I have a grudge against CDE. It superseded OpenLook, which I personally thought was the pinnacle of a clean, professional desktop environment. Some screenshots randomly found on the web:
I did not only like its look, but also many of its paradigms: That basically everything is started by clicking on the empty desktop, which opens up a menu (you see that menu on the far left in the image); that you can pin menus and other elements to keep them open (even that initial menu mentioned before, it's pinned in the screenshot), that some buttons were "drop down" buttons with multiple actions, and application menus were exactly that (look at the "menu bar" in the File Manager window)...
Me too but for a different reason. It replaced HP's VUE which had a much 'happier' colour scheme, sans-serif fonts and a nicer-looking 'dock'. HP buried VUE pretty deep after they moved to CDE (which inherited most of the visual design of VUE and some other stuff from the other cooperators IBM and Sun). VUE was what I looked at while studying so it has a strong nostalgic feeling about it for me :) CDE is too different visually to feel 'off'. The colours are too muted and the fonts too traditional. I can see IBM's influence there, VUE was way too 'funky' for them.
Hi. I don't know why many people here have focus on things which can be easily configured in mentioned environments.
All VUE palettes are exactly the same as CDE palettes, and can be imported into CDE either system palettes directory, or in user's ~/dt one. The same is with NsCDE.
For font, you probably have to spend some time to figure out how to change it in CDE, but in NsCDE you can use any font available on your Unix/Linux system.
That said, you can make CDE look dark, light, serious, funky, whatever.
As someone rightly commented in this thread below: usability of XDG standards, integration with the system and various widgets ... this is the topic, not the theme you can change with a few clicks or 1-2 hours of figuring out and editing.
It was an interface that could degrade extremely well to monochrome and still look reasonable on the lousy LCDs of the 1980s. The hit points are large and spaced out enough so that it could be operated via the janky touch screens of the era as well
Also NeWS used postscript as the display language. It extended it to allow the interactive elements.
As someone who was at Sun during this time (and eventually worked on the CDE project), it was hard to give up a desktop environment (OpenWindows v3) whose look and feel I thought was better than the replacement.
Still, it was interesting to work with our counterparts at the other companies (mostly HP.)
I wasn't trying to divine an alternative present, just recollecting past grievances.
Though I don't know, if OpenLook had lived on, maybe some of it at least would have survived through the ages. Maybe not, though, because Windows was already there, and that pretty much displaced everything. I doubt OpenLook would have made a difference in that versus CDE.
I recall using olvwm (http://www.xwinman.org/olvwm.php) on my Linux machine sometime in the mid-late 90'ies (as I had used Sun workstations at a summer job and I liked the look of it). Not sure it's FOSS per the DFSG criteria, but at least it was available with source under a somewhat free to use license.
What impresses me the most in CDE: application builder. In the 90's the "desktop UNIX" had a multi-plaftfom, standardized and (then) modern RAD environment using a multi-plaftfom, standardized and fast programming language.
Extremely functional. The same cannot be said about competitors.
Many different unix-like systems, many different architectures, used the C programming language, which is much more widely available than the other listed by pjmlp, and, although it needed some libraries, it is so portable that you can it on modern GNU/linux distros and FreeBSD. You know what the N in GNU means, right?
I think I should have said "multi platform AND use a widely available high performance language". I don't know if Objective-C can be considered widely available in the 90's. Apple/NeXT implementation AFAIK wasn't contributed to gcc from the beginning and I don't konw if "Interface Builder" was ever run in anything but NeXTSTEP/MacOS.
I really don't know about SmallTalk availability or performance.
> Portable as along as the the OS is UNIX/POSIX, got it.
:) Well... it excludes VB and Delphi from your list... it would be very good if 90's Microsoft had standardized their OS interface, Sun tried to do that with PWI but was unsuccesful. Also they were x86 only (don't know if VB ran on non x86 NT or CE) while application builder was really architeture independent.
But yes, it looks like you really have a point with Visual Age for C++.
I read the article and while I see a pretty good installation guide, I'm left unconvinced that CDE is either currently being developed or that it is "modern".
Judging from the repository it has a lot of commits so i guess it is being developed.
Also the releases seem to have changed convention since CDE 2.3.0 which was made a few years ago[0] and there have been a couple of releases per year since then. My guess is that there is a new maintainer/team behind it.
I have to agree, at least on the "modern" part. I compiled it from sources last summer to run on a retro-style Linux LFS I was putting together for fun. It was fun and nostalgic to see CDE running again, but there were parts of the build that didn't work at all (eg. help viewers and documentation), and support for Xft antialiasing was still pretty spotty.
It is still receiving patches AFAIK, and maybe these issues are fixed by now. But I also couldn't help feel it was probably a ticking time bomb regarding security fixes etc.
I also installed it from source somewhat recently and the lack of help viewers and documentation makes me sad. You have to learn by exploration, which is not easy in a system with so many parts.
Yes the config files are described in manual pages though, remember that most of the users that worked on this were working on green-screened text terminals only a few years earlier. So this wasn't a big leap for them and more of a natural transition.
But I also remember it took me some time to figure it out. Especially because it required logging in and out to test it, and if there was a big mistake the login would fail and I'd have to jump into a text shell to fix it :P
Yeah 'modern' implies a lot of things. Anti-aliasing fonts? Nope. Hi-DPI? Desktop notifications? Configurability? Dragging items into menus instead of messing with config files?
But I like that people still maintain it. If I actually wanted to use it I would use NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE It's a CDE skin for a modern FVWM version which does have a lot of mod cons.
Given the amount of literature required to do anything usefull with it, the O'Reilly X Windows book series, and how it did so much with text configuration files, I surely never saw it as modern.
Even if I have enough hours using it as the "modern" GUI for Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, during the 1999 - 2005 timeframe.
