I'm surprised to see this; my first thought was also something like
> it's old unsecure code
and that seems very unlike OpenBSD.
On the other hand, I'm still quite pleased; CDE holds a special place in my heart. Usually I fire it up when I'm particularly ticked off at the GNOME devs reinventing/deprecating the wheel again... There's something magical about being able to install CDE - not a fork, or a clone, or a replacement, but the actual original (yes, with minor updates, but they are minor) - start it up... and you're back in 199? sitting in front of a unix workstation, and everything is just like you remember (clunky and messy, but familiar). It's a unix* system, and you know this. Nothing has ever changed, and nothing ever will.
(* Using unix as a family and not the actual on-brand UNIX™, of course, but that's also period appropriate.)
> I'm surprised to see this; my first thought was also something like
>> it's old unsecure code
> and that seems very unlike OpenBSD.
It is going into ports and I am positive there are plenty of worse offenders in terms of insecure software in there already. If this was going into base, I am confident the clean up would be substantial, but there is already cwm[1] and fvwm [2] for your modern and classic window manager needs in base.
I'm not that familiar with OpenBSD but my impression was that the team is extremely security conscious. To the point that "there is insecure software in there already" is not an excuse. Perhaps I'm wrong about that?
It is not an excuse, you are perhaps just not familiar with how software is handled by OpenBSD and other free operating systems. You have a base system, which includes the kernel, user land, etc. Then on top of this you have ports and packages, usually in a different source tree.
Unless you have a nearly insane amount of resources, vetting all those ports and packages is incredibly hard if not impossible (think Canonical and Red Hat level of funding, when on a good year OpenBSD raises ~USD 500,000 and Red Hat's revenue is in the billions) and even then there will generally be different tiers of support. Thus, the strongest guarantees will always be with the base system as it is installed by everyone and outside of Linux also developed by a single team. Yes, plenty of ports such as Firefox on OpenBSD have some great security patches applied, but expecting all the over 10,000 ports to have the same level of quality and attention applied as what is in base is unrealistic no matter how much security and correctness is a priority.
I have maintained ports and packages across the Linux and BSD ecosystems for a good while now and I have more confidence in what OpenBSD has in ports based on my own experience compared to several Linux package managers. However, that does not mean that I will try to pull out a random OpenBSD package and expose it to the Internet before doing due diligence.
No worries, glad to help. I should also have added that on OpenBSD (and BSDs in general) base is much more complete than on most Linux distributions. I run a web, name, and mail server using OpenBSD and I do not need a single port or package for this. SMTP daemon, DNS daemon, web server, TLS certificate handling, etc. It is all in base and works together coherently, which is what draws people like me to BSDs.
That is not the same as in base though. For example, the NixOS developers maintain a large chunk code to generate scaffolding around systemd and to build code via Nix. They do not take a web server, fork it, and maintain it (alternatively, write that web server from scratch as is the case for httpd(8)). When I set up that OpenBSD server, I install the base system, place the configurations, start the daemons, and I am set. Not a single line of code runs outside of what is in the base repository.
I realise that the way BSDs do things is very different from Linux, but in BSD land the same people write the kernel, user land, and maintain the ports tree. With this I am not saying it is superior, but it does lead to a very different experience both as a developer and user. Yes, there are some exceptions to this like clang, the AMD GPU driver, etc. But the overall picture is true.
Right, the difference is those daemons are written by other teams/people who have various experience/knowledge/security requirements for their software.
The daemons in OpenBSD base are all written and maintained by the same team with members who have similar knowledge, expectations and experience with regard to software and security, etc.
Most of the security guarantees are made about the base install of the OS, which is mostly code which the OpenBSD team maintains and develops. The code in ports is mostly subject to the same security issues that exist elsewhere, except where facilities of OpenBSD block them (or the code has been patched by the port maintainers).
A lot of ports are pledge/unveiled; and there are malloc settings which don't let rogue/badly written operations misbehave as they would do in the rest of BSD's or any GNU/Linux distro.
Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched to GNOME.
Now you just need that utility that replicates HDD clicking noise through the speaker when your SSD is accessed.
Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4? For extra realism have a script that randomly kills the process every 15 minutes to simulate Netscape crashing.
Oh man... Once I started working on NT/Win2k, Netscape 4.x became the bane of my existence... So many ways to make it crash it wasn't even funny or intentional.
Especially at a time on dialup, where people weren't willing to spend an hour or more downloading an updated browser.
>The “drag-and-drop” metaphor tries to cover up the Unix file system, but so little of Unix is designed for the desktop metaphor that it’s just one kludge on top of another with little holes and sharp edges popping up everywhere. Maybe the “sag-and-drop” metaphor is more appropriate for such ineffective and unreliable performance.
