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I rather think Motif looks fine. People complain but eye candy is wasted resources.
by SMP-UX 3y ago
I rather think Motif looks fine. People complain but eye candy is wasted resources.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago„The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted.
- SMP-UX 3y agoWhat I meant was that who wants 500 plus megs of RAM dedicated solely to transparency and pretty special effects on the desktop? Idiots that's who. Edit: You might not see the problem if you have a computer with 32 GB of RAM and I certainly do. However I like to ensure that responsiveness is first up. IRIX Motif is 2D accelerated and very snappy as it's multi threaded and designed for power users. I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. What I'm basically trying to say is that visual effects that aren't well designed aren't worth the resources they take up. Functionality over aesthetics any day.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoI‘d agree to that. Aesthetics need not be wasteful, minimalism can be beautiful if done right and be very efficient, as the whole APL ecosystem shows. Its just that Motif attempts neither baroque opulence nor restrained elegance, its just carelessly ugly, and that is a sin against life.
- arp242 3y agoWhat is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided. Or the divided opinions on various styles of music. etc. I personally don't care much for the Motif looks (although I've only used OpenMotif – I'm not sure how it compares to IRIX's implementation; from some quick screenshots I looked up it seems IRIX looked better) but describing it as objectively "ugly" or "a sin against life" is just wrong.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago> What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. No.
- coldtea 3y ago>What is "ugly" or "beautiful" is really subjective. See brutalist architecture for example: opinions are (strongly) divided Strongly divided, as to the strength of like or dislike, yes. But as for the split, it's pretentious architects and a handful of laymen outliers on one side, and billions of people on the other. And whenever people vote with their wallets (as tourists, or picking where to live, etc) they shit all over brutalist monstrocities.
- arp242 3y agoI've seen quite a few people defend brutalist architecture on HN, I'm not a fan of dismissing people's tastes as "pretentious". Plus some of those comments (which I can't be bothered to look up right now) have convinced me that the things people really hate is the worst of brutalism, rather than the concept as such (it's still not my favourite style, but overall less bad than I thought before). But we can use other examples – I don't really want to talk about brutalism as such – like metal music, or paintings from Picasso or Mondriaan, or the discussion about whether or not Alien is a good film that still holds up in 2023 from earlier this week, or any number of things.
- msla 3y agoExamples of Brutalism: Hill of the Buddha, Sapporo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_the_Buddha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_the_Buddha Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Mary_of_the_Assumption_(San_Francisco) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Mary_of_the... Spomenik Memorials, Former Yugoslavia: https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/ https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/ None of those are ugly.
- coldtea 3y agoMy eyes, the goggles, they do nothing! While those are not hideous, they're hardly anything to write home about, much less call beautiful either. Compare them with a traditional budhist shrine, national monument, or church, and they're seen as the regression to ideology and "architect as god" arbitrariness that they are.
- hulitu 3y agoYou should see Android or Win 10 for what it means ugly.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoare we going to enumerate all the ugly things in the world now
- brirec 3y agoJesus, we’re still arguing about the merit of desktop composition after all these years? Do yourself a favor and try comparing the responsiveness and resource usage of, e.g., KDE Plasma with desktop composition off vs on. You’ll probably be really shocked when you see how much more CPU you need to do something as simple as scrolling a browser window. Really, try it. Any browser, scroll around on something and look at your CPU usage and the framerate of your screen. Or image editing — try panning around an image. Doesn’t matter what editor/viewer either, since they all have to draw on your X server. Even just moving windows around on top of one another — everything is just so much more efficient when you offload it to a hardware accelerator. Does it use more RAM? Yeah, a little, because the way it works is by keeping the entire contents of the windows in memory rather than culling anything that’s not exposed in front. It’s definitely not 500 MB more, though, and it definitely can (and does) take advantage of any dedicated VRAM available. And the trade off of being able to just dump a framebuffer to the viewport instead of repeatedly computing what’s been culled 60+ times a second is definitely worth it to me, but if you still prefer not using acceleration, there’s always the option to just not use it.
