So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn’t exactly a secret, so let’s talk about the project’s latest release, CDE 2.5.3, released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE’s window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bugfixes.
Ever since CDE was released as open source over thirteen years ago, and while considerable work has been done to make it build, install, and run on modern platforms, that’s kind of where the steam ran out. CDE isn’t being actively developed to build upon its strengths and add new and welcome features and conveniences, but is instead kept in a sort of buildable stasis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this – it keeps CDE accessible on modern platforms, and that’s a huge amount of work that deserves respect and gratitude – but it’d be nice if we lived in a world where there was enough interest (and time and money) to have people work on actually improving it.
Of course, the reality is that there’d be very little interest in such an improved CDE, and that’s exactly why it isn’t happening. On top op the current work the CDE team is doing, you’d need to not only develop new features, but also improve the Motif toolkit to make such new features possible, and make sure such improvements don’t break anything else. With such an old codebase, that can’t possible be an easy task.
Still, I will continue to daydream of a slightly more modernised CDE with some additional niceties we’ve come to expect over the past 30 years, even if I know full well it’s futile.
Modernizing CDE isn’t futile, its a lack of people willing to contribute. I have been with the project since before it was publicly released. When we released CDE, we had a flood of contributors then after a few months, nothing, just a handful of us left. So CDE can be modernized nicely if more people are willing to jump in and help.
The CDE effort is about software preservation at this point and mostly about getting it to build. That said, systemd support was a bit of a surprise in this release.
At this point though, “modernizing” it would mean a port to Wayland. I cannot imagine anybody is signing up to port Motif.
You will be able to run CDE on Xorg or Xwayback years from now but, as Wayland only apps appear, it is going to become a less and less viable “real work” desktop regardless of user preference. That is unless somebody builds a Wx11 (a seamless way to run Wayland apps on an X server–the opposite of Xwayland).
I would love to see CDE more to a toolkit like Qt that does support Wayland nicely. But I guess it is too linked to Motiff, both in terms of programming as well as licensing, for this to become true.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked CDE but if a legacy UNIX DE should be brought back, it would be 4Dwm.
Better time spent than on MATE or Cinnamon.
I know this isn’t exactly what you are suggesting, but I have been enjoying the “Irixium” theme for KDE Plasma for quite some time now. It makes Plasma at least look like some aspects of the old IRIX machines.
Try searching for MaXX Desktop. This project may satisfy your itch for 4Dwm.
You mean the project whose creator randomly vanishes? Great project, but very unreliable developer.
If you don’t like it, feel free to fork it under a
Can’t fork that one. IIRC it is not open source.
Generally, the amount of code that went down with IRIX is insane. SGI had an X11 implementation capable of things like pbuffers and consistent V-sync way before the X.org/XFree86 kids got around to it. If SGI’s implementation had become the reference for X11 instead of X.org/XFree86, X11 would’ve been less hated.
IRIX Interactive Desktop (the DE on top of 4Dwm) was also the better of the DE’s that are compliant with the old standard.
Old standard = ICCCM
But anyway, it turns out 4dwm is not compatible with it anyway. Still, IRIX Interactive Desktop was the better and prettier of the old Unix DEs.
@kurkosdr
At least we got XFS out of it. It is probably the best non-COW filesystem for Linux.
TempleOS’s environment stands up, shouts: No, I AM SPARTACUS.
The trail of environs that had potential is large. We puts our monies in the machines and we tooks what comes outs.
TempleOS never had potential btw, it was always meant to be a minimal OS with no pre-emptive multitasking, no memory protection (everything runs in ring-0 in a single address space), and unaccelerated VGA-only graphics (640×480 at 16-colors).
As God intended.
Does it work in Wayland yet?
No and it is unlikely to unless, again, someone steps up and ports it.
I do not see a Wayland port of Motif happening. But you never know I guess.
A Wayland port of Motif wouldn’t be terribly difficullt, CDE on the other hand ould be a giant task because of the way CDE’s components use IPC to function.
Except millions of such PCs are used in a corporate environment where they can be upgraded to Windows 11 LTSC without any issues.
Let’s conveniently forget about that.
The challenge is not of porting but the requirements that came with modern desktop setups.
Multiple monitors are now common. Sometimes they are not even local, other times they are plug and play. You insert a thunderbolt cable to your laptop, and now you have an extended 27″ monitor on the side.
Handling that with CDE is going to be a challenge. Not only because Motif or any fundamental CDE limitation, but X11 itself. (Last time I checked there is still no support for multiple DPI setups, or even changing DPI on the fly)
This really stunts the future of “older” desktop environments on modern hardware. It is not impossible to solve of course. But I’m not sure we can muster enough engineering effort to even try fixing them.
Edit: WordPress auto-moderated my comment, I’m not sure why, haha.
Alfman,
Now, I really want to see what was in there 🙂
Alfman,
I think I found what that “interesting” fork was. But my comments was also deleted. And the one following that as well.
Interesting indeed…