>A shining example is Sun’s Open Windows File Manager, which goes out of its way to display core dump files as cute little red bomb icons. When you double-click on the bomb, it runs a text editor on the core dump. Harmless, but not very useful. But if you intuitively drag and drop the bomb on the DBX Debugger Tool, it does exactly what you’d expect if you were a terrorist: it ties the entire system up, as the core dump (including a huge unmapped gap of zeros) is pumped through the server and into the debugger text window, which inflates to the maximum capacity of swap space, then violently explodes, dumping an even bigger core file in place of your original one, filling up the entire file system, overwhelming the file server, and taking out the File Manager with shrapnel. (This bug has since been fixed.)
>But that’s not all: the File Manager puts even more power at your fingertips if you run it as root! When you drag and drop a directory onto itself, it beeps and prints “rename: invalid argument” at the bottom of the window, then instantly deletes the entire directory tree without bothering to update the graphical directory browser.
David Rosenthal (author of ICCCM) summed it up nicely in this leaked email:
That's right, he's a great down-to-earth guy (but he can still write like a passionate punk rocker -- see below), and there's a wealth of interesting thoughtful stuff on his blog. I've known him since the days of the X10 / X11 / NeWS window system wars.
He worked with James Gosling on Andrew at CMU and NeWS at Sun, and on X10 as well as X11 and ICCCM, and he implemented the original X10 compatibility layer that was in NeWS 1.0, before X11 was a "thing".
One of my favorite classics is his Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, developer of the Andrew Window Manager, X10, X11, and NeWS, employee #4 and chief scientist at Nvidia):
Here's David Rosenthal's notorious Sun Deskset Environment flame that some rogue leaked to the Unix-Haters mailing list (inspiring the Unix-Haters Handbook's X-Windows chapter), in which he poignantly concluded:
"It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.":
[...]
PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out
that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM
doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind
of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show -
they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of
screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do
their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have
to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time?
They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with
fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient,
elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may
look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools
screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like
having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.
Yeah, but I am speaking about the out of the box experience, and culture of people using those systems, not the do your own distro kind of thing that nowadays plagues Linux.
Or all the other UNIX clones that were basically UNIX System V (or BSD derived) + twm, latter CDE, with the only visible difference being the vendor's name.
A couple years ago during NixOS's bi-annual Zero Hydra Failures event, I decided it would be fun to look at the issue breaking CDE, because I was honestly fascinated that CDE existed in NixOS at all (and promptly read up about the history of it being relicensed.) It was a weird one: of all things, a Tcl update somehow broke building, I believe, docbooks in a deprecated old locale. When I looked upstream, it looked like they had been moved to UTF-8 since then, so for the time being I just forced a slightly older version of Tcl for building the docbooks, which worked and I was able to run CDE.
I don't know what the status of CDE in NixOS is today: it doesn't appear to be marked broken, so hopefully it's still working. If there was unlimited resources I'd love to have stuff like CDE supported forever, but even though that can't be done it's still cool to see it still being kept up for now. Hopefully with the new Wayback option on the horizon, even if distros do wish to stop supporting X.org as a display server option soon, you'll be able to boot classic desktop environments as though nothing changed... Maybe worth testing weird old stuff like CDE early to see if we can iron out some kinks ahead of time.
My favorite "old software that still miraculously works" is oneko, a once sort-of famous cute little cat that chases your mouse pointer.
oneko-1.1b is from 1995, and yet I was still able to build and run it natively on an M1 Pro MacBook unchanged, with XQuartz as the X server.
(I just tried again on a more recent Mac, and while it still happily builds, running it crashes the X server. That seems to be an X server bug, though.)
A lot of that old software still works. That's one of the benefits of X being so stable over the decades.
I'm sure you can still find the old SUNSITE repos archived on the 'net - tons of neat stuff to play with. I'm not sure anything requiring imake would still build, though.