Honestly in CDE/Motif/classic Tk styles I actually have a little bit of trouble telling stuff apart, because everything has the same background color. We just retired an app that often had like a dozen or so dropdowns and edit fields on top of each other and it was kinda hard to tell where a box was, because all those lines are kinda just noise in a dense interface. The same interface even in Gtk, where widgets have a simpler outline, but utilize colors, is much easier to use. You also can't easily tell read-only widgets apart, because everything is the same color and look (might be a Tk defect though).
I suspect CDE was designed to still work on monochrome displays, but color is imho very important for effective interfaces and CDE doesn't use it at all.
> I suspect CDE was designed to still work on monochrome displays, but color is imho very important for effective interfaces and CDE doesn't use it at all.
To say something like this is a bit funny in the world where "light" and "dark" are theme choices. If anything has tried to use colorful desktop, it is VUE, CDE, today NsCDE etc.
You shall try Teams on windows over another window. The cream of GUI design. Good luck telling which window is active and which GUI element belongs to which window.
And a slight barely-noticeable drop shadow and some transparency with blur effect just light enough not to notice it but still put a big load on your GPU :)
Windows had that well into W 7, individually for inner and outer bevel IIRC. The only thing that went away from the Control Panel was the adjustment of the actual Border Width, between the bevels, below 1. Previously you could set it down to zero, butting the bevels directly against each other (a look I preferred). For a while afterwards, you could hack it via the Registry Editor, but a little later they broke that, too.
Or did you mean the actual drop shadow, outside the window proper?
True but it does need the GPU. I had some issues with my dual-GPU (intel integrated + nVidia) MacBook Pro. Whenever I would start up the desktop it would fire up the external GPU.
But my point is that the effects are often so subtle they can't even be noticed. I'm not against them per se. I have most of them on now in KDE in fact but boosted up a bit which I think looks nicer.
But you're right, it's not a 'big load' like I said, a modern GPU can handle this with 2 fingers up its nose.
I'd say Motif, and my favorite, Xaw3d, are two of the nicer UI toolkits out there. At least, that's true from the perspective of a user, having never programmed against their APIs.
There's a lot to be said for distinctive, beveled buttons for quick visual acquisition of interactive UI widgets. Modern fashion trends make them look dated, but I'd be willing to put money on them being quicker for new users of an application getting oriented and doing things.
I think is a usability vs aesthetic scale. The likes of CDE score high in usability and low in aesthetic; the various "material" toolkits score high in aesthetic and low in usability.
> Your aesthetic is not mine. I find "material" toolkits to be masochistic at least if not worse.
Right to the point. A pure visual and usability masochism. I live for the day when our buttons, menus, scrollbars and such will one again have topShadowColor and bottomShadowColor, inverted on click to have nice fat juicy feeling that something has beed clicked actually.
You could have seen that already with Object Windows Library or Visual Components Library from Borland.
Even MFC, although lower level than Borland offerings, is much better than plain Win32.
Using bare bones Win32 is only for masochists that sweare for C's "simplicity".
Although Windows team seems to have enough of them, so nowadays legacy MFC or Qt/VCL are a much better experience than XAML C++, given the lack of Visual Studio tooling for it.
Maybe it is hard to someone to imagine, but yes. There are some of as who like 3D borders, brutalist semi-modern, semi-retro look dancing on the border of ugly and beautiful. This is what I look just now on my screen, as well as for many years ago.
I had to learn that people exits who like flat gray on dark gray non-intuitive, sick and depressively looking "modern" interfaces with huge visual and thematic choices: usually called "light" and "dark" - all this wierdness in 2021.
So yes, we can try to exterminate each other, or learn to live with this fact about differencies, and let other live.
When I was young I learned how to use UNIX by telnetting into sdf.lonestar.org and in my mind the flexibility of the shell caused me to imagine UNIX in my head as this powerful thing that made Windows 9x and Mac 9x feel like toys by comparison.
So when my school offered UNIX classes I gleefully signed up and they sat me down in front of this. When I saw the CDE Solaris desktop for the first time I thought "what is this? this can't possibly be UNIX, it looks something that was built by people who punched in their time cards and were forced to follow orders to build something that looks like Windows 3.1.
A superior operating system deserves a superior graphical user interface. I thought Enlightenment circa 1998 was a much better look for UNIX: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2bcmol/enlighten... since it felt more true to its hacker base. It's a shame the old enlightenment desktop is no longer maintained, and CDE is. But thankfully, I think Steve Jobs corrected this error for us all with OS X. I felt just as thrilled when I first saw that, as I did when I first saw Enlightenment.
Imagine if Enlightenment was released with Qt's developer API and GNOME's license. We'd be living in a different world today. Shame we couldn't complete the triforce back then.
That's old fashioned internet drama right there. It's cool he added images and video to terminals. That's something about terminals people have been trying to change for a long time and no one's figured out how to do it yet in a way that can gain consensus. I personally find the block character workaround more exciting since it's portable, requires a small amount of algorithmic / mathematical hackery, and produces a nice retro aesthetic.
Not sure I understand this workaround. Can it achieve pixel-exact output?
Say I want to leverage it to get inline visual output in the terminal from imagemagick. Am I getting pixel-exact output? Or am I merely imagining pixel-exact output roughly the size of the retro-styled block?
It's pixel-exact if you use unicode half blocks but pixel-exactness is meaningless if you scale the image or video to fit it in the display. You can gain higher resolution using the unicode block elements since it effectively grants four quasi pixels with two colors, in which case you can use some kind of nearest neighbor search to figure out which combination most closely approximates the 2x2 pixel chunk of the image. Where the math gets turned up to 11 is if you limit yourself to a 256 or 8 color palette and you want to use the shade blocks to blend colors like the dos days since that's difficult to accurately model. Last time I checked the techniques based on the cielab δe or din99d are the current state of the art. Some terminals like gnome-terminal avoid it entirely by simply not displaying shade blocks at all, and instead substituting them for solid blocks where the color blending is performed naively in software.
