DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future

Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by femto113 on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @05:12PM (#29398160)

Ah from the time of great widget wars, when Motif and OPEN LOOK were battling for GUI supremacy. I was vehemently team OL (via Sun's OpenWindows flavor) and absolutely loathed how bulky the borders felt on Motif windows.

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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by DonHopkins on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @06:22PM (#29398724)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

>X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly.

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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by vickm on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @03:32AM (#29401921)

I couldn't stop laughing/crying reading this trip into high school and college. As a kid I thought I was the dense fool who couldn't make sense of X. Nope, it just sucked. Thanks for keeping this history alive :)

As a matter of fact, the mess with widgets and X APIs was the turning point for me where I started to understand why these suits spent so much damn $$$ on Win32

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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by sedatk on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @07:00PM (#29399016)

On the contrary, I'd found Motif's 3D look so elegant and cool that I'd even incorporated it in my DOS-based GUI library. This is a BlueWave/QWK reader I'd written with it: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine

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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by int_19h on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @10:02PM (#29400180)

Your widgets look like they have a 1px 3D border? The Motif that I remember was much bulkier, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/aebBFsx.jpg

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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by mkl on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @04:56AM (#29402309)

They both look very close in terms of pixel widths, though the Motif screenshot is much higher resolution so there they actually look thinner to me.

The window borders are 5px, vs. Motif's 6px (in your screenshot). The Motif button borders are actually thinner (2px vs. 3px). The Motif frames around lists are thicker (2px vs. 1px).

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Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future by sedatk on Saturday December 04, 2021 @02:26AM (#29439364)

Probably. I couldn’t afford long draw times (it ran on 386SX-25Mhz), so I usually opted for 1px for everything. The resolution was lower too (640x480) leaving less space for for decoration.

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