It's a bit tangential, but thinking of Neko, I miss the old trend of little gimmicks like this. I remember for Windows, there were all kinds of weird widgets and toys on the desktop. I've got an old version of Windows XP Plus pack that has these weird desktop dancers that you can have dance to music awkwardly, for some reason. There were also Microsoft's own desktop agents, I assume developed for Microsoft Office for Clippit originally, but also used in XP (Rover in Search) and of course, BonziBuddy. I recall a program called Shimeji as well, though I don't know much about the origin of it; video game and anime fans would post custom Shimeji characters to places like deviantArt. And speaking of Neko, Japan really seem to take well to the desktop mascot concept. If you look around, you can find official Desktop Accessory software sold for various video game and anime franchises that were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, like Konami's Tokimeki Memorial or Broccoli's Galaxy Angel, which would do various things like add mascots to the desktop or even system dialogs, provide custom icons you could replace Windows ones with, or add things like voice clips, screen savers, or desktop backgrounds to use. But, that's almost all Windows stuff. As far as UNIX and Linux go, the X port of Neko is in fact, the only thing I actually do remember exists. (I presume the original Neko program was the root inspiration for most of the other mascot-style programs that followed.) I guess when I used Linux as a kid, I just didn't really care enough to waste time on such trivial, childish things... And on a serious note, while I kind of get why these sorts of things fell out of favor, it did add some whimsy and variety to the experience of using a computer. It would be kind of neat to see a resurgence of that sort of thing. Doesn't have to specifically be desktop mascots or pets, either; there was a gold mine of gimmicky software in the 90s and 2000s.
Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.
> Desktop Accessory software sold for various video game and anime franchises that were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, like Konami's Tokimeki Memorial or Broccoli's Galaxy Angel, which would do various things like add mascots to the desktop ... But, that's almost all Windows stuff.
> And on a serious note, while I kind of get why these sorts of things fell out of favor, it did add some whimsy and variety to the experience of using a computer. It would be kind of neat to see a resurgence of that sort of thing. Doesn't have to specifically be desktop mascots or pets, either; there was a gold mine of gimmicky software in the 90s and 2000s.
> Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.
The more and more prepackaged and restrictive computing becomes the more it's seen in the realm of "serious business" and consumed blandly and soullessly than something that's inherently fun and worth playing with.
In some ways, things may be about to get better for these old environments.
Xwayland is likely to be a completely static environment. The Wayback compositor will evolve with Wayland of course, but Xwayland itself probably will not. That means that desktop environments that run on Xwayland will probably continue to run for a long, long time.
X11 evolution is about to stop. Perhaps that means that nothing will break.
I often wonder how things would have turned out if the Open Group had placed Motif and CDE under the MIT license back in the late 90s.
I've always been a fan of the X resource database, and I think it's a shame it never carried over to QT or GTK+. We'd have much better tools for working with it, and the theming possibilities have only ever been matched by Enlightenment. I remember Netscape let you set pixmap backgrounds for every UI element.
>I think it's a shame it never carried over to QT or GTK+
Same here, but we know why. NIH Syndrome, or people did not realize how great it worked so they did their own thing, making things far more complicated then necessary.
I remember that time period, people were begging Motif/CDE to open up the source. Back then if that happened, many people would have jumped in and fixed a lot of issues. Now is a far different time :(
One of my mentors when I was very young gave me an Alphaserver 2100A running OpenVMS with CDE on it, and I remember using the installed scientific software (cant remember the name) to do 3D graphs, and so began a lifelong love of scientific computing!
What serendipity. I just bought an old Alpha on eBay, and installed both Tru64 and OpenBSD on it. Tru64 came with CDE, and I was once again admiring how ugly it is, and lamenting with friends at work how this eyesore could replace OpenLook. But CDE kind of "belongs" to Tru64.
Looks like I now get to "enjoy" CDE on the OpenBSD partition as well!
It is well known that Steve Jobs got his inspiration for the Apple UI from Xerox PARC, but I think we've found the inspiration for the Apple Marketing strategy.
Interesting. It was recently removed from nixpkgs due to being broken with modern hardening compiler flags; e.g.:
> connect.c: In function 'd_connect':
> connect.c:87:19: error: initialization of 'LONG' {aka 'int'} from 'void *' makes integer from pointer without a cast [-Wint-conversion]
> 87 | DB_ADDR mdba = NULL; /* db address of current member record */
I’m personally fond of Motif, even going so far as to hold XEphem as the epitome of timeless user interface design; I wish I had an entire OS following those blocky UI conventions. While normally using emwm, CDE would be productive and welcome on any of the BSDs and illumos distributions, IMHO.
Now if only OpenLook/XView could be made to lose its 32-bit cruft and become more portable. What a wonderful pair of desktop environments CDE and OpenLook would be to choose from—and perhaps add more functionality to—in 2025.
I was surprised when the 64bit fork appears in github.
The OpenLook 64bit fork is available at [1], it has 64bit & X11R7 patches. It has a miriad of changes related to ids sizes, %ul, function casts, and a migration from X11R4 to X11R7.
Sadly, if a legacy applications is old enough to be linked to OpenLook, it surelly require adaptation. They need their own migration to transition to 64 bits and X11R7. This openlook fork is the start of the journey to resurect them.
