CDE 2.5.1

https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/ci/503d09172b96d1679e049b3e04d8935db7ad0c96/

by marcodiego • 4 years ago

67 67 4 years ago

sourceforge.net

jmclnx• 4 years 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-h5• 4 years ago

Maybe, but we got XFCE out people wanting CDE but FOSS, so overall I think it turned out okay.

senko• 4 years 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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1

chasil8• 4 years 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

hulitu4• 4 years 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.

krylon2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

krylon2• 4 years ago

Huh. I was kidding, but I am amazed. 'tis a brave new world indeed.

brirec2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Wayland has no software other than itself. It's useless.

malux85• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

themodelplumber3• 4 years 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.

kragen3• 4 years 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.

chasil8• 4 years 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."

yjftsjthsd-h5• 4 years 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.

criddell2• 4 years ago

And it's still on SourceForge. I'm still mad at SourceForge for bundling adware in things you download from them.

themodelplumber3• 4 years ago

Even after they changed ownership?

TillE• 4 years 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.

avar• 4 years ago

HP-UX is still being actively developed.

Tsiklon• 4 years ago

It’s only on Itanium hardware now which is super dead, which limits the ability for anyone to experience it

yjftsjthsd-h5• 4 years ago

Huh, you're right; Wikipedia puts the EOL of the current version at 2025-12-31. I wonder if they changed that or I misremembered; I was quite sure that I'd read of it being EOLed years ago. (Or perhaps I did read an EOL notice but they were announcing it on Enterprise timelines, i.e. "heads up that it'll finally die in a mere 8 more years"...)

forlorn• 4 years ago

Coincidentally CDE dropped its support in this very release.

srvmshr3• 4 years ago

I could be slightly opinionated but Gnome v2.2 which shipped with Redhat 7/8/9 in early 2000s was my peak desktop experience. Bluecurve icons felt beautiful, polished & didn't look all flat for e.g. [1]. In comparison, Gnome3 was a mess, buggy and somehow cinnamon/xfce desktop couldn't ever bring back the elegance & sheer joy of early RedHat GUI

[1] https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/RedHat%20v8...

floren• 4 years ago

Yeah, it was really nice. I ran one of those Redhat versions (8.1?) for a while and Gnome just felt great.

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

I never used Gnome (any version) all that much, but I have similar feelings about Windows 2000.

Recently I used Windows 10 a bit because I had to test some things, and it's just so ... chaotic. Buttons everywhere, the "flat" UI just makes it hard to see what's what (including what's a button), and "clippy" is basically built-in now given how often the thing whines and nags notifications at you.

The Windows 2000 UI wasn't perfect, but it clear, simple, and mostly "just worked".

blablabla123• 4 years ago

The situation was also comparable with KDE, I think KDE 3 was for me peak Desktop. It seems afterwards the race to be like Windows started. Although the common Linux Desktop environments were far more advanced than Windows especially in terms of flexibility - just the application variety was lacking behind.

lproven2• 4 years ago

I wasn't a big GNOME fan even back then, but I agree, the Bluecurve theme was lovely, and it looked great on both GNOME and KDE. KDE has never looked so good, before or since.

It honestly escapes me, given the vast variety of themes out there, that since the RHL era, no other distro has ever coordinated its themes across all desktops that way. It's a great way to bring a coordinated look across a distro.

Ubuntu's old Ambiance and Radiance themes have been a strong part of its brand for a decade or more. Why doesn't Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu etc. modify and adopt the standard Ubuntu house style?

Fedora's GNOME themes are also great looking, even speaking as someone who doesn't like the desktop itself. Jakub Steiner is a design genius: https://jimmac.eu/

The other Fedora respins should adopt the look, and present a unified brand.

Same for openSUSE, Debian and any other distro with multiple desktops.

anthk5• 4 years ago

On the GTK/QT3 icons, Tango/Tango2 have a similar design.

Theme: https://github.com/Rakksor/Blueshell

As for the font, just use the one named Go.

chasil8• 4 years ago

The Motif Window Manager and widget set are older, and incorporated into CDE.

"Motif was first shipped by OSF in 1989."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)

"Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, and USL announced CDE in June 1993 as a joint development within the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

Because this software was written for 100MHz CPUs, it screams with high-performance on modern systems.

anthk5• 4 years ago

FVWM was MWM like but much faster. With Rxvt it screamed against CDE. Pentium PC's felt faster than some Sparc machines...

cpach• 4 years ago

Oh, neat.

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

brirec2• 4 years 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…

hulitu4• 4 years ago

I ran linux on a monitor at 1600x1200

publicola1990• 4 years ago

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

themodelplumber3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

chasil8• 4 years 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.

yjftsjthsd-h5• 4 years ago

Depends on your standards. CDE is, by modern standards, rather feature poor; if you actually use any significant slice of KDE's features it'll feel very limiting. On the other hand, IME it's also far less buggy than KDE (possibly for similar reasons; your features can't break if they don't exist), and it's stable both in the sense that I don't think I've ever seen it crash, and in the sense that I don't think I've ever seen it noticeably change. Mixed bag, YMMV.

josteink• 4 years ago

Anyone have any opinion on how this stacks up against NsCDE[1] these days?

[1] https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

lproven2• 4 years ago

I compared them recently on the Reg:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d...

indigodaddy• 4 years ago

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

hulitu4• 4 years ago

The screenshots are on sourceforge.

edem• 4 years ago

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

pharaohgeek• 4 years 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.

zeruch• 4 years ago

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

CDE 2.5.1

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