Let's just assume the image fits into the terminal window without scaling. In this case are any of the techniques you describe perceptually indistinguishable from displaying the image by normal means (e.g., displaying an image that fits without scaling in my browser window)?
It's simpler if I show you: https://justine.lol/printvideo.html That's how you hack a terminal to display multimedia in a portable way. Sadly most terminals can't keep up. Some like Alacritty crash with memory errors running that program. Other ways exist of hacking your way to multimedia. I've seen some people code their terminal programs to sort of hook into the X Windows server, figure out where the terminal window is, and then blit their media onto an overlay. But like I said I appreciate the retro aesthetic.
That would be the parallel universe in which its creator hadn't been ripped apart by regulators before they had a chance to build one. AT&T tried their best to keep it going after the settlement with System Five but they were doing it with half a brain, since the us govt ordered 50% of their lab geeks to switch jobs to the one of the baby bells.
Indeed. Carefully built team is more than the sum of its parts though. If you had your own Space Shuttle and 50% of it was taken away then how would you visit the stars?
> If you had your own Space Shuttle and 50% of it was taken away then how would you visit the stars?
Being a bit of a stickler here, but that's still a different type of problem in your metaphor.
The space shuttle will fail to launch because it's ostensibly missing critical systems now.
The software team will become ineffective because it's impossible for them to stop thinking about the original number of pink elephants.
Put another way-- if the original shuttle design called for half the required systems it still wouldn't have succeeded. But consider if the original Bell team had the post-breakup roster but the breakup itself never happened. (I.e., start with half the number of participants but keep that number and funding for them arbitrarily into the future.) Would you still be willing to state that this hypothetical team would have lacked the ability to succeed from the start?
I'm not claiming anything. I just think the Bell System was doing cool work on operating systems and it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the government hadn't disrupted that. I pass no judgement either. Since as good as that thing might have been, the breakup also gave rise to opportunities for the tech giants we have today to emerge, for better or worse.
CDE had some great concepts. It was super consistent, dtksh allowed programming the GUI, fantastic built-in help. If it were not for the probably security-holy code-base, the missing creature comforts like anti-aliasing and dated look will keep me away from it.
Motif is also a bit chunky, and the serif font looks a bit dated, but it is very consistent, and has well designed colour schemes so very easy on the eye.
The dock was a really useful tool though, drag and drop printing and workspace short cuts. The version I used on HPUX even had a small green blinking activity light like a disk activity light (probably also network) which I loved.
Motif can certainly do antialiased font rendering and could do for many years now, but this is most likely configured to use these fonts as you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources to use antialiasing.
"you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources"
I hope you can understand that any time you say something like this, or tell people to edit xorg.conf or some other cryptic config file, or tell people to put random commands in their bash profile, or something like that, it kind of makes the software appear to be not really modern or usable. Sorry. (This is not specific to CDE, pretty much all Linux desktops suffer from this bad usability at some point)
The claim was that CDE is modern, not that is easy to use. TBH i wouldn't really call it modern either, but that is largely because "modern" is a vague nondescriptive term that practically means nothing (and it certainly doesn't mean anything related to ease of use :-P). Helpful for PR and marketing, not so much for technical stuff.
And IMO pretty much everyone who posted here focused on superficial things like how fonts render instead of practical things like what sort of desktop standards does it support - e.g. can it parse .desktop files to fill application lists? Can it support tray icons so that, e.g., if i run Steam i get an icon somewhere for it? How about some more recent standards like displaying application progress bars (where that makes sense)?
IMO think these are more important and a much better indicator about the state of a desktop environment than how fonts render (which isn't even something CDE itself does anyway).
Actually last time I tried CDE, maybe a few years ago, there were multiple areas where it was not possible to configure something with a GUI. Not just fonts. In fact there were buttons in various settings panels that when you clicked them, would launch a text editor in an xterm window to edit a config file with no explanation of what you're supposed to be doing. I thought that was totally ridiculous. Sorry I can't mention something more specific but it was a while ago and I could be remembering it incorrectly.
For a modern desktop I would also expect wayland support, and integration with networkmanager, pulseaudio/pipewire, udisks, things like that, which also didn't seem to be implemented last time I checked, but if any of this has changed then please let me know. Systrays and desktop files are like 15-20 years old so that's not really a compelling case for modern features...
Well, i also used CDE years ago so i don't know. As i wrote i wouldn't call it modern either but again the reason would be different :-P
Some of the stuff i mentioned (and some you did) might be possible with 3rd party applications - i think the panel can embed small X apps to provide some functionality. In Window Maker (which is what i use) there isn't really tray icon support by WM but there is a "dockapp" (essentially a tiny X app that lives inside the Window Maker dock) that provides it. Something like that (or exactly that dockapp, it is an X application after all) might work for CDE for providing tray icons. Similarly for udisks and pulseaudio.
Doesn't it defeat the purpose if you have to use third party apps? I thought the point was to get a modern Motif desktop, what does that matter if you're just going to install half the desktop from Wmaker or GNUstep or whatever.
Having independent components that can be integrated with various window managers and lightweight DE's is the most UNIX-way of combining bits and pieces for flexibility and builting something for what on other systems one will need heavy machinery of C/C++ libraries and man-hours.
Just imagine grep, cut, sed or awk ... as mime/content dependent tools which can be used only with XFCE. This whould be UNIX (dead end) if this thinking of "build everyting your own to work just for itself" attitude has been practiced back then, long ago. Sometimes it looks like past was the better future.
