DECwindows Motif
20 points
3 hours ago
| 3 comments
| products.vmssoftware.com
| HN
tokyobreakfast
36 minutes ago
[-]
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.

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cturner
4 minutes ago
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"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. So long as the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.
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pjmlp
9 minutes ago
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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.

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ofrzeta
23 minutes ago
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You can use a CDE lookalike https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
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jabl
15 minutes ago
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The real thing is open source since 2012 https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
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aninteger
4 minutes ago
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Time to port this to Wayland using Claude code, right?
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hackyhacky
1 hour ago
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Anyone here going to the VMS bootcamp? [1]

[1] https://events.vmssoftware.com/bootcamp-malmo-2026

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jmward01
23 minutes ago
[-]
I saw DEC windows and immediately thought of Windows NT 3.1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1

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