Most beautiful GUI (OS 4, Windows 8, ...)?

[Sean Cunningham]

I don't doubt it.  But I lost a lot of time and all confidence in that OS so I was glad to be rid of those boxes eventually.  I couldn't install anything new without feeling like it was going to get the cancer again.  Of course, I'll never buy another product from the makers of the Sound Blaster either.  They were totally unhelpful and uninterested once I discovered the problem with my gold plated suppository.

[Sean Cunningham]

See, that's nice.  I don't know WTF people are thinking saying Motif is anything but the fat, uncoordinated kid at this schindig.  4DWM was born looking old, fat and kludgy by comparison.  That actually has appeal.

Which WM is that, BTW?  It doesn't look like NeWS, unless their's is just wildly different than 4Sight.

[Sean Cunningham]

(duplicate removed)

[Sean Cunningham]

And this is why we can't have nice things.

[Sean Cunningham]

...and later you probably publicly expressed hatred against WinXP because of its looks? :p

It's very reminiscent of Windows style, it just does it better and cleaner.  Most of the Windows-like UIs the difference comes down to whether or not you let software engineers do your graphic design, hire a graphic designer or hire a good graphic designer.  Then this gets lots of details better simply by being DPS and not all pixel-y.  It's cleaner and has better use of tone.

[Sean Cunningham]

When I get IRIX Magic Desktop configured just as I like it I'll have to post a picture. Its so elegantly simple and free of the stuff that makes OS X and GNU/Linux terrible looking. BSD is also a great OS, but it lacks the elegance. Its like an AKM vs a G3 rifle, the G3 is prettier, but the AKM sees far more use as a military weapon.

This I have to see.  It must be some real magick in there because 4DWM in base configuration is the dullest, most useless desktop environment I've ever had the displeasure of using.  Though, all you're really tweaking at the end of the day is what your shell window is going to look like since no real apps, in my experience, use the OS UI anyhow.  If they're not doing their own through GL they'll use a different toolkit like TK (first couple GUIs for Nuke were TK).

[Sean Cunningham]

Yeah, that seriously just looks like plain 4DWM to me.  It's so bulky and unsophisticated looking, on top of being slow.  And there's just no getting around how janky and under-styled all the icons look.  

I've got nothing against IRIX, because I totally took to its shell environment as being like a super version of AmigaDOS.  In turn, the couple Amigas I had after I started using SGI I tried to make as Unix-like as possible, with BSD-like command additions, etc. and I even chose, at the time, an ISP that presented me with a shell prompt on a SUN with everything console/text based (this was pre-web and then using DNET for multiple shells and AMosaic).

Its only real advantages on the look of Workbench, which is also fairly unsophisticated in its design up to 3.9 (and now with 4.x made of what appears to be styling cues from about a decade ago and not modern at all), is that it's proportional at least and while the text rendering is really poor and ugly, they at least default to a good and readable font, jaggies and all.

edit: I didn't notice at first you scaled down your frame edges.  I worked a few shops where they must have had this installed because default install wouldn't let you get that tight.  I still went smaller on the top frame, which seemed to help the buttons.  Basically being able to scale everything about the UI to like 1/2 or smaller compared to the way it ships helps the window manager look less crude.  There's just no helping those icons though.  With the icon pack craze that has long existed, with real, working and gifted graphic designers doing totally cool replacement icon packs for other OSes, why couldn't SGI get ahold of some of that if they didn't have anyone internal with any sort of eye?

[Sean Cunningham]

And Mach is a Unix kernel.  Therefore it is Unix.  

Linux isn't Unix.  From an end user perspective it doesn't really matter since it walks and talks like that duck, and "Unix", from an end user perspective is more about the BSD tools than much of anything anyway, since you can run any shell on almost anything and the nittier and grittier stuff is only really relevant to IT professionals whose job is to make it work as close to advertised as is humanly possible, and religious software engineers,  but NeXT and its flavors called OpenStep and OSX are not NT and it's not even arguable that they're the most successful modern implementation of Unix there is, not only for doing what the Linux crowd still cannot but also for what came to life on NeXT and the NeXT technology that powered a fledgling internet as it gained mainstream and enterprise acceptance.

And trust me, plain 4DWM looks terrible by comparison. I scaled down the widgets,and cleaned up the general configuration. If you don't have experience with the 6.5.22 or above its totally different from the 4 and 5 and even the early 6 series.

But your screenshot only shows an improvement in the right, left and bottom frame borders, making them almost disappear compared to default.  The top bar is still generic and unattractive with non-antialiased text.  Or do you just not have a picture of this "totally different" 4DWM?  Because that's effectively just a slightly anorexic looking version of bland as it ever was 4DWM and icons that go all the way back to pre-4DWM IRIX (which, icons didn't matter then or later since the "desktop" functionality of IRIX was pretty much ignored in the context of how alternatively useful this mode of machine interation is on Mac and Windows).   Roll back to the SS I posted just grabbing a 4DWM picture from the net and your's is not appreciably any more attractive, it's just put window borders on a diet.

I looked at the dates and the last version of IRIX I used was earlier 6.5.xx (up to about 6.5.12 or so), because by 1999 they had failed to keep up with Intel and now they were far too expensive for how slow they were.  Here we had multi-proc, multi-core Xeon systems becoming affordable and your average SGI workstation at the time was still P3 class performance with a small mortgage or car payment attached.

As much as I was not a fan of NT the absolutely stupidly designed, Xeon-powered 540 was a shot in the arm for productivity for a couple years in 1999 before BoXX and HP and even Dell systems running various grungy flavors of Linux with shoddy gfx drivers took saved us from a Windows future.  In 2000 I ended up working freelance at this little boutique and was saddled with an Octane and it was just awful going so backwards, even though it was as upgraded as one could.  Except for vector and shading performance the shiny new PowerMac I bought that year felt faster.  

Guys drilling for oil, universities, etc. likely still used SGI after 1999 but only facilities locked into server class hardware for Flame and Inferno (or just still paying off workstations nobody wanted anymore) continued to burn money on SGI after the Turn of the Century.

4DWM, by then, could have had hot and cold running Jolt Cola and it wouldn't have mattered because the hardware was so not up to iterative compute intensive tasks any longer and there in the early days of OSX and the beginning of the buzzword for "cluster" computing they didn't have much leg to stand on in massively scalable computing either.  And at the end of the day, nothing that's ever been done to 4DWM makes it more attractive than IRIX 3.3 and I call your bluff on them really changing much of anything at all...here:

IRIX 4.0.1



IRIX 5.3



IRIX 6.5


...third verse, same as the first.