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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

I have a grudge against CDE. It superseded OpenLook, which I personally thought was the pinnacle of a clean, professional desktop environment. Some screenshots randomly found on the web:

https://www.deviantart.com/sehnsucht94/art/OPENLOOK-SunOS-li... http://www.martin-graefe.homepage.t-online.de/xview_en.html

I did not only like its look, but also many of its paradigms: That basically everything is started by clicking on the empty desktop, which opens up a menu (you see that menu on the far left in the image); that you can pin menus and other elements to keep them open (even that initial menu mentioned before, it's pinned in the screenshot), that some buttons were "drop down" buttons with multiple actions, and application menus were exactly that (look at the "menu bar" in the File Manager window)...

Meanwhile, CDE is ugly as sin and clunky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK#/media/File:CDE_2012...

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Me too but for a different reason. It replaced HP's VUE which had a much 'happier' colour scheme, sans-serif fonts and a nicer-looking 'dock'. HP buried VUE pretty deep after they moved to CDE (which inherited most of the visual design of VUE and some other stuff from the other cooperators IBM and Sun). VUE was what I looked at while studying so it has a strong nostalgic feeling about it for me :) CDE is too different visually to feel 'off'. The colours are too muted and the fonts too traditional. I can see IBM's influence there, VUE was way too 'funky' for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment

VUE was never open-sourced sadly and there is no 'remake' of it either like NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

But it's just for nostalgia. I wouldn't use it today. I tried recently (I still own an old HP box with 10.20) but it's just too barebones.

Hi. I don't know why many people here have focus on things which can be easily configured in mentioned environments.

All VUE palettes are exactly the same as CDE palettes, and can be imported into CDE either system palettes directory, or in user's ~/dt one. The same is with NsCDE.

For font, you probably have to spend some time to figure out how to change it in CDE, but in NsCDE you can use any font available on your Unix/Linux system.

That said, you can make CDE look dark, light, serious, funky, whatever.

As someone rightly commented in this thread below: usability of XDG standards, integration with the system and various widgets ... this is the topic, not the theme you can change with a few clicks or 1-2 hours of figuring out and editing.

Open look was originally from Sun NeWS, an alternative to X built with AT&T. Example: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/tnt.gif

It was an interface that could degrade extremely well to monochrome and still look reasonable on the lousy LCDs of the 1980s. The hit points are large and spaced out enough so that it could be operated via the janky touch screens of the era as well

Also NeWS used postscript as the display language. It extended it to allow the interactive elements.

SGI also had a system based on NeWS called 4Sight: http://sgistuff.net/software/irixintro/images/irix-3.3-img2....

Here's James Gosling (you know, guy that invented Java) talking about it for an hour or so from 1990 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA

As someone who was at Sun during this time (and eventually worked on the CDE project), it was hard to give up a desktop environment (OpenWindows v3) whose look and feel I thought was better than the replacement.

Still, it was interesting to work with our counterparts at the other companies (mostly HP.)

I mean, sure, but in that world OPEN LOOK would have been replaced long ago; it's not as if we'd still be using it in 2021.

I wasn't trying to divine an alternative present, just recollecting past grievances.

Though I don't know, if OpenLook had lived on, maybe some of it at least would have survived through the ages. Maybe not, though, because Windows was already there, and that pretty much displaced everything. I doubt OpenLook would have made a difference in that versus CDE.

If CDE survived as FOSS, why could open look not have done the same?

I recall using olvwm (http://www.xwinman.org/olvwm.php) on my Linux machine sometime in the mid-late 90'ies (as I had used Sun workstations at a summer job and I liked the look of it). Not sure it's FOSS per the DFSG criteria, but at least it was available with source under a somewhat free to use license.

It did for a while as OLVWM but it looks like any links I find are dead now. I enjoy the clean look of it.

http://ftp.metu.edu.tr/pub/mirrors/ftp.x.org/R5contrib/olvwm...

No idea how usable it is or even how to build it, but that looks like the tarball...

There were some warnings that olwm is not 64bit clean. As far as i know can be compiled on 32bit systems.

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