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Those of you yearning for the experience of running a 1990s-vintage graphics workstation are about to have a good day: a developer named Eric Masson has resurrected the IRIX Interactive Desktop that shipped on Silicon Graphics Workstations and now offers it as a Linux desktop alternative.
Silicon Graphics (SGI) had a crack at the workstation business in the early 1990s, when it dominated the then-rather-limited world of computer graphics and decided it would try to parlay that experience into the CAD and desktop publishing markets. Apple's early Macintoshes led those market, but their 68xxx CPUs had obvious limits. SGI threw MIPS silicon at the problem, brought IRIX out of servers onto the desktop and cooked up a nice windowing system to match the Mac and hit the market.
SGI did okay for a while but proprietary workstations became an oddity once Windows came along and Microsoft encouraged makers of graphics-centric apps to bring their wares to Win32. SGI added a Wintel workstation line, but then had to compete with PCs-at-scale outfits like Compaq and Dell. The company kept making MIPS-powered workstation well into the 2000s, but eventually succumbed.
Masson has tried to bring back some of that heritage in the form of the Maxx Interactive Desktop, which aims to offer "an evolution of SGI's IRIX Interactive Desktop."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:07PM (15 children)
... I don't understand why these obviously capable people put their limited time and energy (Yes! We're all going to die very soon) into "resurrecting" these old ways of doing things.
Why not instead put those resources into creating a new system that maybe borrows some of the few good ideas from that old system?
Nostalgia really is a drain on humanity's talents.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:42PM (1 child)
So? Who cares what someone does with their time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:59PM
I mean, OP literally said "good for Masson, but...".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:55PM
The benefit with old window managers is that they use resources efficiently because when they were created you made the best use of them or have the machine stalling on swap. And they keep things simple, down to the business.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:57PM (9 children)
Because a lot of the new hipster-designed interfaces frankly suck, which only drives the nostalgia even more for the UIs of old.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zafiro17 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:23PM (8 children)
The old stuff worked pretty well at the time, and let's face it - there hasn't been a huge amount of innovation since then that has improved the desktop in very meaningful ways.
OSX was on a roll for a few years with a desktop that worked great for users, and from about Snow Leopard onward, have been making it worse. Windows remained unchanged through Win7 before going completely apeshit insane, and now partially recovering (trying to save face, at least). KDE has been spinning its wheels, innovating over color schemes and icon packs while obvious stuff goes unfixed, version after version. And Gnome3 is a festering pile of monkey shit, truly.
I'd say there's no harm in going back to 1990s interfaces because there's nothing gained by choosing newer stuff. I'm using Cinnamon these days (which is lovely). But I could go back to Gnome1 or KDE3 without even thinking about it. IRIX's desktop is just as usable, probably.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 5, Funny) by Grishnakh on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:43PM (7 children)
I find your post highly offensive, especially the part about Gnome3 being a "festering pile of monkey shit, truly". This is very offensive to both monkeys and their droppings. Monkey turds probably aren't even that smelly; it's the pure carnivores that have the worst-smelling shit, because of the high protein content (herbivore shit really doesn't smell that bad). Cat shit is some of the worst, so if you're going to compare a desktop UI to shit, cat turds are more apt. Or better yet, ferrets. But even this is insulting if you're talking about Gnome3, because I don't think any animal's shit is horrible enough to be fairly compared to it. It really isn't fair to compare it to anything other than extremely deadly toxic waste IMO.
Your description of Windows 10 is insulting too, to apes, even to insane apes or their droppings. Honestly, I'm not sure which is worse, Gnome3 or Windows 8/10. The former at least looks OK, unlike the new Windows versions which make me want to pull my eyeballs out.
(Score: 5, Funny) by zafiro17 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:15PM
To all the monkeys and apes out there, I apologize. These software products are far worse than your shit.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:25PM (4 children)
(crying with laughter) Why am I out of mod points....
My favorite is this: "If X and a pile of dog feces were about to be ran over by a bus I'd sooner risk my life to save the dog feces"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:45PM (2 children)
How about me saying that I make my leaving while using GNOME 3 and I like it. Sorry for not entering your group masturbation with old UI, I am actually caring about things that matter.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by aiwarrior on Tuesday June 06 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)
I get modded troll because I call out on joking about people who like GNOME 3 with a joke. Nice mod, yay for freedom of expression.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 06 2017, @07:59PM
Your post hasn't been censored, so yay, freedom of expression!
It sounds like flamebait rather than a "joke" but maybe your jokes are like overcooked steak: Dry and hard to chew.
Disclaimer: I didn't mod you down.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @07:15PM
The past participle of "to run" is "run":
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @11:20PM
They're honestly only comparable to Microsoft Bob, clearly the source of inspiration behind both Gnome 3 and Windows 8/10.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:47PM
Why not instead put those resources into creating a new system that maybe borrows some of the few good ideas from that old system?
Because no one will use it or join your project, that's why. Instead, they'll use garbage like Gnome3 and devote their resources to that, instead of helping with your project. So if you're a single person wanting to do some interesting UI work, you'll make a lot more progress taking some old but highly usable system like this and getting it to work on a modern OS and hardware than trying to build something from scratch.
