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The Superior Motif?
Janon writes: "There's a rather interesting interview with Antony Fountain, a Motif developer and reference manual author at O'Reilly. He makes some rather well-founded (or at least it seems so to me) claims that Motif has some rather important advantages over the likes of GTK+ and Qt, such as an open and superior component model." It's a great illustration of the split between open and closed development, too -- fans of the Bazaar may see only waste in Fountains assertion that "Millions of lines of Motif get written and not one word about it leaves the company doors."
And why does it need to be commercial, like that inherently makes it better?
I agree that it does not make it inherently better but I can see where he is coming from. A lot of commercial vendors will not use/buy anything unless it is a commercial product because of the support issue. It seems from a management point of view that you always need somebody to blame.
As an example at the place where I work we are currently evaluating bug tracking systems. This has been going on for a couple of months and I am getting sick and tired of it. So I offered to grab bugzilla, install it and get it working for our team, but the idea was vetoed purely because it wasn't commercial and there was no official way to get support. This is dispite the fact that it whoops the ass of a lot of commercial products.
I write a lot of my programs using Motif. However, it (along with Xt and Xlib which you must also learn to be an effective X/Motif programmer) is so involved to learn that I wouldn't have bothered had GTK or Qt been out when I started developing under X. If young developers -- the ones who often have cool, exciting ideas -- aren't learning Motif, it is for all intents and purposes dead.
That said, EditRES is very saucy. If you're running Netscape 4 now, fire up "editres", do a "Get Tree" on Netscape, and start changing colors, labels, and even layout and behaviors. [Then start coding that functionality for Qt or GTK.]
DanAt the time I used a memory debugger called "purify", that detected all sorts of memory errors (acesses out of bunds, buffer overruns, buffer underruns, acesses to dealocated blocks, memory leaks, etc.), and It reported thousands of errors inside the motif libraries.
There were all kinds of errors from memory blocks accessed after being freed to memory leaks.
The problem was so bad that even the documentation from "purify" had a paragraph explaining how to filter the error messages caused by the Motif code, because otherwise it was impossible to spot our own bugs.
I beleive that this problem still persists today and this is one of the reasons that explains why Netscape Navigator keeps crashing so many times.
Right now, I'm porting all my applications to GTK+ with the help of Glade.
So far, I'm using "njamd" as a memory debugger and it doesn't detect any problems ou memory leaks.
Well, I'm sure that many people will tell you that the license is far away from a really open source.
Go talk to the guys at lesstif.org about the license and see why they refuse to look inside the code..
And even if I accept your statement that this is Open Source - then so? I would hardly recommend to any of my clients to buy Motif for their application - I'll recommend to use QT (specially if they want to port their applications) or GTK (if they write in C - the binding of GTK in C++ is nowhere near QT with C++)
Motif is D.E.A.D - live with it!
Hetz (Heunique)
Granted, I *hate* GTK, from a programming perspective (let's take C and make it slow and ugly like C++!), but there's got to be some reason people are abandoning Motif.
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Isn't that a marvellous statement of a failure to have a clue about open source development? The whole concept of a 'key killing point' is irrelevant to OSS- if something doesn't suit a task, it'll sit around until somebody needs it- especially w.r.t Free software, which has basically infinite shelf life- if you EVER need routines that were once GPLed, they will be there for you to use.
"Key killing point" is only applicable in an either/or, winner/loser code environment, namely proprietary software, where code competes for relevancy and that which loses is lost to the world. Which hardly leaves much 'successful proprietary software' to compete with the OSS ideabase...
You are the first person I've seen mention Tcl/Tk in this discussion. What's up with that? It's been around for a long time, before Qt or GTK. It's portable. It has a fine license. So why didn't it become the defacto free widget library? Tcl seems to have encumbered it, but despite that many language bindings exist. I don't know if it has the best set of widgets, but I'm sure that could have been fixed. So what's so bad about Tk?
that'll just about get you a working "hello world" program. It'll be very configurable though.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
NONE of the major Unix vendors (Sun,HP,Compaq,IBM) have switched ANYTHING to GNOME. Sun and HP have announced they will provide GNOME 2.0 when it is released and STABLE.
<sarcasm> So that's why the Sunrays attached to the loaner Daktari system Sun had in here last week had GNOME 1.2 on them...</sarcasm>
News flash: Sun is shipping GNOME NOW.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
And he cites the fact that there is no commercial builder for GTK as a disadvantage - what is wrong with Glade? Why does a builder need to be commercial?
There is some other interesting info in there which I am not qualified to dispute, but his anti-Open Source comments sound like something you would expect from Redmond. It is unfortunate that O'Reilly didn't press him on these issues.
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Previous /. Discussion here
Exactly. The difference between Motif and the newer Free Software toolkits like QT or GTK+ is that someone is actively working on making QT and GTK+ better. It's been a while since this article was published, and it would appear that in this short time both GTK+ and QT have resolved the issues that Fountain raised. That leaves Fountain's only defendable reason to use Motif as "there is lots of legacy Motif code."
In other words Motif is dead. People don't hang onto legacy software systems when their only reason to stay is that switching would be expensive. After all, the cost of migrating will only get more expensive with time (you will have created more content in the outdated system). The time to switch is now, while everyone else is still learning the new environment. Be careful though, chances are good that either GTK+ or QT will eventually dominate.
Ah, but it's not the same old crap. GTK+ is a lot less expensive crap, and it comes with source code so that it is possible to make it less crappy.
You are making the same mistake that Fountain made. You suppose that technical merit has something to do with who eventually wins. Technical merit is somewhat important, but more important is being "good enough" at a lower price. GTK+ is certainly "good enough" (especially if it is being compared with Motif) and the price is right. You can even use it without paying royalties in your proprietary closed source applications. That's an important benefit that has already pushed the commercial Unix vendors towards Gnome, and away from KDE.
There are all sorts of ways to work around this problem. The easiest being to deliver the correct libraries with your application. A simple shell script wrapper will guarantee that the correct libraries get loaded and linked dynamically.
Not that it matters. GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, which permits linking (even static linking) with proprietary works. If this wasn't the case then the commercial Unix vendors would be sticking with Motif. They are not interested in a toolkit that would require them to release the source code to their software.
Here is a link to the text of the LGPL. And here is a pertintent quote (emphasis added).
Not to mention the fact that GTK+ (and almost the entire Gnome toolkit) is licensed under the LGPL. Which means that you can even create closed source commercial applications using those libs and never have to release a single solitary line of your own source. That's why GTK+ and Gnome are becoming the new supported desktops for the commercial Unixes and QT is not (it is licensed under the GPL).
