Ede – An Fltk based desktop environment (2014)
edeproject.orgRegarding FLTK: was originálly done by Bill Spitzak (who obviously has used IRIX/4DWM), now famous for Nuke https://www.atogt.com/askoscar/display-person.php?id=74125&v...
And it was based or at least inspired on the previous XForms[1] toolkit – the one with way too many bevel shapes for buttons etc., not the XML thing. Probably at least partially done because XForms wasn't open source, and to provide a more "modern" C++ API.
Meanwhile, XForms has been open-sourced, but FLTK being in a different language and having evolved a bit since its creation didn't suffer from the problems Lesstif had and is standing on its own rather well. And despite being C++, it pops up rather often when you're looking for GUIs with decent language bindings (e.g. for Lua or Rust). Probably because it's less a moving target than Qt or, heck, Gtk.
Related: Xfce originally stood for "XForms Common Environment".
Yep, later used GTK and then it was totally libre. Also, up to the 4.2? releases XFCE with XFFM was uber fast.
Rakarrack <https://rakarrack.sourceforge.net/> has a GUI written in FLTK. It was my earliest adventure with guitar effects and DSP (ca 2008); it ran on a potato laptop and still kept up, which made the whole setup actually viable for spontaneous jam sessions at other people's places.
Good times.
FLTK is still under active development and claims to be adding Wayland support in the next release. Last release was December 2023.
EDE itself though looks like a dead project. I would not expect this to survive the jump to Wayland.
This is really nice, thanks for sharing. Looking back, the obvious inspiration here, Classic Windows, was a remarkably good user interface. (Or, many people simply have a soft spot for it, because we used it for a very long time.)
I imagine Ede would play perfectly with Tiny Core Linux [1] which has FLTK/FLWM as its default desktop system.
If you like this style of UI, check out serenityOS (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity).
They all look the same to me. Perhaps the devil is in the details, but visually, they all look like Windows, except the ones that look like MacOS.
The only system that doesn't look like either, that I can think of, is Plan 9.
Plan9 is certainly unique and opinionated. Nextstep/Openstep/WindowMaker and RiscOS are two others that come to mind.
Arguably BeOS/Haiku could count too. It’s less obvious later and with experience with Linux stacking WMs, but it was pretty obviously a different lineage at the time.
> obvious inspiration here, Classic Windows
Which was inspired by NextStep.
Windows is quite an explicit lift of the interface design guidelines specified by IBM as Common User Access ( CUA ).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
CUA predates NeXT by quite a lot and so the influence would mostly be going the other way.
CUA was the design paradigm chosen for OS/2, a joint project between IBM and Microsoft. When Microsoft started the Windows Project ( after OS/2 ) they pretty explicitly adopted CUA for it as well.
Thanks for the addition, apparently I'm too young to know this. Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...
> built to have a familiar look and feel.
Not familiar for anyone born after the 90's.
To be fair, if you're young enough, nothing is familiar anymore, because that's no longer a goal for UIs.
Why so negative?
Last release was 2014. Project is still hosted on SourceForge. Website copyright notice ends in 2018. Last commit to the github repo was 2018. Project front page mentions the original Xbox, Minix, and Zaurus (and early 2000s Japanese handheld organizer that ran Linux) and Solaris as targets.
This should give you some idea of what time frame to view any claims from the website in.
> Why so negative?
I don't see that as negative, but a remark that most younger people are not used to the look of Windows up to (and including) 2000. And the last time I personally used FLTK had been around 2000 too. Which, btw, (at least back than) looked more like Irix' 4DWM controls than Windows.
XP, Vista and 7 had a classic look mode. And from w2k's classic look to Vista the interface it's almost identical. Windows 8 and tablet UI's were disruptive.
It would be so nice to read how that ancient Windows interface looks just like Serenity OS some day!
Even my sister and brother, born in 2003 and 2009, have used computers with this UI style.
Your siblings are probably outnumbered 1000:1.
source: just trust me bro
Just wait. Ten years from now kids will be like, "wait, you can't wear it on your face?? What's a mouse? Why won't this computer just do what I'm thinking? Mom!!!"
Last year I had a "oh, shit, I'm old" moment when I was talking with a 20-something year old who didn't know what a dial tone was. She never used a landline phone.
"That's like a baby's toy!"
Hah. Or this old gem...
> you can't wear it on your face?
VR feels more in tune with retro-futurism.
Neural implants do, too. Particularly the need for a large 1/4" jack in your head. Like, you're telling me you can drill out that much brain meat, but you can't a fit bluetooth chip in there?
Well, WIndows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and maybe Gnome 2 fit on that UI.
I wouldn't put anything after Windows 2000 on the same category as this. And how many people got to be introduced to computers in their teen years via Gnome 2?
Most widgets are the same under a different style, such as the UI from Be and today's Haiku. Even KDE3. Smartphones and tablets are a different beast altogether.
React OS probably also has the Classic Windows look available. They seem to have switched their main screenshots to something resembling Windows 10, though: https://reactos.org/gallery/
I doubt people born after the 90s are the target audience
FLTK is fun and fast.