Motif can certainly do antialiased font rendering and could do for many years now, but this is most likely configured to use these fonts as you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources to use antialiasing.
"you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources"
I hope you can understand that any time you say something like this, or tell people to edit xorg.conf or some other cryptic config file, or tell people to put random commands in their bash profile, or something like that, it kind of makes the software appear to be not really modern or usable. Sorry. (This is not specific to CDE, pretty much all Linux desktops suffer from this bad usability at some point)
The claim was that CDE is modern, not that is easy to use. TBH i wouldn't really call it modern either, but that is largely because "modern" is a vague nondescriptive term that practically means nothing (and it certainly doesn't mean anything related to ease of use :-P). Helpful for PR and marketing, not so much for technical stuff.
And IMO pretty much everyone who posted here focused on superficial things like how fonts render instead of practical things like what sort of desktop standards does it support - e.g. can it parse .desktop files to fill application lists? Can it support tray icons so that, e.g., if i run Steam i get an icon somewhere for it? How about some more recent standards like displaying application progress bars (where that makes sense)?
IMO think these are more important and a much better indicator about the state of a desktop environment than how fonts render (which isn't even something CDE itself does anyway).
Actually last time I tried CDE, maybe a few years ago, there were multiple areas where it was not possible to configure something with a GUI. Not just fonts. In fact there were buttons in various settings panels that when you clicked them, would launch a text editor in an xterm window to edit a config file with no explanation of what you're supposed to be doing. I thought that was totally ridiculous. Sorry I can't mention something more specific but it was a while ago and I could be remembering it incorrectly.
For a modern desktop I would also expect wayland support, and integration with networkmanager, pulseaudio/pipewire, udisks, things like that, which also didn't seem to be implemented last time I checked, but if any of this has changed then please let me know. Systrays and desktop files are like 15-20 years old so that's not really a compelling case for modern features...
Well, i also used CDE years ago so i don't know. As i wrote i wouldn't call it modern either but again the reason would be different :-P
Some of the stuff i mentioned (and some you did) might be possible with 3rd party applications - i think the panel can embed small X apps to provide some functionality. In Window Maker (which is what i use) there isn't really tray icon support by WM but there is a "dockapp" (essentially a tiny X app that lives inside the Window Maker dock) that provides it. Something like that (or exactly that dockapp, it is an X application after all) might work for CDE for providing tray icons. Similarly for udisks and pulseaudio.
Doesn't it defeat the purpose if you have to use third party apps? I thought the point was to get a modern Motif desktop, what does that matter if you're just going to install half the desktop from Wmaker or GNUstep or whatever.
Having independent components that can be integrated with various window managers and lightweight DE's is the most UNIX-way of combining bits and pieces for flexibility and builting something for what on other systems one will need heavy machinery of C/C++ libraries and man-hours.
Just imagine grep, cut, sed or awk ... as mime/content dependent tools which can be used only with XFCE. This whould be UNIX (dead end) if this thinking of "build everyting your own to work just for itself" attitude has been practiced back then, long ago. Sometimes it looks like past was the better future.
I'm talking about things as stalonetray, dunst, xsettingsd, xscreensaver, dex and such ... which can nicely fit in CDE, NsCDE, as well as in WindowMaker, i3, Enightenment, FluxBox, OpenBox etc ...
Not really, this sort of thinking is something that came waaay later in the Linux desktop. One of X's advantages is that you can do exactly that and some other desktops like LXDE are basically made up by bringing together separate components.
(also the deskapps i mentioned aren't using GNUstep, they're either pure X or some other toolkit)
Yeah but if you're just going to swap out half the components anyway then you might as well just use KDE or something and do the same thing. And in my experience, that's a great way to get a desktop that's really inconsistent and doesn't work half the time because some random component is using the wrong set of X atoms or the wrong X resources or the wrong Dbus interface or whatever, so I don't know if I would say that's an advantage...
That's just hyperbole, using some existing element in CDE or LXDE or whatever isn't like using KDE - you still get the interface that CDE or LXDE provides. I do not see how you'd make that conclusion.
And i don't know what sort of experiences you had but at least personally i never had any issues with desktops made out of separate components. I mean, consider that Raspberry Pi OS' default desktop is basically a modified LXDE which is made up of a bunch of independent pieces.
Also TBH what you describe with "doesn't work half the time because some random component is using the wrong set of X atoms or the wrong X resources or the wrong Dbus interface or whatever" doesn't make sense. If an application used the wrong X atoms or wrong X resources or wrong Dbus interfaces it wouldn't work at all regardless of which DE it is used with.
Well they may work in some way but you'll see degraded functionality. I don't think it's hyperbole, every X window manager and panel, dock, etc that I've seen has support for a seemingly random jumble of motif and EWMH hints, and rarely will they support all of them. If you're using the standard Xresources then those might sometimes work in other apps, like Tcl/Tk and maybe FLTK I think supports it, but other things, not so much. And if you want good high DPI support with those apps then forget it.
I cannot remember what the Raspberry Pi default desktop looks or acts like as I haven't used that in forever, sorry. All I remember is not liking it for other reasons, i.e. the DRM/KMS driver performance was too poor to be able to handle a compositor or play a 1080p video. But maybe that has changed recently?
I tried Rasberry Pi OS recently on a Pi 2 so it was still slow (especially since i had a very awful microsd card - i'm certain that 99% of the slowness was due to the card) but the desktop was very consistent overall. Note that at the past they used LXDE with Rasbian but didn't made any customizations at all.
Correct, those "launcher" panels were not configurable by GUI. You had to edit config files. I spent considerable time figuring that out back in college. GUI configurability is definitely something I would expect in a modern desktop.
I get that remark in the absolute, but here we are talking about an article about how to get and compile CDE from source on a Debian 10. In which case your fear that setting up Xft font rendering via X resources is an insurmontable task to get a modern and usable system that you are literally building is maybe a little bit off-topic.
