My Concern [LWN.net]

My Concern

Posted Oct 5, 2006 20:57 UTC (Thu) by Rotwang (guest, #40943)
In reply to: My Concern by ajross
Parent article: Fedora Core to drop openmotif

Big? Slow? Weird? Buggy? IMO all those adjective apply to GTK+ much more than to Motif.

Motif appeared "big" and "slow" on 1992 vintage computers with inefficient operating systems (no shared libraries... 16 MB RAM... etc). Today, Motif's HD and memory footprints are tiny compared to GTK+. And it's much faster. Of course, the reason for this is that it lacks many of the features of GTK+. Many of these are very useful (e.g. lots of great widgets), some are quite useless. I have worked with Motif for 10+ years, with Qt for a few years, and on and off with GTK+. If you find Motif more weird than GTK+, I suspect that you haven't given it a fair chance. Also, in my experience, Motif had by far the lowest defect/bug count of ANY widget set I've ever worked with. I say "had" because early versions of OpenMotif 2.2 added some really nasty bugs. And of course, many programmers will blame Motif if their badly written application doesn't work as they expect.

Enough of that rant. Most of you aren't interested in such conflicting opinions anyway. My real issues with this decision are:

1. While LessTif compiles and runs most Motif apps seemingly okay, it is several orders of magnitude more buggy, so it causes apps to crash or otherwise misbehave much more often. Which will easily turn off users of excellent applications like DDD or NEdit. The thought that a maintainer thinks that just because an app compiles and starts up with LessTif means that switching is no problem gives me the creeps. QA is obviously not a concern in Fedora.

2. LessTif is ugly as sin -- it doesn't implement the CDE/Motif 2 look (thin frames, etched-in menus, etc) which makes any Motif app look much better once you set 4 resources in your .Xdefaults file.

3. Many corporations, including mine, write vertical/application-specific software in Motif. The OS of choice is very often Linux. Switching from Motif to a buggy, incomplete, hardly-worked-on clone just because the license is "more open" is not an option. Yes, they can get OpenMotif elsewhere and link statically or include libXm.so with their software. But this move makes it harder, breaks old distributions, and generally adds work. Why do they still use Motif? (a) Because it does what they need it to do, (b) because the few bugs in it are well known and so are the workarounds, (c) because rewriting millions of lines of code isn't something you do on a whim and certainly not to a widget set that changes its API in incompatible ways every three months, (d) because the users are satisfied with it.

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