[rescue] CDE

[Andrew Gaylard]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 6:29 AM, leaknoil <leaknoil at charter.net> wrote:

> On 8/6/2012 9:26 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>
>> Very cool. CDE is probably insanely fast on modern hardware.
>>
>
> Insanely ugly as well.
>

Actually, I quite like the Motif look.  Very nicely "chiselled", and it
worked
great on 8bpp X-displays.  I think it needed only 6 or 8 colours.

But the feel wasn't great -- fvwm-1.x was a much nicer feel back in '99.

The real problem with Motif is that's it's really hard to code with.
Back then (1999-2004) I had a job writing Motif code and fixing it.
Modern toolkits like GTK and Qt are much easier on the programmer,
and give much more control to the programmer too.  I sometimes
wonder whether open source would have prospered if Motif and CDE
had been freed back then -- it's possible that coders coming to Unix
for the first time would have given up early, faced with how difficult it
is to do anything beyond 'hello world' in Motif.

As it turned out, we had GTK and Qt, and the reality turned out well.
Still, I'm pleased that they've released it.  But the world's moved on in
the last 12 years...

- Andrew