MaXX Interactive Desktop -- the little brother of the great SGI Desktop on IRIX

While I enjoyed 4dwm when I had a sgi, I am not convinced the desktop environment was that great, it did however have a very nice file manager, which I guess is 90% of a desktop environment, so perhaps it was pretty good after all.

The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.

I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.

https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/user-experience-ux/pa...

Used to be called 5DWM.

Also CDE is now open source, being actively maintained, and is still the CDE you remember. Even on a vintage hosting platform https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Little known fact is that the SGI 5.6+ (certainly 6) settings controls was the first "electron app".

It ran a mozilla process, with CSS1.x to style the controls like Motif. And the Javascript code interacted with the underlying XUL hacks in a manner not much different from WebOS palm used decades later.

The name makes me think of Holomaxx Technologies (styled as holoMaXx technologies), the vanity DBA of one Ilarion Bilynsky, also known as SsZERO. SsZERO was a squirrely guy with an interesting USENET presence in the late nineties. At first he was a bit like the later Imari Stevenson: a spoiled, videogame-obsessed teenager whose confidence far exceeded his competence. He promised the Holomaxx Ultimate Video Game Project or UVGP, a kickass game console that would beat all others and even feature AGI, to everyone on rec.games.programmer and several other newsgroups, and became quite truculent, to the point of rudeness, when actual game devs replied with constructive criticism. He accused them all of "thinking linearly", as opposed to his own "dimensional thinking". This was a TimeCube-like epistemology of Ilarion's creation, under which a circle can be a straight line at the same time, if you rotate it by 90 degrees, given by 90(n) so 90(45) would be a line at a 45-degree angle, that still had the properties of the original circle. It was also critical to how the UVGP worked, as it would possess "dimensional logic" and a "dimensional information crossover" or DFX. If you note that "information" begins with I and not with F, well, you're just not thinking dimensionally my friend.

Needless to say the UVGP never came to fruition, or else it exists in a higher dimension us linear thinkers just can't comprehend. Ilarion would then pivot Holomaxx into a reseller of computer and audiophile parts (thousand-dollar speaker wires and the like), as well as a bespoke web development company (I think they claimed Kazaa as a client). They are most famous, however, for unsuccessfully suing Microsoft and Yahoo! because the spam filters at those two providers filtered out correspondence originating from Holomaxx as spam. The case of Holomaxx Techs. v. Microsoft is cited in case law concerning the reach of the CAN-SPAM Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in terms of how much discretion a provider has in filtering communications going over their network that are, in the provider's determination, harmful.

I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that until I dived in and checked out the authorship, I wondered if Ilarion were involved with this desktop project. It sounds like the sort of thing he might get involved with, especially since SGI was synonymous with "kickass computing power" among gamers in the 90s. Thanks for the trip down 90s USENET memory lane, MaXX Desktop!

How did we have this at one point but now we have gnome and it’s single threaded , bad extensions take down the whole session desktop manager?

This is actually nice. Desktops were much less annoying back in the day.

This is great. Perhaps it's finally time for me to upgrade from my SGI Fuel to a Linux system running MaXX: https://triosdevelopers.com/~jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg

I'm a little confused of what the current state of the project is.

The Photo Gallery [1] features a couple of installations, running on 4k screen hardware and a Xeon X5690 as it seems, but is still based on CentOS from 2004 and running a Linux 4.18 kernel?

Do they have compilation problems or kernel mod problems, or that they need to port their display server and kernel mods to newer APIs in the upstream kernel?

Looking at the roadmap [2] this looks like a major development effort with huge stories along the way. Is there a foundation people can support financially?

[1] https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/misc/page/photo-galle...

[2] https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/whats-next/page/novem...

CDE killed off openlook, another nice desktop environment mostly on Sun workstations. Lots of time spent on both, with my optical mouse and optical mouse pad.

Looks like there's an open source clone though

https://sourceforge.net/projects/openlook/

The file manager in this looks a lot like my beloved ROX-Filer. Would love to try this if I could install it on FreeBSD. I don't see it in a cursory glance at Ports.

Click “installation guides” > “book not found”.

I’m so tired.

This almost seems more like an OS than a desktop. (microservices, messaging)

I guess my opinion is biased given my longterm use of "window managers", specifically fluxbox.

Maybe the features of this are more in line with the development environments provided by gnome of KDDE?

I'm curious how projects like this have been impacted by the Wayland work?

EMWM can do that without propietary components.

The link to "Installation Guides" https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/mid-v211-installation... at the bottom of the page next to the Slack/Facebook/Bluebird icons 404s :(

I wish I could replace windows shell with that one. Or openlook or cde

Man, I sure hope this project can get traction.

The Indigo Magic Desktop coupled with the 4DWM X window manager was among the top computing experiences I've had! At my peak, I was a sysadmin for our setup where I worked and as a reseller, was basically a remote sysadmin for a fair number of other installations.

Used to keep lists of Free Juno numbers while traveling just so I could get online in the days before fairly ubiquitous free or low cost wi-fi. Dial up on those was what? 2.5kbytes per sec, or thereabouts.

Plenty for that kind of support work, but I digress!

I loved it. The red pointer, which I continue to use to this day, crisp interactions, launch/event sounds, drop pads, and too many other niceties to list here, made for great experiences.

And IRIX itself was no joke. The scheduler is amazing! It remained responsive in almost all scenarios.

Once, for a training class, I had updated the software revision. But, on one machine I had left the app open with some action pending.

I saw one student appearing to run the old revision, which I thought impossible because those files were gone! Well, IRIX cached the whole damn thing. gr_osview showed a huge file cache, which I saw evaporate once the app was closed all the way.

Then things were just fine. Excellent!

And the tools. How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.

Want to remote display a high end CAD package with 3D rendering and the works? 4DWM with the GLX extensions handled it nicely.

....

Anyhow, I hope this gets some momentum. I would love to run it and maybe show it off to some younger users in the building what computing was like.

All the Big Endianness you could want.

It's a shame that it's not (visibly) open source. There's so much that could be done at this point. The shambling corpse of SGI is dead enough that anything left of their legal department must be absolutely destroyed.