I'm talking about things as stalonetray, dunst, xsettingsd, xscreensaver, dex and such ... which can nicely fit in CDE, NsCDE, as well as in WindowMaker, i3, Enightenment, FluxBox, OpenBox etc ...
Not really, this sort of thinking is something that came waaay later in the Linux desktop. One of X's advantages is that you can do exactly that and some other desktops like LXDE are basically made up by bringing together separate components.
(also the deskapps i mentioned aren't using GNUstep, they're either pure X or some other toolkit)
Yeah but if you're just going to swap out half the components anyway then you might as well just use KDE or something and do the same thing. And in my experience, that's a great way to get a desktop that's really inconsistent and doesn't work half the time because some random component is using the wrong set of X atoms or the wrong X resources or the wrong Dbus interface or whatever, so I don't know if I would say that's an advantage...
That's just hyperbole, using some existing element in CDE or LXDE or whatever isn't like using KDE - you still get the interface that CDE or LXDE provides. I do not see how you'd make that conclusion.
And i don't know what sort of experiences you had but at least personally i never had any issues with desktops made out of separate components. I mean, consider that Raspberry Pi OS' default desktop is basically a modified LXDE which is made up of a bunch of independent pieces.
Also TBH what you describe with "doesn't work half the time because some random component is using the wrong set of X atoms or the wrong X resources or the wrong Dbus interface or whatever" doesn't make sense. If an application used the wrong X atoms or wrong X resources or wrong Dbus interfaces it wouldn't work at all regardless of which DE it is used with.
Well they may work in some way but you'll see degraded functionality. I don't think it's hyperbole, every X window manager and panel, dock, etc that I've seen has support for a seemingly random jumble of motif and EWMH hints, and rarely will they support all of them. If you're using the standard Xresources then those might sometimes work in other apps, like Tcl/Tk and maybe FLTK I think supports it, but other things, not so much. And if you want good high DPI support with those apps then forget it.
I cannot remember what the Raspberry Pi default desktop looks or acts like as I haven't used that in forever, sorry. All I remember is not liking it for other reasons, i.e. the DRM/KMS driver performance was too poor to be able to handle a compositor or play a 1080p video. But maybe that has changed recently?
I tried Rasberry Pi OS recently on a Pi 2 so it was still slow (especially since i had a very awful microsd card - i'm certain that 99% of the slowness was due to the card) but the desktop was very consistent overall. Note that at the past they used LXDE with Rasbian but didn't made any customizations at all.
Correct, those "launcher" panels were not configurable by GUI. You had to edit config files. I spent considerable time figuring that out back in college. GUI configurability is definitely something I would expect in a modern desktop.
I get that remark in the absolute, but here we are talking about an article about how to get and compile CDE from source on a Debian 10. In which case your fear that setting up Xft font rendering via X resources is an insurmontable task to get a modern and usable system that you are literally building is maybe a little bit off-topic.
I’m not sure how anybody considers things like CDE or the the old Windows 9x aesthetically pleasing. Say what you want about MacOS/Gnome/Windows at least they are easy on the eyes
This is just my opinion, but I actually love the Windows 9x aesthetic and to this day I wish Windows 10/11 had support for the Windows Classic interface; back in the days of Windows XP and 7 I always changed the theme from the default to Windows Classic.
While I'm at it, I actually prefer the aesthetic of the classic Mac OS (especially the Platinum theme introduced in Copland and Mac OS 8) to modern versions of macOS, though I am quite fond of the clean, polished Tiger-era Mac OS X aesthetic. I'm also a fan of the NeXT aesthetic and I sometimes use WindowMaker as a lightweight desktop on Linux and FreeBSD installations, though these days I use KDE whenever I need a full-featured desktop for my daily driver (but I'm keeping an eye on helloSystem, a FreeBSD-based operating system that is inspired by Tiger-era Mac OS X: https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/).
From early 90-ties until today, when I saw CDE first time, I was impressed with it's outfit resembling something akin to brutalism in architecture.
Whatever I used during the ears, privately or at work, I always tried to reconstruct as much as possible that look and partially feel. I love it!
So, today I'm typing this in a heavy CSS'ed Firefox which looks how Netscape 4 should look way back ago if somebody bothered to integrate it into CDE. Bottom of the screen is guarded by Front Panel with nice 3D buttons saying "One", "Two", "Three" and "Four".
MacOS/Gnome/Windows easy on eyes? Yeah, like a knife.
Windows 9x aesthetic is good, except for non antialiased fonts. The same can be said about CDE. Take a look a modern lookalike with AA fonts: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE .
Fonts in nscde still look blurry to me, maybe it is missing kerning or hinting... but looks much better to my eyes.
Fonts in NsCDE are system XFT fonts. Whatever you install on your Unix/Linux system, and however you configure your XFT library (usually in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf) you will have it.
Personally, I prefer the middle ground: sligtly antialiased, but high quality sans family fonts like Bitstream Vera and Bitstream Vera Mono, not default classic serif font which is default for historical reasons, just like "Broica" color scheme.
Eh. The beige and green just look ugly to me and the boxiness of the UI isn’t pleasing to the eyes. That’s my opinion, sure, but I’d say there’s a reason why Microsoft and Apple have went with the designs they currently have.
CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching Hollywood movies in the 90's it looked modern, almost sci-fi.
Maybe the windows aesthetic was influenced by hardware limitations of the time: smaller screens, lower resolutions and somewhat blurry CRTs. Windows on a modern larger, higher DPI e very sharp LCD will look small and hard to differentiate smaller details; CDE on a large high DPI screen makes it very easy to differ smaller details and the borders "better communicate" limits.
I like KDE 1.0 appearance. It's got a good balance of influences from CDE, OS/2 and Windows.
Why are you judging the whole DE on the basis of default color scheme (replaceable 5 clicks away with 15-20 ready made color schemes after log in)? One can even compose it's own scheme by clicking "modify", name it and save it.
