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?
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
> 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.)
>> 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
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.
(Though it does require your computer have a drive access LED.)
For a modern "Netscape", look into Seamonkey.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/OpenIndi...
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
Especially at a time on dialup, where people weren't willing to spend an hour or more downloading an updated browser.
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.":
[...]
I only consider NeXTSTEP and Irix as well on this box, from all big iron UNIX.
I'll give you elegant, maybe. Perhaps you were thinking of a Mini Electric?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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'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.
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 :(
That was part of Xt (X Toolkit). Of course, GTK and Qt were built on xlib, because they wanted to be hardcore. /s
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!
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.
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.