One of the big reasons I have always like CDE/Motif was that it, to me, is the epitome of function over form when it comes to a desktop UI and widget toolkit. It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons. Checkboxes look like checkboxes. Contrasting colors are used to separate window frames from window contents. Window frames had actual titles so that you could glance quickly to see the state of your system. You sat down with it, you knew immediately what was what.
NextSTEP/OpenSTEP/GnuSTEP feels similar to me. Yes, by modern standards, they are ugly as sin. But they were super, super usable for the users with very little ramp-up time.
By contrast, everything else is just so flat now. On my Mac, it's a regular Where's Waldo to figure out what is and isn't clickable sometimes. There is very little contrast between the window frames and window content ... if there is any at all, and I really dislike how they've largely done away with title bars entirely. And so much stuff is hidden in menus or behind obtuse, difficult to reach settings. I'll occasionally go look at Windows and it's not much better.
What's really frustrating is watching some of my elderly family members struggle to use newer versions of Windows or macOS because the UX has become so flat that using it can be very obtuse if it's not something that you use all day, every day. It feels like redesigning UIs is becoming a vanity project for companies to show they are "modern" ... rather than trying to make things better for actual human beings that use computers.
I cannot agree enough. From another comment I made:
> one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable.
> Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top o' the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window.
> The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls.
> Drives me crazy.
> [1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.
> Contrasting colors are used to separate window frames from window contents. Window frames
THIS IS MY BIGGEST⁰ IRRITATION WITH THE MODERN WINDOWS UI. There is no standard window decoration or title formatting, particularly no standard way of differentiating between the active window and others. It is often difficult to tell what application has focus especially if you have two with the same theming on different desktops¹. And it only seems to get worse over time.
I keep thinking of writing a tool that hunts for the top-most window⁴ and draws a nasty great bright green box around it so current input focus is impossible-to-mistake obvious! Ugly but functional.
----
[0] of several…
[1] looking at you MS Office, with nothing but a difference in text decorations²³ between focused and non-focused windows, though that is far from the only or the worst offender
[2] from white to off-white
[3] or, for non-maximised windows, for some apps, a slight difference in how dark that 1px border is
[4] excluding those that are set always-on-top, hopefully that is just a visual thing and the top-most on the task stack is actually the one with input focus
I share most of these sentiments, but I also don't know how much of this is my own wistful "those were the days..." sentimentality and how much of it is based on a those old Us being actually easier to use in practice.
As far as usability, I do think computers have become easier for non-experts to use, especially for basic tasks. I definitely remember helping some very confused people being completely overwhelmed by what to click on, what deeply nested menu was needed, etc., when just trying to browse the web or check their email. Those basic workflows have gotten better.
In many ways I think modern interfaces are more about mobile first, touch based influences, and moving away from keyboard and multi-button mouse based interfaces. Stripping things down to the very basics is almost required now, given the devices people use. You can't "middle click to paste" on an iPad.
It's entirely possible for a GUI to be simple and consistent for all normal actions and also have non-obvious shortcuts for people who want to invest the time.
It's even better when the non-obvious shortcuts are documented and standardized so that you don't have to relearn them for each application.
I came here wondering why anyone would build yet another desktop. Now that I've read your comments--particularly about the flat look--I'm wondering why the github site says "It is probably not well suited for beginners." It looks to me like it could be very well suited for beginners. (And maybe me, too, although I hope I'm not a beginner.)
> It's actually the same reason I think the Windows' UI peaked around Windows 98SE. Things that are interactive, like buttons or window frame edges, look interactive and are easy to spot. Buttons look like buttons.
Unless we're talking about toolbar buttons, where the 3D look that was still in Win95 vanished with either Win98 or one of the early office suites. I still think that's wrong, and maybe even the original sin of our current flatness crisis.
They copied it from web design. In that field discoverability means: hover your mouse over an element, see if the cursor changes, if yes try to click it. And, when all else fails, try to click on everything.
This looks nice, the goals seem to be pretty close to SerenityOS's ones : a "love letter" to 90's UNIX experience, using modern tech (although this is obviously not a full-blown OS like Serenity). I love retro projects like this!
The Win95 interface, being rather well-known, was a frequent emulation target and generally easier to do than OS X, although the finer details are usually missing from both (e.g. good keyboard control).
I was about to respond with "Hey, I'm actually fond of those color palettes...". But, then, I realized really what i have a fondness for is the nostalgia of those times, not necessarily the colors or palettes... Good times!
