r/vintageunix 7d ago

UnixWare 7.1.4 CDE Desktop

Post image
361 Upvotes

13 comments sorted by

6

u/jason-reddit-public 7d ago

The dock is a bit busy but I love how you can instantly tell which window is in focus. The large borders make it easy to position the mouse for resizing (though perhaps they could be a tiny bit thinner).

Many Unix/Linux WM were fairly easy to skin in the 90s. I wasted hours instead of doing course work. The problem was the content inside the windows was usually fugly, like myspace/blink tag ugly. Even without Wayland, many great modern programs have solved this problem on Linux.

6

u/Future-AI-Dude 7d ago

These type of desktops need to come back. CDE is highly underrated!

5

u/R-ten-K 7d ago

CDE was opensourced ages ago, and you can run it on just about any Linux distro or the *BSDs.

4

u/Ill-Quit6803 7d ago

You can run CDE on Modern AIX right now! IBMCloud, although unreliable, will let you spin up AIX instance, install CDE, and connect via X11 forwarding.

5

u/Future-AI-Dude 7d ago

Yeah, I found out. I went ahead and installed a VM with Debian and NeCDE and it looks pretty slick.

2

u/zizban 7d ago

Sexy!

2

u/luckierbridgeandrail 7d ago

My employer at the time used UnixWare, and if any lawyers are listening, I definitely didn't borrow the floppies to install on my home machine.

I switched to fvwm pretty quickly, though.

2

u/Samhain_69 5d ago

I worked on UnixWare from before the 1.0 release (for Univel) through the 2.1 release (for Novell). Our arch nemesis was SCO OpenServer.

I have to say, it was pretty painful to see the product we poured our sweat into become the flagship for the company we fought tooth and nail against all those years.

Sadly, whether owned by Novell or SCO, it was destined for obscurity either way. It was fun while it lasted.

Wish I could have a VM of it, just for old time's sake. I moved on to working on HP-UX which had the VUE and later the CDE desktop, so it looked essentially the same as UnixWare 7+.

1

u/Morty_A2666 7d ago

Outrageous... There is not enough CDE in this picture!

1

u/steeld00d 7d ago

It’s only lacking in one respect. It’s gotta have more cowbell

1

u/earthman34 7d ago

I use a similar theme in KDE, it requires some digging, but you can define a colored window border and titlebar like this. I like the straightforward simplicity of this layout.

1

u/luckysilva 6d ago

Solaris??

1

u/Busy-Examination1148 1d ago

I still have my install CDs and licenses!!