Which is basically why Fountain is so cranky. GTK+ and Gnome are taking the place of Motif and CDE, and most new projects are already switching to these toolkits. And since he creates and sells a GUI designer for Motif... Well, you get the picture.
Even worse, newer versions of GTK+ fix most of the problems that he mentions (libglade for the component model, and I believe there is internationalization work as well). In the end technical issues like this aren't decided by whoever has the most elegant, stable, or easy to use solution. The solution that wins is the one that is "good enough" at the lowest price.
It's game over for Motif.
fans of the Bazaar may see only waste in Fountains assertion that "Millions of lines of Motif get written and not one word about it leaves the company doors."
Oh yeah, we're all going to need a million lines of code specific to some pharmaceutical app. Get a life, Timothy. Most of the code ever written is useful only to people in their industry, and more often only useful for a particular company.
From the article:
As commercial engineers, we don't plug our own names or reputations with the software that we sell.
No wonder he's getting trashed here - some people actually just do their jobs, instead of engaging in endless self-promotion. What a concept.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Huh?
Did you read the same article I did. The only real mention of commercial programming he made was simply to state that they don't bother to toot their own horns when they create something. As compared to Linux which someone makes a big announcement every time something is sold.
He then goes on later in the article to point out why the Motif library is better in his opinion. It's somewhat technical, but he basically attributes this to the component model.
You should go back and reread the article.
If an API makes you do 2 or more times as much work with little in return, it's of NO use to you. If an API takes up 2 or more times as much binary code without giving you something in return it's of NO use to you. You can use it because you think you're elite or because you enjoy hard work or don't mind inefficient code, but in the end it's not that it's useful that you're using it- it's merely because you WANT to use it.
Sorry to say, Motif makes you work harder for a UI that is both ugly and unwieldy. I know, I used to write Motif apps professionally.
Motif applications, tend to needt he whole library statically linked against your application under Linux- because not all apps work with Lesstif and some of them use Motif2 which isn't supported by Lesstif. That tends to make apps using it much larger than say a GTK+ or Qt application. This doesn't take into account the fact that I'm doing 2-10 times as much calls into the api which results in a larger app even if it's not statically linked.
Whether you like it or not, if I can get the same job done with less code (Similar speed of application operation) then the smaller, easier API wins hands down every time.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The X resources are stored with the server, which is very useful for getting the interface correct when you can run remote applications. In addition they allow the resources to be different per application, something none of the theme systems seem to address.
However I very much disagree with the way Motif used it, where they turned it into a huge database that could not be programmed without intricate knowledge of the innards of the application (and often where the program was unusable unless several hundred correctly-set fields were in the database). I also disagree with their inane attempt to merge several (eventually dozens) of files by the application to get the database (ie the "appdefaults", searching for ".Xresources", etc) rather than leaving this to another program and only using the resources string from the server.
The X resources should be on the level of the Win32 preferences settings, very general like they were intended when X was designed, things like "text background color". Not the Motif scheme where the color of every single button can be set individually. This sounds powerful, but is actually totally useless to any real user and makes the database obscenely complex.
Basically Qt and GTK get it wrong by not reading their settings from the database, and Motif got it wrong by turning the database into a Windows-like "registry" with all the bugs needed.
PS: You can easily emulate the X defaults on Windows, just read them from a file! You should also read the Win32 preference settings, it should be trivial to make the toolkit #ifdef in some code for this at the same point it reads the X defaults. With the design specified above there should be no reason to use the Xt or Xrdb functions, just parse the string yourself.
It is possible to be crappier than Windows. "different" and "better" are not synonyms. Analog computers are different too, maybe you should use them.
In our in-house Qt applications we turn on Win32 appearance everywhere. The Motif look is ugly as sin, and since the widgets change size lots of stuff does not work.
I have to also rant against this belief that the users are confused if they don't have a "consistent user interface" between their programs. This is absolutely untrue, I have never seen anybody confused because the buttons in their programs look different, witness the game designers who don't seem very concerned about the appearance of buttons! What does confuse people is when their favorite application changes between platforms (or between versions). I have been killed here because I attemted to change our bindings to be Windows-like, people could not stand it (despite using this application on NT) and I had to change it back! Nobody seems concerned that Alt+X does cut in my program but it is Ctrl+X in other programs, they were totally frustrated by my attempt to change it to Ctrl+X. So I believe that consistency in an application is far, far, more important than between applications. And all attempts by toolkits to mimic the "theme" of the platform are mistakes that make the programs unportable and user unfriendly.
The problems of the inability to direct a FILE* to an in-memory stream (at least in a portable way) are well known and toolkit independent. You will be in exactly the same state if you call your binary library from GTK. Yea, libc should be fixed, however I have seen the nice ideas of iostreams be turned into an enormous bloated mess by people who have no clue (with "wide characters" and binary i/o and attempts to make a thing designed for byte streams into the do-all of stream input output), so I am not sure if we want them messing with FILE* (which I have been forced to return to because of the bloat and slowness of the modern template cio library).
You have to flush the output buffers. For cpio you can do "cout If a binary library writes to stdout or stderr, there is no way any toolkit can get this without modifying libc (actually there may be something that can be done with Glibc, but whatever it is is going to be toolkit independent).
Motif was written long before C++ so it is not suprising that there is no way to redirect cout to a widget. Motif also does not use C++ which means this could not be part of standard Motif (though easily in a C++ only header file).
Indeed. Reminds me of a book "Practical Xview Programming" that I once read. The authors couldn't see that then (1994) Xview was on its last legs (to be killed by CDE/Motif) All the same arguments were there: more code being written in Xview, Xview is the standard, Xview more mature, etc., etc.
In the early '90s on Solaris (which was the only UNIX that counted in most places back then) Xview *was* the standard. Motif was practically nonexistent then. Then *boom* CDE became the standard on Solaris and Motif took off.
Yes, there's a jwz rant on Slashdot on the same subject that I can't be bothered to look up now,
and an interview that I have searched for and couldn't find where GTK's authors say they did it that way because they wanted to learn about what was involved in writing a toolkit layer. (I can't remember wheher they said they would definitely have used Xt if they knew where it was going to end up, but I think at was at least more likely).
But it's probably too late to be worth changing GTK to use Xt now.
--
rant
Many thousands of lines of Visual Basic are being written behind closed doors, too. Doesn't make it a superior language/environment, just popular. Motif was the defacto standard for "legitimized" *nix/X programming for quite a while, and the model is still good.