I prefer EMWM; with XFile, Classic-Colors, Nedit-XFT, XImaging... it's like an-almost-CDE
without the panel, or like the Irix desktop but without being bloated like Maxx, and it's 100%
free as in freedom software. XPDF can complete a bit the feeling (the old v3 release) and
if you are a C programmer with experience, a dumb interface for MPV with XEmbed.
For Gopher browsers there's XMosaic but it's still propietary, a shame.
XGopher might do far better if you link-LD_PRELOAD it against Xaw3D, which can be Motif-ish,
or at least a bit closer to that era, or an alpha Motif build of Netsurf.
Then you can just use Bitlbee as a bridge to anything.
On word processor, Ted against Motif can do really well; I could even use the Spanish translation with Metric sized toolbars and such. Ditto with xfig with 'xfig -metric'. Not Motif, but it matches the environment, kinda like GV for PostScript files.
Or Emacs with Org-Mode.
Emacs linked against Motif will look perfect under EMWM and you'll get:
- A Mail/Usenet client
- An IRC client
- Telegram client with Telega
- A gopher/gemini client (Elpher)
- NNRSS and another builtin RSS reader
- OFC, both handle podcasts fine
- File manager with SSH and rclone support
- A Z-machine interpreter to play text adventures (Malyon)
- Video/music player thru EMMS
- Org-Mode/Org-Agenda-Org-Babel and friends
- Emacs' builtin spreadsheet
- pdf-tools to read and anotate PDF's.
- M-x calc with Gnuplot for plots
- Nov.el to read Ebooks.
For GTK and QT themes, you can use the CDE theme for GTK and the builting one for QT with qt5ct/qt6ct and set
EXPORT QT_PLATFORM_THEME=qt5ct
to /etc/profile.d/qt5.sh and chmod +x 'ing it. The are similar XDG and GTK/Themes icons at https://gnome-loook.org and the like called 'CDE' which are great. Decompress them at ~/.icons and use lxapperance to chage your GTK theme.
It needs JS; but I can just posts a TGZ in my gopher site with both the themes and icons
if you like them, or better, with Bittorrent, then aria2c would do the job.
I just checked, config option --with-x-toolkit=motif still works with 30.1
In a way I would be surprised if motif is removed, I think FSF still wants to support proprietary UN*X and for that you really need to support motif.
FWIW, lucid and athena is still allowed too.
I checked because a person in LQ/Slackware always recompiles Emacs with motif support. He/She would have complained in the group if motif was removed :)
Huh. I was going to question whether that was even possible, but apparently https://github.com/marchaesen/vcxsrv , http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/ , and https://x.cygwin.com/ are all based on Xorg, so I guess if you wanted you could likely get Xlibre to build for Windows. But... Why? CDE isn't really something that makes sense nested inside another system, and AFAIK modern Windows is pretty hostile to replacing DWM (or wherever their GUI is these days).
I'm surprised to see this; my first thought was also something like
> it's old unsecure code
and that seems very unlike OpenBSD.
On the other hand, I'm still quite pleased; CDE holds a special place in my heart. Usually I fire it up when I'm particularly ticked off at the GNOME devs reinventing/deprecating the wheel again... There's something magical about being able to install CDE - not a fork, or a clone, or a replacement, but the actual original (yes, with minor updates, but they are minor) - start it up... and you're back in 199? sitting in front of a unix workstation, and everything is just like you remember (clunky and messy, but familiar). It's a unix* system, and you know this. Nothing has ever changed, and nothing ever will.
(* Using unix as a family and not the actual on-brand UNIX™, of course, but that's also period appropriate.)
> I'm surprised to see this; my first thought was also something like
>> it's old unsecure code
> and that seems very unlike OpenBSD.
It is going into ports and I am positive there are plenty of worse offenders in terms of insecure software in there already. If this was going into base, I am confident the clean up would be substantial, but there is already cwm[1] and fvwm [2] for your modern and classic window manager needs in base.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cwm_%28window_manager%29
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM
I'm not that familiar with OpenBSD but my impression was that the team is extremely security conscious. To the point that "there is insecure software in there already" is not an excuse. Perhaps I'm wrong about that?
It is not an excuse, you are perhaps just not familiar with how software is handled by OpenBSD and other free operating systems. You have a base system, which includes the kernel, user land, etc. Then on top of this you have ports and packages, usually in a different source tree.
Unless you have a nearly insane amount of resources, vetting all those ports and packages is incredibly hard if not impossible (think Canonical and Red Hat level of funding, when on a good year OpenBSD raises ~USD 500,000 and Red Hat's revenue is in the billions) and even then there will generally be different tiers of support. Thus, the strongest guarantees will always be with the base system as it is installed by everyone and outside of Linux also developed by a single team. Yes, plenty of ports such as Firefox on OpenBSD have some great security patches applied, but expecting all the over 10,000 ports to have the same level of quality and attention applied as what is in base is unrealistic no matter how much security and correctness is a priority.