- arp242 3y agoI didn't really see the previous poster mention desktop composition at all? What I have seen is many computers that seem to spend more time calculating various animations than actually animating stuff. When I worked in a computer shop years ago I often turned off animations and transparencies for people who came in with slow computers (XP, Vista, 7) and they were generally happy with the speed-up and didn't mind the lesser visuals at all.
- hulitu 3y agoWhich are the merits of desktop composition besides drawing the whole screen just to redraw the cursor ?
- formerly_proven 3y agoCursor ain't in the frame buffer, moving it around only triggers a render if an application rendered a change in response to the mouse move event.
- thriftwy 3y ago500 megs of RAM TCO is like a cup of coffee. I drink coffee every day. Would you say I "dedicate" that cup of coffee to myself?
- jen20 3y agoI recall for many years running OSX on a PowerBook with 256MB RAM total, with no problems. That machine was in use until the switch to Intels. It was fine - indeed more responsive than most Windows machines laden with crapware that I encounter today with many times the resources.
- giantrobot 3y ago> I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. You're misattributing blame here. Aqua, Aero, and Metro were themselves just UI themes/design languages. They did not cause performance problems. To the underlying compositor it doesn't matter if a button is brightly colored beveled triangle or a flat rectangle. A 32x32px button is 1,024 pixels that need to be drawn to a buffer irrespective of what's in those pixels. The performance problems in those UIs were almost always related to the compositor and underlying hardware (or drivers for same). Without hardware accelerated drawing, even just 2D acceleration, the compositor was limited by the CPU and memory. The hardware limitations are only problematic at the margins though. At those various systems' introduction the performance issues were only at the low end. As the "low end" improved performance became a non-issue. Aero sucked when it was introduced because the 3D compositor was enabled on underpowered graphics hardware at the request of OEMs. Aqua ran great on then-new PowerMacs but sucked on the mobile graphics chips in iMacs and all the Mac notebooks of the time.
- lelanthran 3y ago> „The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted. That's an extreme view; GP didn't indicate that all UI toolkits needed to resemble Motif. I mean, would it be fair to sum up your point as "Prisons are maximally efficient concrete boxes, all houses should be eye candy"? Motif is (was at the time) just one of a large number of GUI designs. I quite liked it myself at the time, too.
- SMP-UX 3y agoMore to the point I think effects are fine if they don't take up massive amounts of resources.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- forgotmypw17 3y agoThe Cathedral should be beautiful. Residences are up for debate. Adding eye candy to a workbench or a toolbox is less than helpful, if you ask me.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoWhat grey and utilitarian relationship to the world. I, for one, am guided by the beauty of our weapons.
- criddell 3y agoDonald Norman has studied this and concluded that attractive things work better. A beautiful UI is one you will want to work at and will inspire creativity and problem solving. It can make your work seem easier. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_Design_Attractive_Things_Work_Better https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_D...
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agothank god theres a study for that I was starting to think the greeks and romans had it all wrong and we could raze rome
- forgotmypw17 3y agoI agree, as far as my workstation goes, it's like putting eye candy on a hammer. I use this: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- GauntletWizard 3y agoNot-so-Common Desktop Environment is a modern attempt at the style. I don't end up using it, but it reminds me wonderfully of a time when computers were made by and for people. https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
- anthk 3y agoUh, CDE was corporation-ware. The computers for the people and by the people used a hacked fvwm and rxvt making magic on Intel PC's with a Pentium I MMX /II running faster and snappier than even Irix and Sparc machines except for OpenGL.
- RichardCA 3y agoCDE on Sun was a daily driver for my working life through the late 90's / early 2000's. KDE under Linux could be configured to have more or less the same UI semantics. That changed with KDE 4 and a lot of people rejected it. One would assume those people are the same ones who now use Trinity.