Make the fonts look _good_ on those screenshots, and we don't need to talk about it. As it stands, the font rendering on those screenshots makes me want to vomit.
Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Makes it look like people don't know what they don't know.
It should be a doable effort to implement high-res font rendering - maybe even just the font needs to be swapped out. I think it's great when good software gets maintained and renewed which is the case here as far as I understand even if there are still some things that could be improved. That said, I like the look&feel of CDE, good to see efforts to get this working on Linux.
The UI is just rectangles and lines. Even "modern" UIs like Windows 10 is made up of just flat rectangles and lines. The precision to draw flat rectangles and lines hasn't changed over the decades.
> and high-fidelity rendering
The fidelity being high or low depends on the source material, GUIs are drawing themselves from scratch and at most copy existing resources (images, etc). Unless you use "high fidelity" as another way to write "good looking", which i hope you understand that is highly subjective.
Look at the text. Can you see how blocky it is? And how awkward the gaps are between letters? That doesn't represent the definition of the fonts that are being used. It's a low-quality rendering in that it's literally a binary quantisation of the curves in the font. It's low-precision in that the output only considers pixel boundaries. It's low-fidelity in that it doesn't represent the creator's intent for the font.
None of that is subjective. In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-precision, high-fidelity).
It's not just the text. Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer. Etc etc etc.
Given the mathematical input of the curves of the fonts, the colour gradients, the icon definitions, this is objectively a poor rendering as it doesn't match the declared intention.
Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text as it looks sharper. What you describe is an issue with the font used (unless it is a bitmap font, in which case the look you'd get would be the creator's intent). You can get that with fonts that do not have proper hinting, but that can be fixed (assuming you dislike the result) by using another font. Regardless this isn't an issue with the entirety of CDE or the rendering it uses, but with the specific font used.
> None of that is subjective.
The very specific issue you mentioned isn't subjective indeed, again assuming that the font in question was not a bitmap font designed to look as it looks. And of course it is only about the font, nothing else.
> In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity).
TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. My comment was about trying to be more specific about what your issues were.
> Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours.
The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. For example personally i often make my own icons for Window Maker (my WM of choice) and i pretty much always lower the colors to introduce some ordered dithering that creates that common cross-hatching pattern (often i do not even care about the amount of colors, just whatever looks adds a bit of that pattern without losing much color info) that i personally find aesthetically pleasing.
> Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer
Yes that is also an objective issue. Not sure how hard it'd be to fix CDE use alpha blending, though the functionality is already provided by the X server as many window managers use it.
> TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance.
I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that.
If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the declared input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS.
> Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text
Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition?
I think it's the latter. Which is why it isn't a modern system.
> I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that.
You only mentioned fonts and what you mentioned was only true about vector fonts without any hinting information (which is what allows fonts to be displayed as the designer intended on fixed grid output like a pixel grid). It is not true for vector fonts with hinting information nor about bitmap fonts.
And what your issue really was was about the binary-only representation, which basically means that what you wanted is subpixel accuracy - ie. introducing antialiasing. This is something that is actually subjective as many people (me included, as i already wrote) prefer the binary approach.
And indeed while you are right about the very specific case of how vector fonts are displayed without enough precision, even when a font renderer does allow for subpixel precision many people prefer to alter the output from what the designer would do for -in their opinion- better results: this is one of the oldest differences between people preferring Mac OS X's font rendering (no alterations) over Windows rendering (alterations to make fonts look sharper). Many font rendering setups you'll find on Linux provide control over this too and while you can objectively say which setup would be more "correct", what exactly looks better is down to the user.
Anyway, this was all about a specific case of font rendering and nothing else.
> If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS.
CDE is not a renderer, it uses Motif and Xlib (and perhaps xcb in places) for its graphics.
> Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition?
CDE uses Motif and Xlib, Motif does have the ability to render antialiased text via Xft which uses FreeType which is pretty much what most other toolkits use to perform font rasterization.
> The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice.
I'm pretty sure the limited number of colours is exactly why CDE does this. At the time it was popular most X terms could only do a palette of 256 colours (from a larger number, I think 65535). Thus the dithering.
In fact if you opened up an image viewer like xv (xview) it would switch palettes and make your other windows look weird. Just because it needed all the colours to display a picture decently.
24-bit + alpha channel greatness only became mainstream after CDE was already a thing of the past.
Yes, as i wrote in the part you quoted, back in the 80s and 90s this was a problem however nowadays the dithering is an aesthetic choice and not a CDE limitation.
You can even see in the screenshot the Firefox icon using true color output (it sadly doesn't use alpha blending though, so this might actually be a CDE or Motif limitation - it shouldn't be impossible to fix it as the X server can do alpha blending nowadays but it needs someone to figure out where the limitation is and implement it)
I agree with you, but I get a feeling that all points you've mentioned can be fixed and still maintain the same retro aesthetics. Isn't it an implementation issue rather than a design issue? Genuinely curious.
I don't get this response to my comment. Why do you want more graphics? How many graphics there are is a decision of the application. The fidelity of the rendering is up to CDE, and the result is poor.
> is this poor rendering "not enough graphics" for you (as in "not fancy enough")?
I never mentioned more graphics. Only you did! Nobody here wants more graphics. You’re arguing with an imaginary person saying different things to me.
I’m interested in rendering that is accurate, with fonts that are correctly hinted and rasterised and icons that are correctly composited, with a high-resolution for high-fidelity. This rendering is inaccurate and low-fidelity which makes it a poorer experience.
It’s not about being fancy it’s about showing me the text and I’m working with and the graphics that are there with as much precision as possible.
Compare the same fonts and icons rendered with a modern rasteriser style a modern DPI. Doesn’t compete.