I have maintained ports and packages across the Linux and BSD ecosystems for a good while now and I have more confidence in what OpenBSD has in ports based on my own experience compared to several Linux package managers. However, that does not mean that I will try to pull out a random OpenBSD package and expose it to the Internet before doing due diligence.
Thanks v much for the info. You're right, I'm unfamiliar with this process and its resource constraints.
No worries, glad to help. I should also have added that on OpenBSD (and BSDs in general) base is much more complete than on most Linux distributions. I run a web, name, and mail server using OpenBSD and I do not need a single port or package for this. SMTP daemon, DNS daemon, web server, TLS certificate handling, etc. It is all in base and works together coherently, which is what draws people like me to BSDs.
Most Linux distros can do that without any external or extra repository.
That is not the same as in base though. For example, the NixOS developers maintain a large chunk code to generate scaffolding around systemd and to build code via Nix. They do not take a web server, fork it, and maintain it (alternatively, write that web server from scratch as is the case for httpd(8)). When I set up that OpenBSD server, I install the base system, place the configurations, start the daemons, and I am set. Not a single line of code runs outside of what is in the base repository.
I realise that the way BSDs do things is very different from Linux, but in BSD land the same people write the kernel, user land, and maintain the ports tree. With this I am not saying it is superior, but it does lead to a very different experience both as a developer and user. Yes, there are some exceptions to this like clang, the AMD GPU driver, etc. But the overall picture is true.
Right, the difference is those daemons are written by other teams/people who have various experience/knowledge/security requirements for their software.
The daemons in OpenBSD base are all written and maintained by the same team with members who have similar knowledge, expectations and experience with regard to software and security, etc.
You could think of ports as 3rd party packages, whereas base is not.
OFC the correct solution there would be patch and pledge/unveil CDE.
Most of the security guarantees are made about the base install of the OS, which is mostly code which the OpenBSD team maintains and develops. The code in ports is mostly subject to the same security issues that exist elsewhere, except where facilities of OpenBSD block them (or the code has been patched by the port maintainers).
A lot of ports are pledge/unveiled; and there are malloc settings which don't let rogue/badly written operations misbehave as they would do in the rest of BSD's or any GNU/Linux distro.
https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.3/man5/malloc.conf.5
Hint: https://richardlupton.com/posts/openbsd-malloc-options/
Detox might crash. A lot.
CDE is already in pkgsrc, there are some minor patches that probably help for OpenBSD.
I gave up entirely and just run xmonad by itself. I have dmenu for launching applications.
So it will feel like Real® UNIX® again.
Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched to GNOME.
Now you just need that utility that replicates HDD clicking noise through the speaker when your SSD is accessed.
Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4? For extra realism have a script that randomly kills the process every 15 minutes to simulate Netscape crashing.
There is a hardware solution for clicking SSDs: https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker
(Though it does require your computer have a drive access LED.)
For a modern "Netscape", look into Seamonkey.
TBH Solaris' Nimbus theme was amazing; elegant and modern but usable and functional. Not so brutalist but miles ahead of Aero.
I am not sure what OpenSolaris had, but I liked that theme. OpenIndiana has the same one.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/OpenIndi...
I was hoping someone would mention Solaris... :)
> Is there a Firefox skin that looks like Netscape 4?
There used to be a really great one called FOXSCAPE, but it was killed off by Firefox's “Australis” UI re-engineering in 2014:
https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/
https://mw.rat.bz/foxscape/history/index.html
Oh man... Once I started working on NT/Win2k, Netscape 4.x became the bane of my existence... So many ways to make it crash it wasn't even funny or intentional.
Especially at a time on dialup, where people weren't willing to spend an hour or more downloading an updated browser.
Solaris just wasn't the same after they switched from XView Sun Deskset Environment.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
>The “drag-and-drop” metaphor tries to cover up the Unix file system, but so little of Unix is designed for the desktop metaphor that it’s just one kludge on top of another with little holes and sharp edges popping up everywhere. Maybe the “sag-and-drop” metaphor is more appropriate for such ineffective and unreliable performance.
>A shining example is Sun’s Open Windows File Manager, which goes out of its way to display core dump files as cute little red bomb icons. When you double-click on the bomb, it runs a text editor on the core dump. Harmless, but not very useful. But if you intuitively drag and drop the bomb on the DBX Debugger Tool, it does exactly what you’d expect if you were a terrorist: it ties the entire system up, as the core dump (including a huge unmapped gap of zeros) is pumped through the server and into the debugger text window, which inflates to the maximum capacity of swap space, then violently explodes, dumping an even bigger core file in place of your original one, filling up the entire file system, overwhelming the file server, and taking out the File Manager with shrapnel. (This bug has since been fixed.)