However, more "modern" toolkits are going to catch on and take over, and I don't think Qt and GTK are going to be the end of it. Why? Because we live in a world informed by Visual Basic. Newcomer programmers are going to expect more and more of the busy work to be done with simple calls. It's a Good Thing, in that it allows the programmer to focus on the task at hand, but it is a Bad Thing, because in mastering the arcana, you master the basics whether you know it or not. (The Wipe-On/Wipe-Off effect.)
Motif, unless it's redesigned and rewritten -- and genuinely opened -- is going to wither on the vine for better or worse.
(Yeah. this is something of a "me too" post...)
-dwd-
Why was this moderated as funny? Insightful, maybe. But not funny.
Xmt was very nice. In the mid 90s, I built and delivered a series of Motif applications that used Xmt. It was very nice. Hell, I even contributed some bug fixes. But, alas, Motif is showing its age. And Xmt, while being very nice, can't make up for the rest of the problems brought by Motif.
Following David Flanagan's lead, I've been a Java programmer for 4+ years now. And, remembering the "good old days" when I could configure the entire GUI with Xmt using Xdefaults, I now encapsulate the GUI inside an external XML file. The GUI is completely separated from the business logic, allowing for automated testing. Internationalization involves simple changes to my GUI XML file. I can theme my applications by merely changing the GUI XML file. I tip my hat to David for leading me in this direction.
But, seriously, this message wasn't (imho) intended to be funny. It was right on the mark. Interesting and insightful.
--Be human.
libGlade does a similar thing. You define the entire inteface of the application with an XML file. You can redesign the entire application with a change to XML files.
The interview takes a rather dark tone WRT GTK and QT. It's clear that Fountain likes Motif, but at the expense of his own vision.
He doesn't offer any interesting insight why motif is neccessarily better, other than: "We can write proprietary applications and people won't talk about them".
Well, duh! You can write proprietary apps with any widget manager you like! GTK isn't encumbered with any legal virii.
If Joe Schmoe Corporation wanted to make a GTK interface for an internal CVS repository application, then they can.
He acts as if using GTK automatically entitles the GTK group to announce your application on Slashdot and toot their own horns. I'll give you a clue: It's the app builders that toot horns, not the GTK peeps.
If Joe Schmoe Corporation doesn't want their horn tooted, then they'll just keep the shut up!
The reality of the situation is that Motif only exists because of corporations that believe they have to use a proprietary, expensively licensed, widget library in their applications, or they won't be taken seriously.
I seem to recall that Netscape first built on Linux, unencumbered, when LessTif was stable enough to permit linking. That was because LessTif was trying to mimick the Motif API in Open Source. Then GTK came along and it seems the drive behind Lesstif is lessened.
Don't let the FUD mongers that want to see Motif remain a cash cow distract companies from using GTK or QT as their widget of choice.
Yes, instead they send out memos telling managers not to approve any more paper, paper-clip, staple, toner, coffee, keyboard, pen, telephone, tape, floppy disk, etc... purchases until the end of the quarter because well, "Our department has gone over-budget."
I'm sure the 1.2 million in software licenses didn't help.
Believe me, this does happen and happens often even at large companies.
IIRC, you can switch between desktops by using Alt-left/right arrow keys.
domc
Not that I like CDE though.
You know it has been my experience that motif has a small niche market that is probably smaller than the linux desktop. Qt and Gtk+ are both easier to program in even if they are not as complete. But then again motif is how old and has had how long to get where it is? Gtk+ is still imature (as I type this in Netscape 4 on UNIX which was done in motif).
Personally I'd like to know of what NEW applications are developed in Motif tool kit?
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Wow, um where to start. I can't believe this got on slashdot. On the question of Is Motif experiencing any kind of resurgence associated with the current Linux wave? he avoids it and talks about how linux people don't like licenses. From what I have been able to gather I don't know of where motif is being used now. gtk and qt have been put just about everywhere. With QT embedded running around why do you even need X any more let alone motiff!
s /k de/style/basics/index.html
i /i ndex.html
... wait for it... a commercial organization. There was also kde studio from the kompany, and that ptyhon qt linux/windows app who's name slips my mind.
Not to beat a dead horse and spit on it and drive over it with a druck, but motif is ugly. Always has been and always will be by default. Fountain talks about user interface, but he is such a hipocrit when the only thing gtk and qt people agree on is that the ui sucks for motif. If that isn't powerfull I don't know what is. While we are here, has he even done any research into the "No user design guides in linux" How about
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standard
or
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/u
(Sorry don't know of any gtk ones off the top of my head) I think I should write an article that says that motif sucks and has no support and is dieing. It may not be true, but then again I didn't do any research so I can't say it is false! NEXT!
Componants, companants componants. Hmm would I rather have 650 componants or 30 well thought out componants. They may have 650, but that just would confuse the user don't you think? I would rather see less that are more standard. Whiel I am at it sense they have had time to make all those componants why don't they spend time on there damm ui and make it better. heck just the file dialog, anything! Even gtk's is better (qt is still better, but KDE's tops the cake) I could rant on this for a while but you all get the point.
there is no commercial GUI builder for Qt What rock has he been under. Ok so you don't have to count glade as a commercial vendor, but what about QT's, Designer??? Last I checked that was made by qt, who is
OK Internationalization. I know that as of 1.3 gtk had the internationaliation stuff in and working. And way back as of qt 2 all the char's were 32bit so that is that argument. Heck wait a sec he has none. There are powerfull translation tools for qt and gtk and from what I know they both do layout. It is only with netscape 4 that I remember having translation issues, wait wasn't that done in Motif...
Bla why am I even wasting my time. I just shake my head when I see stuff like this.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
The problem with Motif, though, everything else notwithstanding is that Motif is _butt_ugly._
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Agreed, you can't. But while I concur that portability is a worthwhile goal, I don't think your GUI toolkit is the right place for it.
The GUI is, or should be, part of the platform. Think about it, the real justification for spending system and programming resources on a sophisticated toolkit is usability, and for most people this strongly implies consistency.
The other problem is that relying on a cross platform toolkit removes the incentive to cleanly separate the user interface from the backend, leading to less maintainable and portable code in the end (think Mozilla).
If you really think the additional effort isn't worth it, for example if you have to keep hundreds of dialog boxes in synchronisation, you could still use an effort such as wxWindows. For most smaller applications, however, the effort in porting just the user interface (assuming that is possible) is probably less than the effort in cross-platform testing, which had to be done anyway.
Come on, this is a matter of taste. Personally I find a well configured Motif visually much more pleasing than almost any GTK+ theme. (Ignoring the horrible 2.0 Notebook widget for a moment---nobody uses that anyway).
However, I agree it's very easy to completely mess up Motif interfaces if the programmer starts to enforce their weird colour prefences and to dump widgets all over the place without regard for user interface design considerations. GTK+ prevents that to some extent.