> Because many could not care less for the "fidelity of the rendering" compared to the actual functionality.
Showing me the text and UI I’m working with is the functionality of a desktop environment. Without rendered text for me to work on… what am I doing in my desktop environment?
>I never mentioned more graphics. Only you did! Nobody here wants more graphics. You’re arguing with an imaginary person saying different things to me.
I've already explained what I meant in my follow up comment, so I'm not sure why you continue to protest being misinterpreted. Not sure what you understood as the meaning of my "not enough graphics?" comment. But I tried to make it clear in the follow up (e.g. that your issue is the poor rendering, etc.), and it seems you have the same thing in mind as being the problem.
The distinction I am making is between graphics and functionality.
For me "rendering that is accurate, with fonts that are correctly hinted and rasterised and icons that are correctly composited, with a high-resolution for high-fidelity" is not functionality, it's graphics.
It's how CDE looks.
Whereas what's important (functionality) is what it does as a desktop environment/launcher.
If we were talking about GIMP or Photoshop or Premiere or even Word, sure "fonts that are correctly hinted and rasterised" would be part of the functionality. For a desktop environment, they are secondary.
You might agree or disagree, but that was the point I was making.
I do not use touchscreens for desktop environments (the post is for a desktop environment) and the overwhelmingly vast majority of touch screens are for mobile devices which need and have their own conventions and UX - trying to shoehorn one on another is a disaster (not that some do not try but this is also a major source of modern UI awfulness).
Though having said that even with touchscreens i'd rather use a stylus (i do that for my tablet actually) and styluses work fine with 90s style UIs.
Ever seen those used in an office setting? I have, and it was hilarious. Everyone swore at their laptops for two or three days, and then they all scrambled for mice. No screens were touched afterwards.
It looks cute in ads but truth is spending eight hours a day poking at your screen all the time just makes your hands sore, and after an hour or so, you spend half that time poking at the Undo button because you poked somewhere else than you meant by mistake.
It's just a wet dream of executives who never bothered to ask their underlings how they do their puny underling work. Wherever touch screens provided considerable advantages -- e.g. in touch-operated software for medical, imaging, CNC, SCADA industries -- they've already displaced non-touch devices since the 1990s. Everywhere else, suits have been singing dirges and whining about the post-PC era for ten years now and yet lo, walk into any open-space office, and you'll find nothing but rows and rows of 24" LCDs hooked to laptops with pristine screens.
Yes, when at the desk they are plugged into the docking station and used as regular desktops, when going into meetings they get folded and used as tablets.
IMHO it's not at all a good approach to optimize UIs for that one hour of largely unproductive work instead of the other seven hours that actually make the dough.
It really isn't though. I'm honestly getting very exhausted reading these HN comments suggesting that the situation with using Linux on the desktop is okay. I feel like I have been reading those comments for like 10 years (and on Slashdot for another 10 years before that) and nothing has changed and still nobody actually wants to use Linux on the desktop besides programmers and geeks. It's messed up enough if you use one of the popular desktops, never mind if you use an obscure desktop from the 90s like CDE.
Laptops also come with touchpads and mice and laptops with touch screens are a niche in the first place. Forcing everyone to use an interface that is optimized for a subcase of a subcase is the worst way to tackle UI design.
Besides even then i'd use a stylus - in fact i have a tablet which is essentially a PC without a keyboard and i use it with one instead of rubbing my fingers against the device. Both cleaner and more precise.
Okay, just for you I went and installed CDE on my pinephone. It's too small (not really a touch issue; it'd probably be fine if I could figure out how to adjust the DPI), but even so everything seems to work fine. Window bars are big enough to move around, dock icons work fine, menus are okay (albeit, yes, cramped on that screen). What did you expect to break?
Not everyone likes that, personally i always disable antialiasing. Even on Windows 10 i use a registry setting (since Microsoft thought it wise to hide the UI option) to disable text antialiasing since i prefer the sharp text.
Sadly many fonts nowadays do not have hinting information at all, but at least so far Firefox, etc allow me to override sites' font choices with fonts that look good with my setup.
Yeah, maybe. I do not have a very high DPI monitor and TBH i find even my 27" 1440p monitor to be too high DPI for my taste, i just couldn't find something smaller with the other specs i wanted (VA for having decent blacks and with a high refresh rate). I'll probably replace it with a ~23" 1080p monitor at some point though if i find a VA with high refresh rate... and not be curved (because for some reason 99% of them are curved). Either way i'll stick with the non-antialiased fonts :-P.
Well I would find 27" 1440p too high DPI too if I ran it at 100% scaling :) I run my 24" 4K at 200% scaling so it's effectively 1080p. Just super crisp which I like.
We have super-crisp screens on our phones these days, why not on the computer?
There are too many micro-issues with high DPI and TBH while the text is sharper i do not see the benefit for everything else while they do add additional strain on the CPU and the GPU (especially for games), so i just avoid it.
Some time ago I tried 150% scaling on my laptop (which has a 1080p monitor at a small size) and i just reverted to 100% because a lot of things, from websites to applications, etc didn't work properly. Note that this was on Windows but i do not expect things to be better in other OSes anyway (except perhaps macOS but it has a ton of other much worse drawbacks IMO).
Perhaps if all i used was terminal apps and pure text editors i'd have a different opinion but i use a lot of GUI apps with images, games, etc.
I don't know, but seems like you're bending over backwards to explain that CDE's weaker rendering is a good thing. Maybe it suits you, but I think it's a clear fact that the reason it's weaker is because they haven't developed it, not because they were able to but made a conscious decision not to.
If CDE could render better but let you opt out that'd be great... but it can't render more accurately in the first place. It's not choosing to be worse.
> seems like you're bending over backwards to explain that CDE's weaker rendering is a good thing
You'd be wrong.
