I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.
Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4
If only it had been given the RISC OS GUI with BSD underneath - that would have been way easier to port to modern Unix-like foundations and may have had a healthier-but-niche future as something 'modern' beyond Acorn's existence.
Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.
IIRC, KDE was created because Motif/CDE were proprietary, but QT was free and had an open-source license, but wasn't compatible with the GPL. There was an agreement with Troltech, the creators of QT that would make QT available under a BSD-style license if they didn't release a free/open-source version after a year.
GNOME was created because of license issues with QT not being compatible with the GPL, so GNOME used GTK which was created by the GIMP project because Motif wasn't free.
> You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel?
No. (Although that sounds fun, I never heard of such a thing.)
RISC/ix was Acorn's ARM UNIX. It had nothing of the Acorn GUI -- it was fairly standard X11, I think with Motif or something Motif-like.
Acorn did add some Acornish tweaks to it, including its text editing and its memory allocation, but it looked and ran much like any other late-1980s UNIX, as far as I now. I have never got to try it myself, sadly.
I still think it’d be fun to bring it back to life. I don’t think there are many copies still usable and it was picky about hardware - it wouldn’t run on more modern Acorn boxes.
Has anyone saved the sources anywhere? Would whoever now owns IXI IP help with the desktop part?