>But that’s not all: the File Manager puts even more power at your fingertips if you run it as root! When you drag and drop a directory onto itself, it beeps and prints “rename: invalid argument” at the bottom of the window, then instantly deletes the entire directory tree without bothering to update the graphical directory browser.
David Rosenthal (author of ICCCM) summed it up nicely in this leaked email:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050165
That's right, he's a great down-to-earth guy (but he can still write like a passionate punk rocker -- see below), and there's a wealth of interesting thoughtful stuff on his blog. I've known him since the days of the X10 / X11 / NeWS window system wars. He worked with James Gosling on Andrew at CMU and NeWS at Sun, and on X10 as well as X11 and ICCCM, and he implemented the original X10 compatibility layer that was in NeWS 1.0, before X11 was a "thing".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal
One of my favorite classics is his Recreational Bugs talk [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM, developer of the Andrew Window Manager, X10, X11, and NeWS, employee #4 and chief scientist at Nvidia):
https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html
[...]
Here's David Rosenthal's notorious Sun Deskset Environment flame that some rogue leaked to the Unix-Haters mailing list (inspiring the Unix-Haters Handbook's X-Windows chapter), in which he poignantly concluded:
"It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.":
[...]
NeWS was one thing that made Solaris special and not yet another boring UNIX clone.
I only consider NeXTSTEP and Irix as well on this box, from all big iron UNIX.
Irix DE it's just a tweaked MWM and Motif tools. Nothing you couldn't get with EMWM, XMToolBox for the menu and some additions.
https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
No vector icons for XFile, but at least you can set SGI-like ones once you extract the TGZ in the correct place.
And some tools like the Fluxbox-Blackbox like slit from this guy:
https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html https://github.com/luke8086/pmdock
Yeah, but I am speaking about the out of the box experience, and culture of people using those systems, not the do your own distro kind of thing that nowadays plagues Linux.
Or all the other UNIX clones that were basically UNIX System V (or BSD derived) + twm, latter CDE, with the only visible difference being the vendor's name.
Well OTOB Irix wasn't that 'user friendly', even the installer required some thinkering. Irix 5.23 and up were a bit more fair to the user.
https://www.tech-pubs.net/wiki/IRIX_101
> like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated
I'll give you elegant, maybe. Perhaps you were thinking of a Mini Electric?
Early BMWs were like that. Look up the ~1979 320i for instance.
A couple years ago during NixOS's bi-annual Zero Hydra Failures event, I decided it would be fun to look at the issue breaking CDE, because I was honestly fascinated that CDE existed in NixOS at all (and promptly read up about the history of it being relicensed.) It was a weird one: of all things, a Tcl update somehow broke building, I believe, docbooks in a deprecated old locale. When I looked upstream, it looked like they had been moved to UTF-8 since then, so for the time being I just forced a slightly older version of Tcl for building the docbooks, which worked and I was able to run CDE.
I don't know what the status of CDE in NixOS is today: it doesn't appear to be marked broken, so hopefully it's still working. If there was unlimited resources I'd love to have stuff like CDE supported forever, but even though that can't be done it's still cool to see it still being kept up for now. Hopefully with the new Wayback option on the horizon, even if distros do wish to stop supporting X.org as a display server option soon, you'll be able to boot classic desktop environments as though nothing changed... Maybe worth testing weird old stuff like CDE early to see if we can iron out some kinks ahead of time.
My favorite "old software that still miraculously works" is oneko, a once sort-of famous cute little cat that chases your mouse pointer.
oneko-1.1b is from 1995, and yet I was still able to build and run it natively on an M1 Pro MacBook unchanged, with XQuartz as the X server.
(I just tried again on a more recent Mac, and while it still happily builds, running it crashes the X server. That seems to be an X server bug, though.)
A lot of that old software still works. That's one of the benefits of X being so stable over the decades.
I'm sure you can still find the old SUNSITE repos archived on the 'net - tons of neat stuff to play with. I'm not sure anything requiring imake would still build, though.