That was VUE, CDE was a further development from this, with input from Sun and IBM. VUE was only from HP. But most of the visual stuff came right from there except the styling.
VUE used fruity colours and sans-serif fonts. CDE was businesslike and with serif fonts.
I greatly preferred VUE but I can imagine people found it ugly.
I wish someone would make an NsCDE port that looks like VUE <3
Older I get, I care less about the desktop I use as long as I have a toolbar, can alt-tab my apps, and has nice looking fonts. I look at windows 11 and osx and amazed how win10 and linux font rendering is still bad.
Only reason i bring it up, the screenshot looks like a nice and fun desktop, but the fonts are still horrible.
I have win11 in a vm, and its amazingly nice looking fonts, in win10 I use MacType, on linux I can get terminal fonts to look good and ms code, but the gui/desktop still looks meh.
This helps a lot with font rendering in Linux: https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ It's a bit of work but I was a lot happier after making all the tweaks. The biggest thing is that Chrome has its own completely isolated view of anti-aliasing independent from the system and you have to take very specific measures to configure it appropriately. I ended up just switching to Firefox and have had less troubles and more consistent fonts.
Can you drag stuff onto the taskbar in Win11 yet? Like drag a file to a folder icon, the folder window appears, and the file is moved to that folder. Or drag a file onto an app icon to open the file in that app. The fact that I couldn't do that in Win11 blew my mind, and was the deal breaker.
Me too, I reverted due to its horrible toolbar behavior. Now I run it in vmware workstation (for nested virt and tpm chip emu), so I can monitor updates and see when things are fixed, then I'll prob upgrade. WSL2/Android emulation works rather well.
I was figuring someone will replace a taskbar replacement eventually and work around microsofts stupidity.
Note that the original versions of CDE[1] and Motif[2] are released as FOSS these days and apparently receive a modest amount of maintenance, though I don’t know how hard it is to actually get them to work (and whether their internals are of any interest—I haven’t heard much praise for Motif).
Two things that Motif has going for it is that nowadays it is very lightweight without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective) and the API has been stable since the 90s, so code breakage is rare (though it can still happen since AFAIK some Unix vendors did make customizations that weren't 100% compatible).
> without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective)
Does it support accessibility, DPI independence, layouts that automatically resize (important when you need to support different languages), right-to-left text...? Many "modern" toolkits struggle with stuff like this - it'd be really cool (and maybe even useful?) if Motif had that stuff down.
I don't know about that, Motif was used (and in some circles is still used) a lot with government and scientific projects so it might have something but that is just guesswork. If it has it'd be something specific to it.
> DPI independence
Depends on what you mean with this. Motif was made to work in a large number of different systems with different graphics abilities so it can use arbitrary text and gap sizes, a large part of the visual side can be customized to make it work at any DPI. I think it can also use the DPI settings from the X server to adjust sizes too.
However it doesn't have automatic and dynamic scaling in mixed DPI scenarios since there isn't any commonly accepted mechanism for X11 toolkits to do that (this is more of a political/social issue than a technical one - the X server already provides all the necessary information and functionality but there needs to be something akin to EWMH -or even a new version of EWMH- to standardize messages and behavior for handling DPI dynamically).
> layouts that automatically resize
It was one of the first toolkits to provide such functionality.
> right-to-left text
AFAIK it has support for both right-to-left and top-to-bottom (for, e.g., Chinese) text layout support. However that is only about layout, i think Motif can only use either core fonts or Xft, so you do not get proper support for Arabic, etc.
Regardless what i had in mind with "pure functionality perspective" was about things like having working GUI elements such as buttons, menus, windows, lists, dialogs, events, etc, etc - i.e. the necessary bits for all toolkits to have to be "GUI toolkits" :-P.
I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. Sadly it was open sourced about a decade too late to gain any momentum.
> I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up.
It is developed but not in the style of say, GTK. The goal is to add more image formats and make it modern without breaking existing functionality. And this is good.
They might have had more attention and contributors if they were hosted on GitHub or GitLab (or FreeDesktop's GitLab). Or the SourceHut. Sourceforge is the worst possible choice for development nowadays.
Novice question to window manager experts: Is it possible to build browser as a window manager? Something like OS -> OpenGL -> socket -> http/websocket -> browser based desktop ? Then be able to easily port all gnu apps. RDP would be a native experience this way over the browser.
