[defaultrouteuk]

Hi All,

Obviously the 4DWM desktop is beautiful, goes without saying. But the CDE desktop has a lot to offer and in some ways might be more relevant to anyone who used to work on Solaris (like me). So I was dabbling in the desktop customisation and figured I'd have a go and the fruit of labour (by accident) revealed my old comrade. So, say hello to my little friend.

   

Rich

[Geoman]

Yes, that's true. I think with IRIX 6.5.28 you get a free license for CDE on IRIX an it is very easy to setup. Needless to say on Solaris it is the standard environment.
It is also open source for some years now https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/
but is not developed any further.

[Raion]

Geoman that's incorrect, CDE continues to be developed but the development pool is small and the codebase is large.

[hamei]

Geoman that's incorrect, CDE continues to be developed but the development pool is small and the codebase is large.

I've often thought this could be a reasonable desktop for loonix .... everything works well, it's just the graphics that are butt-ugly. I always thought it would be easier to make some pretty pictures than design an entire desktop ....

[commodorejohn]

It really doesn't look too bad in itself, IMHO - the main problem is that every vendor shipped with a different color theme for it, and every last one of them was hideous. Other than that, the biggest things CDE could use are a facelift on the Motif control set, antialiased font rendering, and a less clunky and primitive file manager.

[hamei]

every vendor shipped with a different color theme for it, and every last one of them was hideous.

That must have been one of the pre-requisites for working at a computer company in the past - no taste. Have you looked through the available color schemes on 4Dwm ? Gag me with a spoon, they look like the project was outsourced to the nearest kindergarten !

That'd be kind of a fun project, now that you mention it - a set of attractive schemes for Irix. Too bad I have zero artistic talent

[commodorejohn]

I remember setting up Tru64 on my AlphaStation, and I had no earthly idea that I'd swapped the red and blue cables going to the monitor until I tried the video player and watched the Space Shuttle ride a teal booster into a pink sky, because the CDE theme was just as terrible either way...

[lunatic]

The original CDE clone xfce has pretty much overtaken CDE. We should be honest: CDE was never really good. It was far too bloated, for too resource-hungry judged by what it actually offered. And the colors... like dropping acid in the Sistine Chapel... The moment other open source desktop became available, people were running away. I actually remember building KDE from source on a Tru64-Alpha many, many years ago. That was back when KDE had this relaxing blue default background. It sort felt nice, because the old DECwindows/Motif (before CDE) also had the blue color tone.

The basic idea of CDE was good of course. Too bad the implementation was so poor. For those of you interested in history, try some HP-UX 9 and its native user interface HP-VUE.

[Raion]

While XFCE may have it's roots as a clone of CDE, literally every modern Linux DE, and the one BSD designed DE, all have issues. XFCE now depends on logind and polkit on Linux, and consolekit2 on non Linux. It's also based on GTK3, which is ass. Years ago, it would have been a light option. Now? It's like how Honda scaled up the Civic from essentially subcompact to "compact" which is more like a midsize saloon of the 1990s. Everything is bloated.

Anything based on a modern toolkit is unfortunately really hard to deal with. Took me ages to get GTK3 to build without cups or dbus on FreeBSD, and I had to bug Jan Beich a bunch to figure this out.

That being said, I used to like GNOME 2. That was long ago in 2007 or so. I'm now rather attached to E16 and Motif/FLTK based interfaces. I prefer functionality over prettiness or *ease of use* which is now defined by macOS. Tbh, I don't mind Windows 2000. Unpopular opinion, sure, but it wasn't bad. OS/2 ain't either.

With that all out, I hope CDE continues to get attention. A modernized fork of CDE would be welcomed.

[lunatic]

While XFCE may have it's roots as a clone of CDE, literally every modern Linux DE, and the one BSD designed DE, all have issues. XFCE now depends on logind and polkit on Linux, and consolekit2 on non Linux. It's also based on GTK3, which is ass. Years ago, it would have been a light option.  Now? It's like how Honda scaled up the Civic from essentially subcompact to "compact" which is more like a midsize saloon of the 1990s. Everything is bloated.

Anything based on a modern toolkit is unfortunately really hard to deal with. Took me ages to get GTK3 to build without cups or dbus on FreeBSD, and I had to bug Jan Beich a bunch to figure this out.

That being said, I used to like GNOME 2. That was long ago in 2007 or so. I'm now rather attached to E16 and Motif/FLTK based interfaces. I prefer functionality over prettiness or *ease of use* which is now defined by macOS. Tbh, I don't mind Windows 2000. Unpopular opinion, sure, but it wasn't bad. OS/2 ain't either.

With that all out, I hope CDE continues to get attention. A modernized fork of CDE would be welcomed.

Sure, I get your point. Today, by comparison, CDE is rather lightweight, but old. One of the problems that plagued user interfaces on Unix for ages is the multitude of different toolkits and frameworks. It's not like one thing is particularly bad. It's the problem that one thing is piled on another to the point where you need all of them at the same time. Yet CDE does the same thing. Essentially all the vendors kept their old interfaces and libraries around to support older applications. CDE just added another layer.

I have been a Mac user for many years now, but I am not so optimistic about the future of the Mac. I am not really sure if I want to buy a new ARM Mac. I hate modern Windows and I don't really enjoy any of the big Desktops on Linux either. Many years ago, when Linux was my primary desktop system, I used fvwm2, but I don't really want to go back to a background image and some transparent terminals on it.