It's a bit tangential, but thinking of Neko, I miss the old trend of little gimmicks like this. I remember for Windows, there were all kinds of weird widgets and toys on the desktop. I've got an old version of Windows XP Plus pack that has these weird desktop dancers that you can have dance to music awkwardly, for some reason. There were also Microsoft's own desktop agents, I assume developed for Microsoft Office for Clippit originally, but also used in XP (Rover in Search) and of course, BonziBuddy. I recall a program called Shimeji as well, though I don't know much about the origin of it; video game and anime fans would post custom Shimeji characters to places like deviantArt. And speaking of Neko, Japan really seem to take well to the desktop mascot concept. If you look around, you can find official Desktop Accessory software sold for various video game and anime franchises that were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, like Konami's Tokimeki Memorial or Broccoli's Galaxy Angel, which would do various things like add mascots to the desktop or even system dialogs, provide custom icons you could replace Windows ones with, or add things like voice clips, screen savers, or desktop backgrounds to use. But, that's almost all Windows stuff. As far as UNIX and Linux go, the X port of Neko is in fact, the only thing I actually do remember exists. (I presume the original Neko program was the root inspiration for most of the other mascot-style programs that followed.) I guess when I used Linux as a kid, I just didn't really care enough to waste time on such trivial, childish things... And on a serious note, while I kind of get why these sorts of things fell out of favor, it did add some whimsy and variety to the experience of using a computer. It would be kind of neat to see a resurgence of that sort of thing. Doesn't have to specifically be desktop mascots or pets, either; there was a gold mine of gimmicky software in the 90s and 2000s.
Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.
> Desktop Accessory software sold for various video game and anime franchises that were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, like Konami's Tokimeki Memorial or Broccoli's Galaxy Angel, which would do various things like add mascots to the desktop ... But, that's almost all Windows stuff.
One for UNIX is MaCoPiX:
https://rosegray.sakura.ne.jp/macopix/index-e.html
It still works, I used it a few years ago.
> And on a serious note, while I kind of get why these sorts of things fell out of favor, it did add some whimsy and variety to the experience of using a computer. It would be kind of neat to see a resurgence of that sort of thing. Doesn't have to specifically be desktop mascots or pets, either; there was a gold mine of gimmicky software in the 90s and 2000s.
> Likewise, the gradual decline of the screensaver has been somewhat of a bummer. On one hand, yeah, the relevance of screensavers has fallen off so much that I hardly noticed when they were gone... but again, it added some fun to computing. Hard not to miss it a little.
The more and more prepackaged and restrictive computing becomes the more it's seen in the realm of "serious business" and consumed blandly and soullessly than something that's inherently fun and worth playing with.
In some ways, things may be about to get better for these old environments.
Xwayland is likely to be a completely static environment. The Wayback compositor will evolve with Wayland of course, but Xwayland itself probably will not. That means that desktop environments that run on Xwayland will probably continue to run for a long, long time.
X11 evolution is about to stop. Perhaps that means that nothing will break.
I often wonder how things would have turned out if the Open Group had placed Motif and CDE under the MIT license back in the late 90s.
I've always been a fan of the X resource database, and I think it's a shame it never carried over to QT or GTK+. We'd have much better tools for working with it, and the theming possibilities have only ever been matched by Enlightenment. I remember Netscape let you set pixmap backgrounds for every UI element.
>I think it's a shame it never carried over to QT or GTK+
Same here, but we know why. NIH Syndrome, or people did not realize how great it worked so they did their own thing, making things far more complicated then necessary.
I remember that time period, people were begging Motif/CDE to open up the source. Back then if that happened, many people would have jumped in and fixed a lot of issues. Now is a far different time :(
There was LessTif but it was incomplete, altough a good chunk of tools could run with it. DDD for instance.
I have a vm with NsCDE installed for when I what that childhood nostalgia hit
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
One of my mentors when I was very young gave me an Alphaserver 2100A running OpenVMS with CDE on it, and I remember using the installed scientific software (cant remember the name) to do 3D graphs, and so began a lifelong love of scientific computing!
That's heavier and lies on GTK tools to mimic the rest.
EMWM it's like a micro-CDE but without the panel, almost like the Irix interface.
And it will run really fast on ATOM n270 netbooks and the like.
What serendipity. I just bought an old Alpha on eBay, and installed both Tru64 and OpenBSD on it. Tru64 came with CDE, and I was once again admiring how ugly it is, and lamenting with friends at work how this eyesore could replace OpenLook. But CDE kind of "belongs" to Tru64.
Looks like I now get to "enjoy" CDE on the OpenBSD partition as well!
Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR7G-wIm-e8
It is well known that Steve Jobs got his inspiration for the Apple UI from Xerox PARC, but I think we've found the inspiration for the Apple Marketing strategy.
Nice. Though it wasn't on the ports tree, seems like it was possible to build already. https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/OpenBSDBuild/
Interesting. It was recently removed from nixpkgs due to being broken with modern hardening compiler flags; e.g.:
I’m personally fond of Motif, even going so far as to hold XEphem as the epitome of timeless user interface design; I wish I had an entire OS following those blocky UI conventions. While normally using emwm, CDE would be productive and welcome on any of the BSDs and illumos distributions, IMHO.