Excuse my ignorance if I am missing something here but would love to understand if there is a basic flaw in building something like this.
Do you remember which one? What do you think would be the source of latency at least in the local machine setup (not over network). Would not passing window manager commands be much faster than passing video or pixel level information?
This is great, using actual CDE is abysmal. I didnt get very far installing CDE, but I remember WindowMaker not recognizing full screen YouTube videos, I wouldn’t be he surprised if CDE was the same.
As far as i remember there were 2 organizations which tried to standardize UNIX: X/Open and Open Look. One had IBM, DEC , HP in it the other SUN and AT&T. One choose Motif/CDE, the other OpenLook. In the end the OL people gave up and everibody went CDE under the OpenGroup umbrella.
To me it's the exact opposite, OpenLook was just UGLY. CDE/Motif didn't look that great either, but it was at least serviceable.
It's very telling that no one at Sun would look at OpenLook and recognize it as ugly. Sun was an engineering company, the entire company, from the CEO on down, had no taste.
Exhibit #2: the Java Metal look and feel, almost repulsively ugly, yet no one at Sun saw anything wrong.
If I had to guess it's because CDE had a more modern, desktop oriented design that the newer generation of Unix users, specifically PC users would be attracted to.
Straight window managers require a lot more tinkering and have steeper learning curves.
Motif was pretty horrific to program. It was full of what we would recognize as pointer abuse today.
I was always a little upset when Gtk took off in the late 90s, because it had a bunch of similar pointer abuse. It seemed to be heavily influenced by Motif. Qt seemed much better at the time. Java UI (Swing) clearly seemed a big step forward at the time. Tk was pretty nice at the time.
A lot of the X stack back then had this kind of stuff. At some point it probably got cleaned up.
Yeah and Sun was never really seemed fully on board with the whole CDE thing anyway. They dropped it for their horribly slow Java desktop environment as soon as they could.
Not sure how IBM fared but I think HP-UX had it for longer until they dropped it in 11i
> I remember WindowMaker not recognizing full screen YouTube videos
I'm using Window Maker for years now and full screen YouTube videos work perfectly fine. Perhaps you used some very ancient version? The latest from the official site[0] should work (though getting the "next" branch from git might be better if you want all the latest fixes - and bugs :-P - as releases happen infrequently).
Most likely yeah. In 2015 i used Window Maker as my main WM and at least Firefox worked fine with fullscreen videos and from a quick look via git blame support for the _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN state for _NET_WM_STATE was added in 2009.
However AFAIK that was in the CRM fork which became the main/official version somewhere in 2013 so it is possible your distro at the time had some version from 2006 (which AFAIK was when the last version from the previous developers was made).
Can someone explain to me, why someone would use such an (in my opinion) ugly looking DE?
I think it could be very fast. But using some pretty looking DE doesn't have to be slow.
So it looks like some "nerds" sit down and did something like an graphical user interface without anything like prettiness in mind.
I always ask myself the whole time why anyone would use something unpretty? I know the history ... it looks like something I used on some old unixes but I'm glad that it's been replaced by KDE or Gnome or XFCE ... something what the eye pleases.
Why doesn't not everybody strive for prettiness?
Speaking personally, I see what you mean, but one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable.
Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top 'o the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window.
The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls.
Drives me crazy.
90s GUIs were obsessively focused on making the function of something apparent based on its appearance. You learn a few different common controls, and you know how everything works, and it's consistent. [2]
Modern UI has sacrificed discoverability, and to some degree usability, for style. You can have both, but no one seems interested in that.
[1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.
[2] I mean, not always. There are of course a thousand examples of shitty applications not playing nice, but lots of really heavily-used applications did.
Oh that's crazy. Thank you for that. That's something I never thought of.
I'm obsessed with prettiness but at the end it have to be functional and all you writing about is something that is also something important BEFORE prettiness.
Thx for that.
When I sit down at a computer, I want to run an application and get something done. I don't want a desktop environment in my way, trying to entertain me, or otherwise distracting me. I am also not trying to entertain someone else when using a computer [see footnote]. Looking pretty is for art and games.
The specific aesthetic that matters when you are working and trying to accomplish something are ergonomics. Is what I need where I need it and easily findable?
Below are concrete preferences of mine and likely many others which could lead to a DE prioritizing things other than appearance:
- Can I see at a glance my commands and tools, or are they hidden behind "beautiful" panels and other formerly skeuomorphic metaphors that got rubbed down into large blank areas of color?