What i write isn't about CDE but about antialiased text. As i wrote a few parent posts above i even have antialiased text disabled on Windows 10 via a registry setting and Windows can certainly do antialiased text rendering.
> If CDE could render better but let you opt out that'd be great... but it can't render more accurately in the first place. It's not choosing to be worse.
CDE can do antialiased text rendering, or more precisely Motif can (CDE doesn't render its own fonts) if configured to do so via Xft which uses FreeType for font rasterization - the same library that other toolkits (e.g. Qt) use. So its font rasterization can be as good as other toolkits. You need to do it via X resources and is opt-in instead of opt-out.
And besides i do not even use CDE myself, last time i used it was years ago out of curiosity. Personally on Linux i prefer Window Maker (which can also optionally use Xft for antialiased text rendering).
My guess is that because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you seem to make the assumption that "antialiased=good looking, non-antialised=bad looking" but in my comments for this entire thread i claim that i prefer non-antialiased text. And i'm going to guess that anyone who would use CDE would also like it to use non-antialiased text.
Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots in the CDE wiki that says how to enable it[0]. Unsurprisingly the only comment there is about someone saying that they prefer the non-antialiased version.
Apparently there are a issues with the terminal emulator though i guess xterm would be a better choice anyway.
The pixels in that screenshot are absolutely enormous. Modern screens have far higher resolutions. If you can’t even see that then I don’t what what else to say.
Sorry but what you write make zero sense, the pixel size has nothing to do with screen resolution and the pixel sizes are not even something you can judge from a screenshot. And even ignoring all that, the topic was about text antialiasing, pixel sizes (whatever you may mean with that) and resolutions have absolutely zero to do with it.
It depends which OS and desktop you use of course. Mac does it perfectly. Windows still has many issues (sadly). Gnome is pretty great at it, KDE too but there are some minor issues (the mouse pointer doesn't scale and has to be manually enlarged). Still, I use KDE this way and it's fine for me. Every version brings improvements too.
Overall I still think it's worth it. But YMMV of course!
It must be truely depressing being a Linux FOSS developer when any time you try to make something quality and up to todays standards, the Linux user base whinge and insult you for years.
I have no idea why people still work on gnome/wayland right now. I would have left FOSS entirely if subject to that behaviour.
If you've got a bare-bones, basics, simple desktop-environment then embrace that and tell us!
If you're calling it 'modern' when it everyone can see in two seconds that it isn't then you're just setting up both yourself and us for disappointment.
Don't blame the reaction - blame the preventable mistakes that caused the reaction.
I’m not calling CDE modern. I’m saying that the Linux user base has terrible preferences when it comes to software which hold back actually modern and good software like Gnome/Wayland/systemd.
What I don't like about Gnome is the lack of options. It's all so barebones, things have to work just one way and if you don't like it you have to resort to a load of plugins that often don't work right with the latest versions and/or cause issues when working together. I don't understand why lack of choice is meant to be 'modern'. It's not an iPad I just use for facebook. It's a computer. Apple has put the opinionated software paradigm on the map but it's not the be-all-end-all. Especially for desktops. For screen-constrained mobiles it works a lot better.
Systemd I don't like because it's so heavy. I really like lightweight systems. I use FreeBSD for that reason though I have other reasons too. And Alpine when I need Linux. Alpine is working on an init system based on s6 that will be more lightweight and I will give that a chance. I'm not against progress. I just like having options.
And Wayland, I don't mind it too much but I do miss the network transparency badly.
Every boolean option you add to a system doubles the possible configurations of the system, and the possible interactions and bugs. Add just ten new flag options and you've increased the configuration state by 2*10 or 1024 times.
KDE suffers a quality problem that Gnome does not. I had countless bugs and random issues last time I tried KDE but I have pretty much never had an issue with the core Gnome desktop experience (the bundled programs are another matter).
At first the lack of options on gnome bothered me but then I just accepted the default config and found that it isn't actually important to be able to tweak every single bit of layout and the default config gnome ships is actually really good.
That’s abusive to users. They constantly change random things, and optimized the desktop for mobile regardless of if I’m mobile or not.
I don’t want to be stuck with a crappy desktop environment that I don’t like if I left windows for the same problems, and I doubt most people want to be forced into someone else’s narrow workflow as well.
>I had countless bugs and random issues last time I tried KDE
Would you mind saying when was this? This is important as the KDE crew is delivering new features and bug fixes on a rapid cadence. So your experience from a year ago, might not be valid today.
Also, a lot of the issues KDE suffers from are out of the hands of the KDE devs, as some issues stem form GNOME devs enforcing their agenda on the Linux DE community as the defacto standard on how things should work, leaving the KDE devs to fix the jank they create.
The statement about booleans is a total fallacy. In real life, this MAY be the case for some cases (to introduce a bug in some combinations), and totally harmless for other cases. It depends on the context.
Even then, you cannot make the omelet if you don't break the eggs.
> actually modern and good software like Gnome/Wayland/systemd.
Well, many people disagree that those are modern and good software - and while you could claim that those are "terrible preferences" the exact same can be claimed about your preferences. The point of Free Software is to allow for everyone to be in control of their own terrible choices :-P
Everyone is entitled to use what they want, but this goes way beyond choosing something different. FOSS devs are receiving real insults and threats constantly for simply developing something. In the end the Linux desktop is being severely held back and it takes over a decade to implement improvements like wayland which are critical for Linux to keep up with Windows and MacOS.
> this goes way beyond choosing something different. FOSS devs are receiving real insults and threats constantly for simply developing something.
As long as people become emotional about these things, they will react in emotional ways - which works both ways. I don't know if you realized it but here:
> In the end the Linux desktop is being severely held back and it takes over a decade to implement improvements like wayland which are critical for Linux to keep up with Windows and MacOS.
