Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It’s codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows their SGI history will chuckle at this and other codenames MaXX uses.
Like last year’s alpha release, 2.2.0 brings an Exposé-like overview features, initial freedesktop.org integration, tons of performance improvements and bug fixes, desktop notifications, and much more. For the next release, 2.3.0 they’re planning a new file manager, support for .desktop files, a ton of new preference panes, a quick search feature, and a whole bunch of lower-level stuff. With how serious the renewed development effort seems, I hope that some day, the project will consider building MaXX out to a full Linux distribution, to gain more control over the experience and ensure normal users don’t have to perform a manual installation.
Wish I could get it running on a Raspberry Pi.
Years and years ago when I was involved in the project, we did an internal Ubuntu MaXX spin. It was buggy but it worked okay. Then Eric pulled one of his usual multiyear vanishing acts and it fell by the wayside. I’d love to see this new filemanager that has literally been promised for years.
I am pretty good at vanishing… I will give you that. This is not an excuse, but hopefully will hint you about what I am up to – https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/people/eric-masson
I and many people in the PowerPC community are more than happy to lend a hand to help it port to PPC64 architecture. I hope one day you could get an agreement with SGI to publicly open the source code.
I’m having a great time running IRIX on Ubuntu. It was always such a classy desktop. I’ve got three O2’s in the workroom just to boot them up from time to time to admire the UI, but god knows you can’t run Firefox on any of them.
Are there plans to move this to wayland? I mean who from a user and or developer standpoint view wants to invest time into something new and base that on a technology that was just declared obsolete (please do not start some holy war about wayland vs x-windows i do not care for that, i am a pragmatic user, who just cares for something that works. Same goes for another project called nextspace, why x-windows? I have found several people in various sources online asking for a simple environment under wayland so there it could really find its place. This question became even more interesting, when i had to install all these oldschool dependencies (which also a lot of distributions are not bundling anymore into the default choices etc. and who installs several services etc. on his system when its just for one environment. Just wondering how this can workout, and even more now knowing the author has a tendency to vanish regularly does not further help the concerns if this is a hobby environment from a fan or something that wants to be a serious alternative being productively usable at some point (my point of view thats only cosmic at the moment showing such potential)
Most probably because it is based on the original.
If you go to the author’s page, the author claims access to original code and elements through a license, meaning that this is more akin to a continuation of SGI’s work rather than a fresh design.
The thing I have always like about these older DEs was the absolute clarity between what part of the window was reserved for tools and menus and which part was the user’s working area.
I’ll second that, and add that consistently organized menus with highlighted/discoverable hotkeys, clearly-defined resize handles, and consistently-styled menubars are all Cool and Good, and I’m glad to see someone developing a DE and (I think) toolkit that allows them.
Like, I understand the value of client-side decorations on small screens, but on an actual workstation I’ll give up a little screen real estate for the sake of keeping controls easy to find and windows easy to move and resize.