- Do all my commands and tools fit on the screen and aren't separated by seas of overly minimalist whitespace or require clicks in weird, unobvious places or require weird mouse gestures that might be misinterpreted from my normal mouse movements?
- I want text labels because I'm literate and can understand words, not impressionistic random icons that look like hieroglyphics.
- When I click on something - is there some immediate feedback to give my brain a sense of interactivity? After all that is why I'm using a graphical toolkit and not a serial terminal. My RAM should go to what I'm using the computer for, which is applications, not the DE.
Footnote: Some who work in sales or marketing and use computers in front of others, such as paying clients, might actually need to "look pretty" while doing their tasks. Their DE requirements would be different.
That's also interesting. I know that not everybody have an eye for style like I have. TBH I wreck my nerves if an interface looks like some ugly pile of sh* (no I do not mean the CDE thing).
I do not agree with " Looking pretty is for art and games." because if you take a look at some commercial audio plugins for Cubase/ProTools/whatever you'll see that they always look good, fancy and please the eye. They wouldn't invest any money if looking pretty is only for "art and games" and a "simple" formular based interface is everything the customer needs.
The remaining points you listed are good point's I'll think over. Thx
I think ultimately, out of everything invested in, we see that common sense rarely, but occasionally, factors.
I think it's more likely that someone had to justify their position as a developer somewhere along the line by taking a fat dump on the work of predecessors and poorly reimplementing the lost functions, calling the inevitable bastardization a 'UI refresh'.
Since when has a modern 'invested in' toolkit allowed, for example, to even move the 'X' to close a window elsewhere? Or to set your own background image on the titlebar? Or even... color UI elements? Not long since Chicago!
Seems clear to me the tools to 'make things pretty' are being removed, not maintained, if we can say prettiness is based on the artistry of the user. And otherwise, the prettiness that remains is ephemeral and by another's whim.
Perhaps as long as it is still pretty, it's not bothersome, and yeah, aesthetic has commercial value. But these days I look at things like Windows's flat looks and ask, 'what the hell is this aesthetic?' They must be spending millions, but I don't find the results appealing at all.
I don't agree with the point about audio plugins. Functionality is far more important when I'm evaluating audio plugins than looks. If a plugin has a "good, fancy" custom UI sometimes it takes longer to read labels or view the value of a knob. I usually opt for my DAW's default interface over a custom one unless there is additional information in the custom one. I find this keeps me in my flow and lets me manipulate the plugin more efficiently.
I'm sure some people buy plugins because how they look, but people also buy wine because the bottle, and books because the cover. Personally I'd rather buy audio plugins because they sound good and get the job done.
I hear ProTools and Ableton Live disparaged all the time for having simpler "ugly" UIs. Both programs remain popular because many people enjoy them for reasons other than eye candy. Perhaps it isn't that others don't have an eye for style, but simply that their exist other factors that people prioritize over style.
Good point bringing up up audio plugins. I wish many things worked like them. Everything visible/not too much hidden unless it's really complex, available/usually discoverable, and responsive in real time.
> I know that not everybody have an eye for style like I have.
Another way to think of that is that your taste is not the same as others' - do not let that difference blind you and make you think yours is somehow superior, accept that what you dislike can be something that others do like and this isn't about them lacking something you do not.
This looks like it could be very dense and functional. I see the appeal.
Counterpoint: Gnome, in its failed attempts to be like MacOS but "better" for me ends up looking and feeling like "Fisher Price, My First Computer." I'm a grown-up who can handle and appreciate both complexity and customization. Stop trying to make decisions for me and get out of my way.
If I want "prettiness" I'll go to an art gallery. When I sit down in front of the computer, I typically want to get work done. I want functional first and foremost. Prettiness gets very, very close to a "0" weighting from me in relative terms. Just let me accomplish the damn task I'm trying to accomplish, without getting in the way.
You probably (and I definitely) have a flat color for your desktop, rather than a picture of some mountain (much as I like mountains) or garden or some such.
I can't say I've never changed my background to something that I find aesthetically pleasing, but it's rare. At the moment, both my work machine (a Mac) and my personal machine (a Linux box running KDE Plasma) are using the default / initial background. So yeah, changing that definitely isn't something I prioritize very highly.
I will however concede that I always make it a point to configure my terminal to display green text on a black background.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. People tend to like the fact that all shapes and UI controls were clearly defined and very easy to tell apart from one another, plus there is a giant nostalgia factor in play. See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/ktz5v3/just_made... for an example of this behavior.