Based on programming for Motif and Qt (admittedly, this was two years ago), I liked the Motif widget sets and interfaces better.
Also, at least at that time, it seemed the Motif was a lot more polished, and had what I needed built in, in addition, it worked more seamlessly out of the box on my Solaris boxen, as compared to being quite as Linux oriented as Qt was (is?).
Is Qt a lot easier to use out of the box nowadays, on non-linux unix based platforms?
I spent a couple of years doing heavy duty Motif development, and can assure you it's the most bug ridden piece of crap you can imagine. It's also got a lame widget set.
I downloaded Qt, and from knowing nothing about it was up and writing my own widgets in a few hours - it's an excellent API and widget set, not to mention QtDesigner vs things like the Motif designer UIM/X which was expensive as hell and followed in Motif's tradition of bugginess.
Sorry - experience says it's no contest. Qt wins.
VNC is wonderful. It doesn't provide all this same functionality, and as such, it's not got the usefulness of the basic X protocols. And that matters to me.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Fountain claims that you can't write GTK apps which support multibyte character sets like Japanese needs. Obviously he's never used GNOME in Japanese or Chinese. When Pango is stable, his comments will no longer be merely wrong, they will be laughable.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
No disrepect to the author of the reference manual which I seem to remember was a nice book along with the rest of the X set. But I would argue that motif is not "the native toolkit for the X Window System" It did later become the toolkit of the Common desktop environment. Thats another story
Motif came to zenith as a windows look and feel, early 1.x implementations were extremely poor quality and the SDK was expensive but did promise faster gui development. Just around the time it became more stable up comes the browser and the
rest was history. Well consigning motif to history at least. If openmotif was done earlier maybe things would be different but this product is from a bygone age of consortiums with the big cheeses like IBM, HWP, Sun. The closest I get to motif is Java and netscape, thats close enough for me
There's nothing wrong with Motif. It has been designed from scratch to be extensible and it can still get improvements over years.
I've written Motif, QT, Gtk, Photon (QNX) and Fltk apps. They all work the same way. The basic widgets are the same, and when you've learn how to code one, you can easily move to another one. They all work on a hierarchical component model, with inheritable attributes, and an event-based system.
For some apps, especially those who are dynamically building widgets, QT and GTK are easier to program. And libglade is something worth to look at. It goes one step further than other toolkits, because an user can build his own interface for any compliant app, not only customize an existing one with themes or colors. For widgets with dynamic content (lists, panes), Photon (on QNX) beats them all. It's easy to code, smooth and damn fast.
The only problem with Motif IMHO is that it eats up a lot of memory. Especially when you are using nested scrolling panes. Properly using widgets and gadgets can reduce the memory footprint, but it's always huge. It's not the size of the Motif library itself, but the amount of dynamic memory it requires for itself and from the X server. I can't run more than 3 or 4 different Motif apps at the same time without running out of memory (128 Mb) . Other toolkits don't seem to need so much memory, even with complex themes.
The FLTK toolkit isn't very popular. But it's really a very good one. It's LGPL'ed, and it has X, OpenGL and Windows backends. It's fast and lightweight. And it has many similarities with QT. If you want to write an applications with basic widgets in C++, try FLTK before QT. It's not easier to code, but your apps will run faster (at least the GUI part) . FLTK also comes with FLUID, an efficient interface builder.
{{.sig}}
You seem to be the only one making that comparison....
Take this quote, for example:
Indeed, there is no commercial GUI builder for Qt or GTK+.
WRONG!
How did Mr. Fountain miss the press release announcing Kylix from Borland? This is a commercial GUI builder and RAD development environment which relies on Qt.
My apps come w/ their own widget libraries. All hand coded in pure x86 assembly language. No need for portability. My platform is the ONLY platform. Have fun with your GTK+ QT Motif premade toolkits, script kiddie tools. C, C++, cobol. You are all a bunch of script kidides. Fucking posting an article that was already posted over a year ago here on slashdot. If you really gave a shit about motif, you would have known this is OLD news, and it is not news for nerds! Real nerds do not need premade tool kits. They do not even need X for that matter. But that is another article entirely. And fuck you anonymous cowards who can't post a netative comment under their real name. Fucking karma whores. Timothy is not off the hook either. He should have checked all the previous articles posted here on slashdot. But he didn't, and now we have a problem because we have a duplicate article. It's just another "my penis is bigger than yours" article anyways. So therefore, this post is ON TOPIC, and should be moderated accordingly. Thank you for your time.
Well, this was a couple of years ago, I guess it's better now.
:-(
The thing that bit me was the form widget: the Sun Motif let you have circular dependencies if you kept horizontal and vertical links separate. The HP-UX one didn't, as I discovered when HP-UX people started complaining
I did Motif devel for 6 years, I switched to GTK about 3 years ago. Here's why:
... a very simple rewrite for GTK brought load times down by a factor of 10 (ten ... TEN)
API -- GTK has a much, much nicer programmer interface; if you're coding stuff by hand, it's about 1/2 the number of lines (guess)
speed -- Motif pays a huge price for Xt. One of my apps makes a whole bunch of widgets when it loads a file
open source -- developing for a widget set which you have the source to is just lovely. With Motif, if something didn't work the way you expected, you had to spend hours trying different stuff at random. With GTK, you can see what's wrong, and how to fix it.
simplicity -- GTK is much simpler than Motif, and it's much easier to write your own widgets. The object model is much better. Signals rock. Within a few hours of starting GTK, I subclassed one of the standard GTK widgets and modified its behaviour; fantastic. Xt makes subclassing widgets difficult.
range of widgets -- GTK has a much better range of standard widgets. At the end of the interview, Fountain says he's updated his new edition to cover the latest widgets, such as the ComboBox and the Notebook. Good grief!
portability -- amazingly, not all Motifs are equal. If you want to write an app which can run on most versions of IRIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. you can only rely on quite a small part of Motif. This is an incredible and enormous pain. With GTK, you can just say "needs 1.2.10 or better", and if the user doesn't have that, they can download and build. They don't need to go through their vendor to get the toolkit. This is less of a problem now that Motif has opened up a bit, to be fair.
portability -- because GTK wraps Xlib, I can recompile my app, and it'll run on Winders.
Fountain is right on i18n being a current lag point for GTK. GTK2.0 (due out fairly soon (less than six months? not sure)) will include stuff like pango. This will jump GTK quite a way ahead of Motif on i18n.
On introspection, GTK has had this for years, I'm not sure what Fountain is talking about here.
