Yeah it had GUIs, painful as hell to program for. Only masochists can enjoy Xlib and Athena Widgets.
And CDE? No thanks.
Compared with Amiga, Windows 3.x and OS/2, UNIX has nothing to be proud about on the GUI chapter, other than outliers like NeXTSTEP or Irix, which in spite of CDE had other GUI capabilities on top.
It was designed for and remains a CLI focused OS, with a graphics buffer on top without a coherent stack.
As for Linux caughting up, until 2005 I only used Aix, HP-UX and Solaris in production.
While at CERN Linux was being adopted as transition away from Solaris to run on the clusters (2003), everyone was either using Windows 2000 or the newly released OS X on their desktop/laptops.
On my group I was one of the Scientific Linux early adopters, and yes in the context of running CMT, displaying Latex produced documents, Java based GUIs for the accelerators dashboards, or the same POSIX stuff as any other UNIX it was ok for the research workflows being done there.
Ironically even in such contexts the large majority was either using Word or Framemaker for their papers.
And CDE? No thanks.
Compared with Amiga, Windows 3.x and OS/2, UNIX has nothing to be proud about on the GUI chapter, other than outliers like NeXTSTEP or Irix, which in spite of CDE had other GUI capabilities on top.
It was designed for and remains a CLI focused OS, with a graphics buffer on top without a coherent stack.
As for Linux caughting up, until 2005 I only used Aix, HP-UX and Solaris in production.
While at CERN Linux was being adopted as transition away from Solaris to run on the clusters (2003), everyone was either using Windows 2000 or the newly released OS X on their desktop/laptops.
On my group I was one of the Scientific Linux early adopters, and yes in the context of running CMT, displaying Latex produced documents, Java based GUIs for the accelerators dashboards, or the same POSIX stuff as any other UNIX it was ok for the research workflows being done there.
Ironically even in such contexts the large majority was either using Word or Framemaker for their papers.