I'm definitely in that camp. 4Dwm was nice back in the day. I never got the appeal of CDE back then. That said, after looking at old screenshots, I definitely prefer anti-aliased fonts.
ok good points ... I expected that. Yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder IMHO this counts only for a limited scope. Discussing this further would lead into a philosophical debate.
What I never got into my mind is "nostalgia". Nostalgia isn't worth of nothing for me. I tried but can't understand why this is for somebody anything worth because in my eyes it's like hold tight to something obsolete.
Also appreciate that CDE was designed at a time when a 16-32MB workstation was commonly deployed. The overall footprint of these DEs is quite low, especially compared to today.
"Prettiness", while desirable, is also/can be expensive in terms of everything: CPU, RAM, IO, none of which the machines these were deployed on had in any abundance.
It's really hard to appreciate how slow older hardware was.
Today, if you wanted a DE on a small machine with 1G of RAM, something like CDE might be a really good fit. Especially if you could get away with something like Lynx for a browser.
Haha back in those days they called Motif a resource hog. And it was pretty big for the day, I remember at the uni library we had a whole shelf for all the hefty volumes of official documentation (and those for X11R5)
tl;dr: I don't like something, so no one should like that thing, and if they do they get a derogatory label as 'nerds'. You might want to read the room...
For some of us, computers are tools, not manifest expressions of our self-important concepts of 'good taste'. I could not possibly care less about rounded corners, transparent windows so I can see some pretentious background picture through my code, animated anything or whatever else the latest UX fad is. I want my window manager simple, consistent, functional, fast, familiar and out of the way of the actual work I'm doing. Simplicity is it's own kind of 'pretty'.
So, recently, I've been having a problem. I can't control the way my desktop or programs look, nor how I interface with them. For me, control of my environment takes priority over aesthetics but doesn't explicitly exclude them. The nature of the work I'm getting done changes depending on how I do it, which in turn is shaped by the GUI, or what appears and its mechanics.
I want to tell my GUI how I want it to look, feel and work, not the other way around. In my opinion, although CDE is nice and functional, and definitely more so than any recent desktop I see, I'm not sure if I can hold it up as 'the way', if it won't let me decide what that would be. I can just say it works, and well, but it's not 'optimal' if I don't get to change it, just like I can't reach in and rip out every little hamburger menu in modern apps by the seams.
To me a fundamental control problem still exists. CDE restores lost functionality, but I am left to wonder: what do I control?
All that aside, this is a great project, just for proving that someone can get all the modern engines to behave and show consistency again. That's a gift.
As opposed to Motif, you always had one OL implementation freely availablye (XView), so there was little need for it. It's also a bit weirder, so harder to dupe as e.g. a gtk/qt theme. The scrollbar being a prime example.
Also, even older. I think CDE was basically Motif's victory lap.
Scrollbar in OL was cool. And the round (oval) buttons also. The pinning of menu items and automatically selection of first menu item was also a nice concept.
I don't want to offend anybody but for me this kind of graphics is very hard to look at.
I wonder why all the progress of aesthetics of desktop environments happened on windows and macs (also chrome) while linux desktop system did not introduce anything pretty.
At a guess: you pay for Windows and MacOS (or whatever they call that now). And because they need you to pay, they bring out a new version with a Fresh Look, Clean, Modern, New And Better (until they come out with a Newer And Betterer version).
That said, this doesn't explain new versions of Gnome, etc., nor why updating from Windows 7 to 10 was free.
NextSTEP/OpenSTEP/GnuSTEP feels similar to me. Yes, by modern standards, they are ugly as sin. But they were super, super usable for the users with very little ramp-up time.
By contrast, everything else is just so flat now. On my Mac, it's a regular Where's Waldo to figure out what is and isn't clickable sometimes. There is very little contrast between the window frames and window content ... if there is any at all, and I really dislike how they've largely done away with title bars entirely. And so much stuff is hidden in menus or behind obtuse, difficult to reach settings. I'll occasionally go look at Windows and it's not much better.
What's really frustrating is watching some of my elderly family members struggle to use newer versions of Windows or macOS because the UX has become so flat that using it can be very obtuse if it's not something that you use all day, every day. It feels like redesigning UIs is becoming a vanity project for companies to show they are "modern" ... rather than trying to make things better for actual human beings that use computers.