Really, we already have a bunch of "new systems", and generally they all suck. Gnome3, Windows 8/10, MacOSX, they really all suck. If this weren't the case, then maybe people wouldn't be "wasting time" on "resurrecting" these old systems.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:18PM
Hey! Get back to curing cancer, slacker!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:09PM (13 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:13PM (1 child)
If you knew anything at all, you'd be using xmonad [xmonad.org], and learning Haskell [haskell.org] just to write your config program.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:27PM
DWM is nearly as hard-core:
-- http://dwm.suckless.org/ [suckless.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:24PM (6 children)
I'm unsure whether you're saying it's a clone, but what I read on one of the project's pages says it's based on SGI's code:
-- http://5dwm.org/licensing/ [5dwm.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:14PM (5 children)
Yea, that was when I lost interest, the license. Restrictions on use are unacceptable. Which means it can't be packaged and put into repos so it will never be used. Period, full stop.
I'm guessing this guy is maintaining this for a couple of diehard customers in Hollywood. Maybe one of the charnel houses that passes the husk of SGI around will remove the restrictions and allow it to have a chance, but even then I wouldn't bet much on it making a breakout.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:37AM (4 children)
The licence gives permission to modify and redistribute, in both source and binary form. A notable restriction (which I had mentioned in a separate comment) is that it's only allowed to be used on certain architectures. However, it could be added to a repo or packaged, if anyone could get a copy in the first place. The article says "we can't offer a download link" nor did I find one.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:54AM (1 child)
None of the mainstream distros would accept a package with that sort of use restriction because they all now tend to have ARM ports. So even if somebody gets the sources it will be an obscure personal repo. Dead end. As I said, I wouldn't put money on it ever achieving >1% desktop Linux usage, even if it were DFSG compatible. Being banished to oblivion only makes it worse.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:44PM
It later dawned on me that the word "Linux" is also a restriction.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:00AM (1 child)
Hmm, something in what you said didn't make sense instantly. When I looked earlier there were download links for Fedora and Debian binaries and no source apparent. Those are now gone and a link to a source repo is there instead. What did you see? Apparently the site is undergoing rapid change.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:36PM
I was mistaken. I had looked at:
http://dev.maxxdesktop.com/trac/maxxdesktop [maxxdesktop.com] (gives me an error page)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/maxxdesktop/ [sourceforge.net] (no downloads)
http://maxxdesktop.co/ [maxxdesktop.co] (parking page linked from Sourceforge)
I confused those with the link from the article, which did lead me (just now) to http://maxxinteractive.com/downloads/ [maxxinteractive.com] which is an index page. There's an installation script for Fedora, dated 1 June and some other files with recent time-stamps. From the file-names it looks like it's binaries and architecture-independent files.
When I poked around the project's SVN-to-Web pages, it looked as though there was an initial import 8 years ago, a little bit of clean-up around that time, and no changes after that.
http://dev.maxxinteractive.com/trax/maxxdesktop/browser [maxxinteractive.com]
Among the sources there I didn't find those for the window manager. Among the downloads most of the files for the DR3 release and earlier releases are dated November 2009, so I would guess that what's in the SVN may correspond to DR3. It looks as though the maintainer changed hosting in 2009 and the project was inactive from then until this 31 May/1 June.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fishybell on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:19PM (3 children)
I'll give you my FVWM [wikipedia.org] when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
In all seriousness though, it's amazing how tied to a particular desktop people will get, and then wonder why people are unwilling to leave behind their Mac or Windows. A million choices is what makes Linux, etc. both great and horrible.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:47AM
When I was college in the 90's there was a bank of IRIX machines in the computer lab. I used them a little, but I preferred the SPARCstations where I had installed fvwm along with TkDesk. Does anybody remember TkDesk?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:18AM (1 child)
And worse - my favourite MS Windows UI is the 3.1 one. Possibly because it had the best file manager ever. It just managed files, and wasn't a browser or a control panel.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:44AM
Funny story, I still use FVWM when I get bored of KDE. Or vice-versa. Did you know that it is currently being reworked? With a possibility of new config format? I know!
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:10PM
Or, I could just go turn on my old Indigo II.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:06PM
I wouldn't mind running this on my SGI 330 system. It was SGI's last attempts to make a Windows workstation which used a standard ATX case so I stuck a new power supply and an AMD board in it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:20PM
The software can only be used on certain architectures:
-- http://5dwm.org/licensing/ [5dwm.org]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:31PM
... Windows NT, Pentium, itanic...
The rest, as they say, is history.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:59PM (1 child)
links dont work - not a good sign!
and how come sourceforge is still around after their malware idiocy?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:45PM
It was sold again, and apparently the new owners were planning to fix those issues...although I don't have much use for it these days so I'm not sure how successful they were:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/06/21/0732212 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by engblom on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:05AM
I was for a very long time Window Maker user. When other people used new stuff like GNOME, KDE, *box window managers, I stayed with Window Maker. Some years ago I finally made the switch away from Window Maker to dynamic tiling window managers (first dwm, currently xmonad). Why did I switch? Because tiling window managers brought a very useful feature, automatic tiling, which I could not have with Window Maker.
Now when looking at MAXX Desktop, I have difficulties to see any reason to use it. It seem to neither bring any improvements over old window managers (like Window Maker, AfterStep, FVWM, etc), nor does it seem to bring any improvement over modern window managers like dwm, xmonad & co.
If you would use MAXX Desktop, what is the feature you find there but not in other systems?