I've not used Qt, no doubt similar stuff can be said.
Qt is so much nicer to core ;^) ObNoFlamers: it was a typo, yeah, y eah. But I couldn't stop myself. ;^)
So, um, I take it Qt core dumps a lot, then, but it sort of feels good when it happens?
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Athena is small, clean but ugly. It was only an example widget set to show how to use Xt. Xt's structure, with its resources describing every aspect from the GUI is very powerful. There are even add-ons that let you create your widget hierarchy (i.e. GUI structure) using some small external text file (a much much more productive way than using a WYSIWYG GUI builder).
Motif, one of the real-world widget sets on top of Xt, is horrible, as others have said in this discussion. It also walks over some basic Xt do's and dont's. In that respect, Suns OLIT (the open look widget set built upon Xt) was much nicer in every respect. Alas SUN lost the UNIX interface wars due to political reasons (only).
I hoped Qt and GTK would become the new standard unix GUI toolkit (one of them, at least) but I must say that I am very dissapointed if even "old stuff" such as editres are not there.
As long as there is nothing that replaces the network transparence of X, it is not going to be replaced! Even the Linux-PDA from agenda computing decided to put X in that tiny machine. Once you have made a TCP/IP connection via PPP from your Linux desktop, you can remotely display the agenda's X-window apps on your host computer, which is very cool and useful. Sending the whole screen bitmaps (a la laplink type of software for Windows) would be way too slow and would not take advantage of larger display size and resolution of your desktop. X-window does such things transparently.
I'm convinced that X-window will even be in embedded devices. There is no need for embedded Qt.
Motif sucks a fat one. I wouldn't really know, as I've never ever been unfortunate to do any programming with Motif, and have only toyed around with GTK and QT.
As far as ease of use, I didn't find GTK or QT to be too difficult, and I NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER __EVER__ do any GUI programming... ever... Well, except for like 4 or 5 years ago in Java 1.something. They both seemed pretty straight forward to me.
Anyway, what I *DO* know about Motif from experience is that it is the ugliest fucking GUI toolkit I have *EVER* seen. Windows, Mac, GTK/QT blow it away it terms of both look AND feel. Even if you're a hardcore "looks don't matter" geek, the feel is still important, and God Motif is just so awfully disgusting! Then there's the matter of stability...
I have only seen _ONE_ Motif app that is really stable, which would be Nedit BTW(the absolute greatest text editor in the world). Can anyone else think of another stable Motif app?
Why is anyone still using Motif, why is anyone defending it? For the sake of all that is good and pure, throw that wretched thing away! = )
Why oh why am I still awake?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Isn't it amazing how out of touch the author was. Even a year ago when the story was first posted you could tell that Motif was dying, and the past 12 months haven't made his assertions seem exactly full of insight.
But I suppose it is to be expected, considering the author's investment in Motif.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Of course, to be fair, a lot of the problem with the "Crappy old motif apps" is that they are just that -- old! Most of those things were designed before the concept of threads came along and many of them were simply kluged together in a time when you didn't demand a lot from a GUI. Motif was popular in the days of Windows 3.0. If you want to know the level of expectation for your applications, break out the old XT and fire it up. That's pretty much what we had to work with.
With some modern design principles, you can write an effective Motif program. However, I never found GTK lacking for my user interface code, and the stuff I've done has been pretty esoteric. I also enjoyed having the GTK community on hand if I ever ran across a problem. Between them and the source code, if I ever ran across something bothersome, I could damn well fix it myself.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Millions of lines of [Insert Your product here] Motif get written and not one word about it leaves the company doors"
doesn't everyone know products that they wish word never got out about?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
It amazes me that people are so shallow and caught up their blind hatred of MS that they won't use something because it reminds them of Windows.
All GUI interfaces look pretty much the same, with buttons, scrollbars, cycle gadgets etc. etc. That goes for Windows, MacOS, GTK, QT, Workbench or Motif. Stick a nice theme on GTK or QT and either of them will look less like Windows than Motif ever will.
What you are really saying is that you are prepared to burden yourself with 1980s technology so you can get off on how 100% pure Unix you are. You're also saying that you don't care how hard Motif is to program because you're so much cleverer than all us GTK/QT idiots.
I hope you're coding in strict K&R C a PDP-11, because if not then you're betraying your true Unix soul.
What use is the debugger if it does not detect memory leaks!?
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Nice reasoned article, many things I'm inclined to agree to.
A remark, though: I was forced to used Motif under C++ for my diploma thesis in University. Of course we had no GUI builder.
It sucked. Royally. No, wait,...
It sucked beyond comprehension.
I spent most of my time finding out how things, parameters, widgets etc actually behaved (as opposed to manpages or Fontaine's book), fought with incredibly shitty useless details (the things a toolkit is supposed to do right but almost guaranteedly did wrong when not speficically told to do right). I even spent considerable time to work around that f** kit.
Example: you use binary libraries that produce output via c stdout or stderr. Now get their output into a motif text widget. Nearly impossible.
Another: have a standard C++ streams object for output to a text widget. Should be a a basic component - instead I had to write all stuff myself
Another: you want to see state of some inner workings of your program. Standard programmer trick - just make it say something occasionally. Really Bad Idea with motif... it waits to display anything until you give some time in the main loop. I _hate_ this way the toolkit guys break traditional control flow of software. If I say "printf x" or "y >> cout" (printf and cout beeing properly widgetized) , I want to see it _now_. With motif I see it never.
I could rant on and on. Maybe Motif is the best thing since the inventioin of sliced bread when you have one of these fabulous UI builders, but with just gcc, vi and the OReilly Books it borders on unusable. And it's object model is so alien to C++ that it seems nearly hostile.
f.
OTOH id did solve these problems; I wrote an iobase and iostream class to get a stream into a window, and I even wrote a hack by redirecting stdout and err into a socketpair from the other end of which I then could read and shove into the text widget. Not pretty, probably not portable without a bunch of ifdefs, but it worked. It's actually not so much a question of buffering but that the text widget must get time in the main loop else it will not redraw/update its contents.
f.
Dude, you're not listening very carefully. :) "Goddamn treehuggers don't care about jobs. Damned liberals want to take away our cars. Touchy-feely leftists want to make religion illegal. BlahBlahBlah." Seriously; read a copy of one of the NRA's mags and you'll see a boatload of insults and heated rhetoric, and that's just about one issue! Having said that, I must say I consider the 2nd Amendment important, and am myself a member of the NRA. I just don't have much use for inflammatory rhetoric, whether it's from the left or the right.
It's particularly painful 'cause I'm pretty liberal on some stuff, pretty conservative on others, so no matter who I'm talking to I'm going to get insulted.