...you are basically accusing others for holding Linux back (ie. not letting it "keep up" with Windows and MacOS) because they do not see wayland (or gnome or whatever preferences you have) as an improvement. People, especially if they feel powerless to do much, can react to this as an attack. And i do not think you are making this easier by trying to pull out an emotional card like "FOSS devs are receiving real insults and threats constantly for simply developing something" - this thing can work wonders if you are among people who agree with you but also backfire badly if you are not.
I think the lack of development of Wayland is more due to its corporate sponsors. Nvidia has been really slow to embrace it which hindered adoption. RedHat is putting a lot of effort in but desktop is not their main game so it doesn't have priority. And Ubuntu has been trying to play the "Not Invented Here" game for a long time and trying to get their own intellectual property on the map which didn't really have any discerning feature from Wayland other than being their own. But it did fragment the attention it received.
But this is mainly a corporate game, not one played by independent developers. Remember, also X11 itself was a corporate invention. It came from DEC, MIT and IBM. I don't think it's fair to blame the users for its lack of progress.
But I still think choice is good. I don't want to be forced to use Gnome, I don't agree with their UI ideas (in particular the opinionated software paradigm). Having multiple desktop options is a great thing to have, and it lead to new ideas like tiling WMs such as i3. Personally I use KDE.
I don't think "Linux on the Desktop" should ever be a mainstream thing anyway. It would suffer from the drawbacks of the other options, such as too much corporate control. For something like Wayland it doesn't matter as it's just in the background doing its thing. But for a desktop environment it matters a lot. If Linux had only one option it would be just one of the other not-ideal options around. Just like ChromeOS has become, for that matter.
Also, it's not really realistic to expect all Linux users to 'get with the program' and use the biggest option available to strengthen Linux as a whole. Most of them use it because they want something different. Not because they want to promote Linux.
One of the problems of open source is top down imposition by distros. Perhaps software should be developed with a certain regard to the preferences of the userbase? I suspect software not liked by its users is not going to be very successful in the marketplace.
Aside: Gnome is far worse than KDE. systemd is an improvement on what was there previously, albeit not the only choice. I have enough experience with X to know how difficult it was to work with, a lot there needed to go.
However, Wayland is too minimal, we're going to have lots of unnecessary differences between Gnome-wayland, KDE-wayland, and wlroots-wayland thanks to wayland's bad focus. Speaking of this, want to look at stuff that held back Linux? Maybe have some words for people who prioritized irrelevant features over basic support for remote work.
What’s your definition of modern? I don’t agree with it being modern looking unless a GUI is sufficient to make it so. LXQt was pretty, do you consider it modern?
Y'know I love the idea of using a serif font as your system font—I use Noto Serif as my own system font—but good lord, if you're going to use a serif font you need to enable hinting. The unhinted fonts in that title bar look anything but "modern" to me.
Funnily I had downloaded and compiled it just last month on Manjaro. It's pretty cool to use something which I remember being new and shiny in AIX 4.x way back in the day.
CDE? That's an acronym I haven't heard in a long time. Still being developed? Very nice.
Brings back happy memories of running oddball screen resolutions on X Window. 1000x800 I think. Definitely not 1024. Monitor couldn't do 1024. But it could do 1000. The 800 number is hazy but in the ball park.
One thing I did notice was the fonts. Those pixels.
Classic MacOS screen modes always tried to deliver square pixels, in contrast to IBM/PC-compatible screen modes where pixels were rectangular. Apple also tried to stick to a consistent 72dpi for a long time.
The monitor I had wasn't capable of 1024x768. I got that custom resolution using a manually defined modeline determined through experimentation. It wasn't a simple VESA style display setting like the later 15" monitor I got. A flat CRT was quite a sight.
OK, fair enough. I don't think that's one I saw, then.
I do recall netbooks with 1024×600 screens, which were a bit of a pain. E.g. in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, LibreOffice dialog boxes wouldn't fit on the screen -- they extended off the bottom. Meaning you couldn't reach the "OK" or "Cancel" buttons. >_<
Another fun exercise was configuring an old Dell PowerEdge server I had, connected to a very old mono VGA monitor. *Really* VGA: it maxed out at 640×480 -- but sitting on top of the server, it fit under my table and it didn't draw much power.
Every allegedly text-only server Linux distro I tried -- I remember Ubuntu Server & Debian, but probably more -- had an 800×600 graphical splash screen, which sent my monitor into conniptions so that I then couldn't complete the setup process.
This was a problem with Windows Server 2008, too. It assumed you had unaccelerated SVGA graphics and couldn't and wouldn't do actual VGA mode. I had to identify my motherboard GPU, find a Vista driver for it, install it, accept a compatibility warning, and then I could forcibly choose the monitor type and pick IBM PS/2 VGA. Then Windows believed me and displayed a 640×480 mode that my screen could show.
Funny I felt CDE was too clunky even in... 1996? when I last tried it. Pretty soon I moved to gnome from the redmond/twm thing once gnome hit 2.0ish. Used SGI 4dwm a VFX job. Still using Mate.
The CDE dock kinda demands a 4:3 monitor as well, is no one ever going to learn and put them on the side? Make sure the widgets can handle the orientation?
https://www.deviantart.com/sehnsucht94/art/OPENLOOK-SunOS-li... http://www.martin-graefe.homepage.t-online.de/xview_en.html
I did not only like its look, but also many of its paradigms: That basically everything is started by clicking on the empty desktop, which opens up a menu (you see that menu on the far left in the image); that you can pin menus and other elements to keep them open (even that initial menu mentioned before, it's pinned in the screenshot), that some buttons were "drop down" buttons with multiple actions, and application menus were exactly that (look at the "menu bar" in the File Manager window)...
Meanwhile, CDE is ugly as sin and clunky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK#/media/File:CDE_2012...