Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 03:24:16 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Forget CDE, try OpenStep!? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.961021031316.326B-100000@hamby1>
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I stayed out of the previous thread on CDE for FreeBSD, because even though it's bloated, slow, and hellishly difficult to create custom configurations or integrate applications, it is a "standard". Not a standard I'd want to run on my 486 (okay, it wasn't all _that_ bad on Solaris/x86, I suppose), nor something I'd want to pay $200 for (the entire Solaris/x86 package cost all of $130 educational discount), but a standard that brings some additional prestige to the free UNIX's. However, I bring this up because Sun has recently posted a version of OpenStep free for non-commercial use. Even though OpenStep is now an evolutionary dead-end, and I have no plans to develop for it, speaking strictly as a window manager and user interface, it put CDE to shame! The icons are prettier, the interface is intuitive, there is useful online help, and it's simple to customize. And in spite of using Display PostScript and a raft of shared libraries (for the Objective-C runtime and OpenStep API, in addition to X11), it actually manages to be faster than CDE! Unfortunately it's only available for SPARC/Solaris and Windows 95/NT, and is unlikely to be ported to other OS's any time soon. :-( The moral of the story is: Just because something's an open standard doesn't make it worth spending money on. Especially when free software (like a decent fvwm95 configuration) or even proprietary software that's released without any fanfare (OpenStep) can put it to shame... -- Jake
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