get fed up with GNOME's latest "innovations" and Firefox's endless UI changes and all the other endless churn and change of modern software, I pull the latest version of CDE and start a session and just... relax. Because this is the same CDE that was around in the 90s, this is the same CDE that ran on Solaris and AIX, that outlived HPUX, that has had zero UX changes in living memory, that you could come back to after a 20-year break and find everything where right you left it. And I think that stability is beautiful.

criddell 4y ago
And it's still on SourceForge. I'm still mad at SourceForge for bundling adware in things you download from them.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Even after they changed ownership?
  - FreeFull 4y ago
    It stopped after the change in ownership, but by then the damage was already done, and sourceforge lost a ton of popularity.
- TillE 4y ago
  When a project is on SourceForge these days I assume it's because they never felt like migrating away from Subversion, but no, CDE uses Git.
  - criddell 4y ago
    They are still using SourceForge. Click through the link at the top of this page to see for yourself. Or google "cde desktop" and follow those links to SourceForge. Or check the CDE Wikipedia page and notice how they link to SourceForge.

cpach 4y ago

Oh, neat. How does this kind of GUI work on a 4k monitor? Has anyone tried?

brirec 4y ago
I am pretty sure there is support for changing the size of fonts and titlebars, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else that scales. I doubt anything scales _well_. The thing is, CDE predates high DPI monitors by so long that most of the beefy workstations running it were considered particularly high resolution at something like 1152x864 or 1280x1024. Widget scaling really was the last thing on anybody’s mind…
- hulitu 4y ago
  I ran linux on a monitor at 1600x1200

publicola1990 4y ago

Any one using it as their daily driver?Is it a fully viable alternative to KDE for example?

themodelplumber 4y ago
Are you comparing it to KDE as in the software ecosystem / integrated desktop experience? "Fully" would be a misleading way to compare in that case. Someone who lives in a given text editor and needs a pleasant, lightweight host with extra nostalgia built in may really love it. Grass-is-greener holistic consumer software critics probably not so much.
inetsee 4y ago
I used CDE professionally back in the day (a long time ago). It was very good in its day, but I use KDE now, and I would never go back to using CDE. If I were feeling nostalgic for old software I'd rather go play with TOPS-20.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
CDE was not great, but KDE still has major UI issues. Was just trying out the new Konsole and the "show menu" setting changes places between the menu <--> context menu, depending on whether it is set or not. Also the silly new toolbar buttons were really hard to find to hide, shouldn't have to google change such basic stuff. Tells me that no one is paying attention to these details. Iterm2, while not perfect is much better at these things. As is gnome/mate-terminal etc.
chasil 4y ago
There is no font compositor; text is less attractive. There was no HTML browser for the early life of CDE. NCSA Mosaic was the first, followed by Netscape for the RISC platforms. The native terminal app, DTTerm, is not tabbed. Such a GUI element would take another decade. Don't turn on the server components unless they are patched (ToolTalk specifically). There is a GUI-enabled Korn shell, dtksh, but it is an ancient version the last time I looked. Most scripting sourced library code from a book by Pendergrast (of which I found a copy after lots of searches). I used dtksh for basic operations dialogs in the past, so I had some interest. It is fast, though.

josteink 4y ago

Anyone have any opinion on how this stacks up against NsCDE[1] these days? [1] https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

lproven 4y ago
I compared them recently on the Reg: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_desktops/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d...

indigodaddy 4y ago

Can anyone with the latest version post some screenshots of their desktop, or point to some links?

hulitu 4y ago
The screenshots are on sourceforge.

edem 4y ago

I love CDE. I first saw it in Solaris and I still have fond memories of it.

pharaohgeek 4y ago

I absolutely LOVED running Solaris 7/8 on my x86 desktop in college. It made me feel like a "real" developer. Even though CDE and MWM look positively ancient by today's standards, there's still something about them I really enjoy. They feel like you're using your computer to do "work". I enjoy macOS, but there's still something about that UI that makes it feel like a consumer-focused machine (understandably). The old-school Linux/Unix UI always felt like it was designed for someone different. I wish that there were a more modern version of CDE/MWM that maintained that same feel. Updated rendering, compositing, etc. but without the sad attempts at "commercial appeal" like I see in Gnome and KDE now.