- anthk 3y agoXfce3 was like that but lighter.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoThere are things that Motif got right and things that better be killed with fire. Things they got right: contrast. Shapes. I don’t need my glasses to use this stuff. Things they got wrong: over the top 3D look. Fonts are shit. Italics in menus? Ragged bitmap italics? Gotta be fucking kidding me.
- kickingvegas 3y agoOof. IMHO back in the day all the Unix implementations of Motif were terribly clumsy. You know who did a really great, coherent implementation of Motif that had nothing to do with the Unix folks back then? GeoWorks for the PC. Go figure.
- nullc 3y agoNot just wasted resources, a lot of modern eye candy actually makes the computer harder to use. For example, the recent 'flat' appearances make selected, unselected, and entirely-non-button areas look almost indistinguishable! Or animations that cause visible slowness locally and make remote display over any media slower than tens of megabits per second unusable. A computer is a tool, most tools are not sleek, they have buttons and dohickies, sharp edges that do work, etc. There is nothing wrong with polishing something up, sure, but it has to be strictly secondary to usability. The high contrast 3d look in motif wasn't because its creators had bad taste. They may well have also had bad taste, but the appearance served a utilitarian purpose. :)
- flyinghamster 3y ago> Or animations that cause visible slowness locally and make remote display over any media slower than tens of megabits per second unusable. Hello, Firefox, I'm looking at you, especially during start-up. I don't know whose idea it was to "fade-in" the toolbars on start up, but I noticed that one right away, when firing it up over both x2go and (especially) X-over-SSH. Cute thing to do in the middle of a pandemic where everyone is using remote displays!
- DonHopkins 3y agohttps://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398... >The X-Windows Disaster [...] >The Motif Self-Abuse Kit >X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn’t give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn’t speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn’t written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a “solution:” the Open Software Foundation’s Motif. >What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP’s circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. >Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it “Motif.” Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can’t compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform. >[...] 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. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly. [...] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.... >MOTIF ANGST PAGE >If you have any ANGSTFUL Motif code, comments, documentation, or resources, please share them with me! Here is some of the stronger stuff I've found. Note: this is only for official Open Software Foundation Motif inspired Angst. If you're experiencing TCL/Tk That Only Looks Like Motif But Doesn't Suck Angst, then you should stop whining and fix the problem yourself, if somebody else hasn't already. /* Note that the text callbacks are "weird" in that they expect values in the callback structure to be set inside the callback proc to determine what actions need to be taken after the callbackproc returns. In particular, the XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct's 'doit' slot is always set to True, and must be set to False if the callbackproc doesn't want the action to be taken. To do this, Set_Call_Data_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct() is called by Wcb_Meta_Callbackproc() after the callback lisp code is evaluated, and the values bound to these settable variables are set inside call_data.... Another inconsistency with the Text widget is that some callbacks on this widget return XmAnyCallbackStruct's (XmNactivateCallback, XmNfocusCallback, XmNvalueChangedCallback), whereas XmNlosingFocusCallback, XmNmodifyVerifyCallback, and XmNmotionVerifyCallback return XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct. In the code below, we look at the 'reason' slot of the call data, (which is present in both XmAnyCallbackStruct and in XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct) to determine the kind of callback that occured and we only bind the values that are appropriate for that kind of callback. Information about which slots are valid for particular callback was taken from the documentation on the XmText(3X) widget, and verified against the Motif 1.1 source -- this is valid for both XmText and XmTextField widgets... */ static LVAL s_CALLBACK_CUR_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_NEW_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_START_POS, s_CALLBACK_END_POS, s_CALLBACK_TEXT; static void Lexical_Bindings_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct(bindings_list, lexical_env, call_data, client_data) LVAL bindings_list; /* a list of symbols to which values from XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct are bound */ LVAL lexical_env; XtPointer call_data; LVAL client_data; /* XLTYPE_CALLBACKOBJ */ { extern LVAL true; register LVAL s_bindname; XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct* cd; /* How long can this go on???? */ } [...]