I miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothing more.
Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.
> Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing.
Well, of course it takes more ram when we run 4x the pixels for the same size screen. And we double the refresh rate, but then hold everything back a frame to composite it. :P
"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.
I miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothing more.
Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.
> Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing.
Well, of course it takes more ram when we run 4x the pixels for the same size screen. And we double the refresh rate, but then hold everything back a frame to composite it. :P
"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.
Safe languages have nothing to do with it, case in point, the choice of programming languages available on VMS.
Which contrary to UNIX did not had the C mistake.
Rather Structured BASIC, Extended Pascal, COBOL, Modula-2, Fortran and Bliss.
It is really sloppy programming nowadays, regardless of the languages.
You can use a CDE lookalike https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
The real thing is open source since 2012 https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Time to port this to Wayland using Claude code, right?
Anyone here going to the VMS bootcamp? [1]
[1] https://events.vmssoftware.com/bootcamp-malmo-2026
I saw DEC windows and immediately thought of Windows NT 3.1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1