Now if only OpenLook/XView could be made to lose its 32-bit cruft and become more portable. What a wonderful pair of desktop environments CDE and OpenLook would be to choose from—and perhaps add more functionality to—in 2025.
I was surprised when the 64bit fork appears in github.
The OpenLook 64bit fork is available at [1], it has 64bit & X11R7 patches. It has a miriad of changes related to ids sizes, %ul, function casts, and a migration from X11R4 to X11R7.
Sadly, if a legacy applications is old enough to be linked to OpenLook, it surelly require adaptation. They need their own migration to transition to 64 bits and X11R7. This openlook fork is the start of the journey to resurect them.
[1] https://github.com/ggodd/xview-64bit
Install lxappearance, get the CDE icons from https://gnome-look.org and the matching GTK2/3/4 one. Then your setup will look close enough.
Have the known security issues in CDE been fixed?
It doesn't look like it...
> I wouldn't use is as a daily driver, it's old unsecure code but it's fun if you want to bring back memories.
I prefer EMWM; with XFile, Classic-Colors, Nedit-XFT, XImaging... it's like an-almost-CDE without the panel, or like the Irix desktop but without being bloated like Maxx, and it's 100% free as in freedom software. XPDF can complete a bit the feeling (the old v3 release) and if you are a C programmer with experience, a dumb interface for MPV with XEmbed.
For Gopher browsers there's XMosaic but it's still propietary, a shame.
XGopher might do far better if you link-LD_PRELOAD it against Xaw3D, which can be Motif-ish, or at least a bit closer to that era, or an alpha Motif build of Netsurf.
https://github.com/revmadison/netsurf-motif
As for IM'img, any IRC client written against Lesstif will do the trick building it against OpenMotif.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nebula-irc/
Then you can just use Bitlbee as a bridge to anything.
On word processor, Ted against Motif can do really well; I could even use the Spanish translation with Metric sized toolbars and such. Ditto with xfig with 'xfig -metric'. Not Motif, but it matches the environment, kinda like GV for PostScript files.
Or Emacs with Org-Mode.
Emacs linked against Motif will look perfect under EMWM and you'll get:
- A Mail/Usenet client
- An IRC client
- Telegram client with Telega
- A gopher/gemini client (Elpher)
- NNRSS and another builtin RSS reader
- OFC, both handle podcasts fine
- File manager with SSH and rclone support
- A Z-machine interpreter to play text adventures (Malyon)
- Video/music player thru EMMS
- Org-Mode/Org-Agenda-Org-Babel and friends
- Emacs' builtin spreadsheet
- pdf-tools to read and anotate PDF's.
- M-x calc with Gnuplot for plots
- Nov.el to read Ebooks.
For GTK and QT themes, you can use the CDE theme for GTK and the builting one for QT with qt5ct/qt6ct and set
to /etc/profile.d/qt5.sh and chmod +x 'ing it. The are similar XDG and GTK/Themes icons at https://gnome-loook.org and the like called 'CDE' which are great. Decompress them at ~/.icons and use lxapperance to chage your GTK theme.https://www.pling.com/p/1920644/
It needs JS; but I can just posts a TGZ in my gopher site with both the themes and icons if you like them, or better, with Bittorrent, then aria2c would do the job.
> Emacs linked against Motif will look perfect under EMWM
I think that Motif support has been removed from latest Emacs, it is still there in v29.
I just checked, config option --with-x-toolkit=motif still works with 30.1
In a way I would be surprised if motif is removed, I think FSF still wants to support proprietary UN*X and for that you really need to support motif.
FWIW, lucid and athena is still allowed too.
I checked because a person in LQ/Slackware always recompiles Emacs with motif support. He/She would have complained in the group if motif was removed :)
Just in time for wayland...
Should run on Wayback, though. Or in a windowed XWayland session.
i try to follow undeadly but i get behind. have there been any major wayland-on-openbsd milestones since last year when they announced it?
Oh yeah!!!! Time to bring Openmotif and Xlibre on Windows
Huh. I was going to question whether that was even possible, but apparently https://github.com/marchaesen/vcxsrv , http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/ , and https://x.cygwin.com/ are all based on Xorg, so I guess if you wanted you could likely get Xlibre to build for Windows. But... Why? CDE isn't really something that makes sense nested inside another system, and AFAIK modern Windows is pretty hostile to replacing DWM (or wherever their GUI is these days).
Xlibre it's not needed when Xenocara does a better job.
Unless the point is about FOSS, I had no issues using Hummingbird Exceed back in the CDE glory days.
Does it come with dtksh? (dtksh or dtmksh, not sure)