And considering Dubya ran as a moderate conservative, and has shown himself to be a big-C Conservative, you have to admit that deceptive campaigning works for everyone, unfortunately.
I've been coding in Motif for about eight years and then switched to Qt a year ago. Qt is so much nicer to core in and I think my productivity has increased by at least 100% with Qt. When I look at my old Motif code today it really feels ancient compared to Qt code.
I think I have written about 70k of that!
Maybe what I dislike most about X, Motif and OpenGL is the visual inheritance...it sucks to see menus/popups/drag ops crashing apps. The "Green Book" molview program explains how to get past this issue.
The gui builders are usually expensive and weak, or generate proprietary stubs, or use proprietary libs, locking you to the vendor. I still write a lot of Motif apps by hand. The runtime is nice and fast compared to alternatives like Tcl and Java.
The Xbae matrix (from lesstif.org) is one of the fastest matrix displays I've ever seen.
Motif is really not that bad looking...it's all in the resources.
If you want to talk about some ugliness, I still cringe at the naming conventions and typing in GTK. I know why they did it, but it still makes me cringe.
Now that Motif is free, I can't see any reason to consider Qt with it's expensive licensing...at least for closed source.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Motif may suck, but so does everything else. The main benefit of Motif is stability and backwards compatibility, as well as feature completeness.
Contrary to popular opinion, this is important even in new projects. A large project that takes, say 3 years to complete requires somewhat stable components during building. Who knows what changes will happen to GTK+ and Qt during those three years? At least with Motif I would have some confidence that the API's originally documented 3 years ago still work on the latest version. This matters if you are just trying to get some work done!
Most development on Linux uses a different model. There are no customers. There are no in-house users that must be supported at all costs. There are no deadlines. If the software is buggy, it can be fixed later. Hacking value and aestethicks matters the most (as well as licensing debates), and actual functionality matters little, because if you want to do something useful, you use the command-line. Nobody cares about end-users. And those end-users that exists don't have a job to do either, so they complain about lack of themes instead of lack of functionality.
Motif has been used to create mission-critical applications in large corporations all over the world. Motif simply can't go away. There are way too much invested in Motif for it to go completely away even in the next 20 years.
That doesn't mean that Motif will ever be exciting and new again. It will be like Fortran or Cobol, with old engineers cranking out code for old legacy systems. But thrust me: It won't go away soon.
Personally I find this a bit sad, as I happened to like XView very much, and found the OpenLook look much nicer than Motif. It was also relatively sane to program. Well, well --- those times seem to be gone now.
I want what Mr. Fountain is smoking. Seriously, if he can't see that Motif development will be dead in the not so near future well then that is his problem. Also, I guess he thinks all the rumors that Sun and HP are moving towards gnome in order to phase out CDE are just rumors. Oh no wait they aren't rumors
and all these developers seem to forget it. It doesn't matter how easy it is to develop with it, if the final interface looks ugly. I'm sorry, Motif is *ugly*. Even more so than Qt. :P~ While I agree that the widgets and what not need to be easy and practical to use, appearance is important.
BZZZZZ! Wrong answer. The Great Louis Armstrong died on July 6th, 1971 at his home in Queens, NY.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
I dunno, MotifZone looks alive and well:
http://www.motifzone.net/
BTW, grab the latest version of OpenMotif (or order a CD).
So, he's saying that QT is better to program with, but hey, it really doesn't matter if Motif sucks to try to write a program with, and it's really not going to take longer, or be worse off because of that fact. Not to mention, its going to make your application look butt ugly while you're at it.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
-m-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Hey everyone, the original article from Fountain is well over 12 months old and it was already featured on Slashdot when first published (do a search on "Motif"). One must ask why the Slashdot folks recycle stuff like this...
Lots of things have changed since then. Don't waste your time picking apart whether his comments on GTK/QT internationalization are correct, or why did he not know about Kylix, etc. Those all happened after the original article.
The relevant issue is dealing with the fork that has occurred in the Linux community over the UI toolkit and desktop. Let's learn from the UNIX wars and resolve this quickly before we degenerate into a civil war while Microsoft sits on the sidelines and laughs at us, again...
The basic tradeoffs (from my viewpoint, and I'm a Motif guy) are:
1. Motif - Enterprise/Legacy support. It is used in mission critical applications today. New mission critical business applications being developed for Fortune 1000 on Unix/Linux in C/C++ are generally using Motif. The real decrease in the use of Motif for new applications has been the result of enterprises moving to Java and Windows.
2. QT - Provides cross platform portability and native C++. This has been done before by a variety of companies that are now out of business (remember Galaxy?). The goal is to reduce the cost of supporting multiple OS's. The problem is that you end up creating a subset of the GUI that is natively available on the platform. Let's remember, we're writing applications for the benefit of end users, not ourselves. If the end user sees an application as being somewhat different in look and feel to his other applications, then it is confusing and frustrating. Lots of applications have started out using a portable toolkit only to be eventually rewritten in the native toolkit. The TrollTech folks are smart, perhaps they have it right and this won't happen?
3. GTK+ - C based, LGPL I think (and I am sure someone will correct me), that GTK+ was developed to provide a open toolkit and avoid the original commercial oriented licenses of QT and Motif. Certainly, However, Motif is now freely available on open source platforms and QT offers a GPL version for open source fans.
The world has indeed changed since Anthony wrote his article. The cross platform and C++ support of QT provides valid reasons why somebody might chose QT. However, I am personally completely perplexed on why someone might jettison one mature C based toolkit for another, that is less reliable and still needs to mature. There is just no real benefit.
While I am at it, some of the myths that seem to flow through this conversation:
1. Motif is bloated - check the facts. Compared stripped versions of the archive libraries. Even accounting for Xt, Motif on x86 is approximately the same size or smaller.
2. Motif is ugly - mostly claimed by people that don't understand resources.
3. Motif is dead - mature? maybe, dead? no way. Check the MotifZone (www.motifzone.net). There is themes for Motif there!
4. New applications are using GTK+/Qt - True for Open Source applications. Less clear for commercial/proprietary ones.
5. QT/GTK+ provide more modern widgets - true as part of the native toolkit. But that is not clearly an advantage because it creates a larger, bloated toolkit. There are plenty of Motif widgets out there (both open source and commercial), that do whatever you need.
6. Motif is history because Sun et. al. has abandon it. Well, maybe I'm older than most of you out there (I was a r.99p13 user of Linux), but my memory is that you are best betting against Sun and their choice of toolkits. Sun has a horrible history of picking the wrong toolkit.Remember NeWs? Remember Xview? Remember OpenLook? It is developers and end users that chose the toolkit, not the hardware vendor. This is even more true today as hardware vendors that seem to be focusing more on servers and less on desktops everyday. This means their influence on GUI toolkits are even less.
