4 ms·
I miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothin
by tokyobreakfast 9mo ago
I miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothing more.
Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.
- cturner 9mo ago"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.
- ofrzeta 9mo agoYou can use a CDE lookalike https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
- pjmlp 9mo agoSafe languages have nothing to do with it, case in point, the choice of programming languages available on VMS. Which contrary to UNIX did not had the C mistake. Rather Structured BASIC, Extended Pascal, COBOL, Modula-2, Fortran and Bliss. It is really sloppy programming nowadays, regardless of the languages.
- Tor3 9mo agoHm? VMS also had K&R C, and a simulator I worked with at the time was written (not by me) using that compiler.
- dhosek 9mo agoIndeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself. Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).
- nineteen999 9mo agoMuch of VMS was eventually rewritten in C to accomodate the Alpha.
- pjmlp 9mo agoBy then it was OpenVMS.
- nineteen999 9mo agoVery familiar with it. Ran it in production for a major gambling company in my country for years. The stability was okay (no better than say Solaris) but the ergonomics for administrators and developers was absolutely horrid. The Alpha though? It's a shame DEC couldn't push it hard enough to prevent x86_64 from happening.
- pjmlp 9mo agoEventually, but it wasn't first class, rather to port UNIX software into VMS. Just like MS-DOS had plenty of C compilers to chose from, while it was actually written in Assembly, and most folks were programming in Turbo and Quick Pascal, Turbo and Quick BASIC, Clipper,... Hardly the same kind of C for everything like on UNIX.
- toast0 9mo ago> Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Well, of course it takes more ram when we run 4x the pixels for the same size screen. And we double the refresh rate, but then hold everything back a frame to composite it. :P
- ahartmetz 9mo agoI think the one frame delay is due to X11 clients rendering a frame, then the X compositor rendering a frame, both according to the usual timing rules. With Wayland, it should be easier for client and compositor to render in the same frame interval because the compositor properly controls frame timing. It can just tell clients to render slightly early, then use the remaining few milliseconds for compositing.
- hapless 9mo agoThe Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.
- pjmlp 9mo agoNot really, because it wasn't a thing when Motif took off.