[rescue] OpenLook/Openwin WAS::::::::::Re: CDE

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
>
>
> Ran OLVWM on Freebsd for awhile. Ran fast and light but decided I
> liked XFCE somewhat better on my old Dell once I had the 2 gb it could
> support in it and loaded XUbuntu 12.04 instead. Still, when I first
> got the machine with a 20 gb HD & 256 mb ram, I could run Freebsd,
> OLVWM & Opera successfully.
>
>
I have always marvelled at how OpenWin somehow makes every machine running
it feel exactly the same as the first 8meg Sun 3/60 (w/SunView compat
mode!) that I had on my desk in 1991.  I've run it on every Sun desktop
I've used since then, from a diskless SS1+ running XKernel through just
about every sun4c/m/d/u up to my 8-way/14GB E3500.  You can always count on
OLWM/OLVWM to faithfully recreate the look and feel of that old 3/60!

Maybe it's not so much "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as it is "feh, I'm
used to it now."  Stubborn?  Lazy?  Definitely.  But CDE and its follow-ons
were positively huge and visually Baroque.  I still admire OLVWM's classic
clean lines, relatively light footprint (it's still atop the bloated pig
X11, after all) and the retro feel of it takes me back to the heyday of my
budding sysadmin career... before Oracle, before... the Dark Times... nah,
mostly I'm just waaaay too lazy to switch.  Even on my Mac my left pinky
still instinctively reaches to tap the L-keys to manipulate windows...

Okay, some screenshots:
http://www.q7.com/~skeezics/sadnetwork.jpg  (wiping machines, the day the
dot-com died)
http://www.q7.com/~skeezics/olderandsadder.jpg  (the survivors at home,
before another culling)
http://www.q7.com/~skeezics/helpimshrinking.jpg  (still slowly letting them
go...)

Providing photographic evidence of... sorry, doorbell, BRB... oh, it seems
some nice young men in clean white coats have come to collect me, guess
I'll have to finish this later.  Cheers!

-- Chris