7. QT/GTK+ have better GUI builders - obviously, these people have never tried to use a GUI builder in a production application. First generation GUI builders often leave developers holding the bag. Great prototypers, gets you 80% there, and then drops you short with ugly machine generated code. Motif went through that phase over 10 years ago. The GUI builders that are now available, provide mechanisms, including preserving changes to the generated code, that allows you to go 100% of the distance. (They also generate readable code!) Go to the Glade home page and look at their todo list. It includes styles, modified generated code, etc. all done by Motif GUI builders 5 years ago. I seem to recall that TrollTech now claims that their QT Designer is a "real GUI Builder" in their latest release (probably don't have the exact words here, so please forgive the paraphrase) In regards to Kylix, I kind of like it. Pascal was my first computer languare. Let's drop C/C++ and switch! ;-)
In any case, the real issue here is trying to figure out how to eliminate the fork in the road. This may not be a technical decision...
Mark
I tried. I really tried. Honest to God, but motif is just not functionnal enough for serious development, although the only logical choice.
For instance, it is more then toolkit, it's a framework. Sounds like a silly limitation ? not really. First of all, Fountain speaks of it in terms of a framework he says things like "As a language, Motif does show its age". This innocent statement is very heavy in meaning. I wouldn't say that of an api, only of a framework. And to that extent, the Motif toolkits wraps alot of Xt calls, trying like hell to not have you code with Xt at all, and denying you alot of Xt's functionnality.
A framework ties you in so tightly with the application you write that you cannot really extend the functionnality the framework offers other then within the bounds the framework allows you to go.
In other words, use of any motif components locks you in the motif way of doing things and you can only extend it a very high price.
Fountain claims that having had motif built on Xt is a good thing for the component architecture of motif. True, but Motif ties in on Xt by locking out the developper of several useful Xt functionnality, basically, an application writer using Motif is limited to a subset of Xt (and Xlib for that matter) for working on components without wrecking havoc on the motif app.
Fountains speaks of wrapping motif in C++ front-ends to facilitate use of the toolkit. Sure, but to what end ? It is a common practice to find in software development businesses wrappers around several lib's or toolkits they use to offer a common front end to the application writers, a practice that aims at decoupling the application from the toolkits: an honest effort.
The problem with this is that you still are locked in with the motif way of doing things. If you intend to develop an other type of component that you would wish to interact in the motif toolkit and perhaps another toolkit, you will find yourself running into a brick wall. It is possible, I am doing it right now, but the cost of making this work is far to great for the end result. It is like writing a framework with a framework. This is possible if the frameworks are orthogonal ( do not step over each other in functionnality, in which case you are effectively merging frameworks ), but in the most common case, a business wants to develop its own api/framework, in which case, using motif makes it a daunting task, virtually impossible.
This is examplified by the premise of a framework: "dont call me, I will call you" idiom. Build a framework on another one and you will find yourself coding loops and loops around motif to overcome the difficulty of not being able to control it like you need to.
I haven't use Qt or GTK, but in my opinion, the success of any of these two will be if they offer an good api without any framework functionnality. The framework functionnality should be another separate layer that you can use or not, depending on your needs.
I will end this rant on a positive note for Motif: it is the most ported toolkit out there and it's single most strong point.
And unfortunately because of this and the fact that it's now free to get development librairies, this makes of motif the only really good choice for xplatform development for all the *nix's out there. I certainly hope that in the near future, this will change. It is, but not as fast as it should...
A few choice quotes...
There are things Qt in particular does better than Motif: it is nicer to program with, for example. As a language, Motif does show its age. However, that doesn't make a hoot of difference when you have an end product to produce.
When you have an end product to produce, it does make a hoot of difference. If a tool-kit is nicer to program with, you code faster and with fewer bugs.
It does not matter how elegant a toolkit is in terms of programmer taste if at the end of the day the product derived from the toolkit is shorn of customizability, internationalization, attribute configuration, or a standardized way of working.
Compare this to his later statement:
Xt/Motif provides built-in standard methods for user customizability of components, which includes built-in internationalization capability. The internationalization issue may prove to be a key killing point for Qt/GTK+.
So, does he think internationalisation is important or not?
The commercial world writes product for customers and users; the Linux community writes software for programmers.
Funny, when it comes to programming toolkits, I thought the programmer WAS the customer/user? I've yet to meet the CEO or end-user who gave a toss what toolkit I used, so long as it did what they wanted.
The nature of the software being produced with Qt and GTK+ is yet more software for programmers. KDE, GNOME, and the like aren't about products and customers at all.
OK, so all those desk-top apps I'm using are only for programmers? KDE and Gnome are about building a better environment for developers and users to work in. Now that these environments are maturing nicely, the products will come. It's the same factors that led to CDE and Motif being developed in the first place.
Indeed, there is no commercial GUI builder for Qt or GTK+.
Kylix anyone? And why does it need to be commercial, like that inherently makes it better?
There are a number of private programs available, but as far as companies go, this is a no-no because it fails to guarantee any kind of continuance, stability, or development. Compare this with the Open Group's license for maintaining Motif, guaranteed by contract. Continued development is absolutely guaranteed. The same cannot be said about Qt or GTK+. The commercial infrastructure just isn't in place.
Not sure what license they use, but it's commercial right? So if Open Group goes under, what's the use of a support contract? Continued developement is not guarenteed, unless they just invented some new economic model that means they can't fail. At least GPL means there's a whole community behind QT/GTK who can pick the baton up and run with it.
Now, it is true that Motif has features that QT/GTK can't compete with. Yet. Motif's been around for how long now? 15/20 years? Give QT/GTK that long and they too will have all those features. But by then they too will have been superceded by the Next Big Thing, that's the nature of the industry.
Kylix is QT based, and Borland is looking into ways to add GTK support (though I don't think that'll happen this year).
With a price of > $2000 for the cheapest version, you might want to call it commercial.
Yeah, CDE is a real piece of crap. I have to use it at work on an HP-UX machine and it really sucks. No hotkeys to change between desktops, minimized windows' icons hide behind the big ugly bar at the bottom, etc. And that big ugly bar is really useless too; the only thing it's good for is changing between desktops.
What's really funny is how Xi Graphics purchased CDE, and is now trying to convince everyone that they should give up KDE and GNOME and buy a copy of their CDE for Linux since it's so much better. Yeah right.
