It could be just me, but I find that UI repulsive. I had the (mis)fortune of using CDE back in 2005 on the job working on Solaris, and I remember not liking it back then either; slow and ugly is what I remember; but I didn't mind since I didn't have any strong opinions about the UI/UX back then. I was coming from a Windows development environment, so perhaps that's why CDE felt like a severe downgrade in experience.
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Yeah, it always kind of sucked. The UNIX-HATERS handbook famously described Motif as looking like the Moscow Airport. But, unlike GNOME and Firefox, it doesn't suck more every release.
You made me look it up.
"X will not run in these 4-bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1” thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport."
Yeah, Xaw and I think SunView would run on a 1-bit-deep display (though my recent quest for 1-bit-deep OpenWindows/OpenLook/XView screenshots came up empty), but Motif is less accommodating in that sense. And, although it looks worse than SunView, it's not nearly as shitty as Xaw.
A big contributing factor to Motif's profligate palette consumption was the bevels to make it look "3-D". I think Motif was actually an inept attempt to ape the aesthetically uninspired Microsoft Windows, which was not very popular yet, but which (relevant here) ran fine on 4-bit displays. Because that's what the VGA gave you in 640×480, and a Windows that limited you to 320×200 or 640×200 on a VGA would have been a non-starter.
Open Look had a bit of a 3-D look to it, but for example (original) Macintosh and Genera were pretty flat-looking. GEOS was mostly pretty flat with the exception of the occasional drop shadow. The Newton GUI (postdating Motif) managed to get quite a bit of visual depth out of grayscale, but I don't think the Newton ever had a 1-bit display. The Palm Pilot (postdating Newton) looked like a less ugly GEOS.
In theory there are all kinds of depth cues you can use to get a comprehensively 3-D look on a 1-bit display, but I haven't found a GUI toolkit that managed it.
PC/GEOS had plenty of bevels, if you ran it on a 16 colour display. I recall contemporary reviews said "it looks a lot like Motif" and it really does aside from the distinctive typography and the things they invented from whole cloth
I meant real GEOS, sorry for the confusion.
Yeah, compared to Windows of the time it did come up short in Power User readiness. Especially by 2005. Using it in 2005 seems kinda late in the commercial game for CDE.