It is undeniable, as we can see from most of the posts here that the trend is towards bashing Motif. I've recently entered into the world of user-interface programming in X and contrary to what most budding *nix GUI programmers would take, I would prefer to code in Motif instead of QT or GTK. IMO, Motif represents UNIX itself. I like Motif because it is UNIX. QT/Gtk looks like Winblows. I never really used KDE/GNOME because it reminds me of my Windows desktop. That's the reason why most of us is here because we want to leave the Windows desktop.
Now, you whiners would argue that "even the most faithful of all Unix supporters had to recognize that the Unix community had technologically fallen far behind the windows as well as Macintosh worlds with regard to GUI and desktop technologies." Of course, that would be true in some sense, but isn't Motif created for creating technical, high-end *NIX apps like Maya? Why do we need COM? Component-based approach on the desktop are for Word Processors. Maya doesn't need to e-mail flowers to your grandmother.
I dont care how hard to program Motif is or how old it is or about the claims that how buggy it is, its going to be completely free software in the near-future anyway. What I care about is tradition. Look at the OpenGL standard, its nearly as old as Motif itself. Why don't you whiners howl about how crappy and buggy it is when something about it gets posted? Face the truth! Your mother won't be able to use Linux/Unix for a very long time!
You're also saying that you don't care how hard Motif is to program because you're so much cleverer than all us GTK/QT idiots.
That was for the claims on how hard Motif is to program with. We'll I don't care. It's an API: learn it if you want to use it. C was hard to program at one time, too.
"In many of these companies, there's not a single line of Qt or a Linux box in sight."
So, where do I go to get hired?
In the Motif Era (tm), David Flanagan produced a
library called "Motif Power Tools" (Xmt) which
included the most genuinely powerful, capable,
and just plain _right_ window layout manager I've
ever come across. Xmt's other capabilities
included the ability to make massive changes in
appearance and functionality to a Motif user
interface without so much as recompiling a single
line of code. This was a truly and genuinely
useful construct, and I still rue the day that I
eventually moved to another environment where Xmt
wasn't handy.
There's also an irony here. David Flanagan is
"somewhat famous" for his authoring of _Java in
a Nutshell_, which he'd admit he threw together
fairly haphazardly (and in any case, was pretty
cruddy). Meanwhile, his Xmt effort was an effort
of love, both at the source level, as well as the
documentation level... a genuine feat.
The irony is that _Java in a Nutshell_ made Mr.
Flanagan truly big bucks. _Motif Power Tools_
was a financial flop.
Ah well; them's the breaks.
C//
I'm sure lots of lines of Cobol are still being written behind closed doors, in dirty little rooms filled with sterile programmers and clamorous machines, but I wouldn't offer that as an argument for its relevance (or its superiority over Java). Popularity is often a red herring in a debate of merits; if it were one we bought into, we'd all be running Windows.
Whether Xt is still important/relevant is debatable. Heck, people argue that X is antiquated and not relevant to modern networks and desktop systems.
Ultimately, though, Qt and GTK/GNOME are in their infancy compared to Motif, as Fountain points out. The moral of the interview, component models and all aside, is that, yes, Motif is not dead, but, yes, it's stake is being usurped by the next generation. My grandma writes Motif.
Personally, my favorite quote in the interview is, "There are things Qt in particular does better than Motif: it is nicer to program with, for example."
Oh yeah, my grandma's dead, by the way.
Fountain is probably right. I know from experience that the military, which requires mission critical applications, is still depending on Motif and even in some cases (yuck) OpenLook. There probably are some companies out there that are capable of looking ahead of the curve, but as far as being tried and true, Motif is the best route.
of course, probably going to start a holy war with that statement
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
This is very important, because it's the entire basis for the gnome/kde flamewar.
Functionality Rocks. Don't lose sight of that. If you want pretty, buy a Mac.
(Shit. I'll get modded down for the Mac comment...)
- Dan I.
That's a big advantage of open source--over time it matures and improves if there is developer interest. Obviously in this case, there was. There will probably also be developer interest in motif, as long as there are legacy apps to support. But I wouldn't hold the former lack of features of Qt and gtk against them any more than I would hold it against motif that at one time there was no computer powerful enough to run a motif application.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Just because you haven't bothered to figure out how to configure CDE doesn't mean it's not possible. Both the things you mention are possible to change. (The second thing you complain about is definitely not the default behaivior of CDE.)
Not that I'm a big fan of CDE (I rarely use it), but you should be fair anyway...
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I'd rather not hear the word "rather" used, well, rather overzealously.
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
I work for one of those shops that has millions of lines of Motif code. That doesn't necessarily mean Motif is that great, just that if you lined up our years of Motif experience end-to-end, it would probably predate Noah and the biblical flood. It's hard to overcome that much momentum.
Running Motif would be like getting behind the wheel of fifties car; it would work, but don't try anything fun with it.
--slasdot should go 100% blue, i'm sick of green.
However, to me, all that is water under the bridge. In practice, Motif was a messy and buggy toolkit that it took forever to get anything done in. Most corporate and defense projects I have seen dumped Motif as soon as they had an alternative, mostly for Tcl/Tk and web interfaces (but if you prefer to believe that the lack of press Motif is getting is some corporate conspiracy to keep the good stuff from you, I have some Internet stocks for you to invest in).
OTOH, I don't think Gtk+ or Qt will have the life span of Motif, for a variety of reasons. The only existing toolkit that seems to me like it's going to survive another two decades is probably Swing, which is pretty powerful, easy to extend, and still simple enough to develop for.
What's so unfunctional about Macs? Sure, Mac OS 9.1 may be less stable, but almost all of my PC friends who have used a Mac for long enough don't use PCs anymore. Anyway, Mac OS X's Cocoa is better than qt, Motif, or GTK! (If you like Objective-C or Java, that is).
--
And I thought the reason it was changing colors on me was because I had too much acid...
--
As for "complete lack of customizability" - the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean there isn't one. Try, for example, editres - make it grab Netscape widget tree and play with it. It is *extremely* customizeable. It may not be as flashy as KDE control center and it (thanks God) lacks "themes" but these are hardly required by Motif's target audience...
Proof: That article was written April of last year and, more proof, all (or most) major Unix vendors have abandoned Motif and made the switch to GNOME.
There is at least one
The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
Um... windows XP? Don't know about functionality, but it looks like a candy store by default... seems microsoft is willing to bet on "prettier" is better. Maybe give you more insentive to restart crashed programs to see the pretty again, I donno.
Would I rather use but uggly Motif that worked over Windows that crashed? Yeah. Would I rather use a command line program over either? yeah. But most people aren't such stick-in-the-muds like programmers and old school computer users.