longing for Irix

grad studentgrad student
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
OK, I love mac os X, most of it apple seems to have done right (aside from a few of my major complaints...). However... is anyone here an SGI refugee? who misses some of the nicer parts of Irix? Such as clean window management. No frills (as in no wasted time for eye candy) yet gorgeous UI? I dunno... I sometimes wonder why apple couldn't have gotten windows to grow from any corner... and why the window widgets are so small compared to the title bar size (i.e. they should have been larger...), or why minimizing windows is so slow, and inflexible.. I find myself missing Irix a lot lately. Perhaps it has something to do with my dabbling in Maya on OS X, and how it doesn't feel quite right... what are your thoughts?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    stimulistimuli Posts: 564member
    My thoughts are: what a lucky bastard you are! I've always wanted to mess with SGI (MIPS, not that lamer x86 crap that crashes every 5 mins... grrr...) boxes,

    peep out irix. I've heard old machines, even today, do beautiful, cripsy FSAA double-buffered realtime graphics.



    Nothing gives me a hard-on like some good, tasty VR. OK, maybe sex, and art, but besides sex and art, nothing else.



    (I briefly dabbled in realtime graphics for my grad piece at art school April 2002)



    Anyway, all this talk about VR and SGIs has gone and gotten me all hot and bothered. Be back in 10 mins or so...
  • Reply 2 of 8
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    Ah Irix...Who doesn't love the ability to set a null root password!? <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
  • Reply 3 of 8
    hotboxdhotboxd Posts: 125member
    anyplace i can find some screenshots of irix?
  • Reply 4 of 8
    smithjoelsmithjoel Posts: 240member
    <a href="http://www.sgi.com/software/irix/desktop.html"; target="_blank">From SGI's site</a>
  • Reply 5 of 8
    davechendavechen Posts: 56member
    I dunno. Irix's user interface is getting pretty long in the tooth. As far as I can tell it hasn't changed in 5 years, maybe longer.



    I have my feet in multiple camps. Some of our machines are SGI (an Onyx2 and an Octane2). I have an SGI Linux box on my desk, and a Titanium Powerbook that I carry around. My next machine will probably be a Mac, if those IBM processors come our way.



    It'd be nice on the Mac if you didn't have to click on windows to raise them. But it's probably confuse the heck out of newbies.



    I just find it's different interacting with Mac's versus X windows. On X windows I spend most of the time on the keyboard, only occasionally using the mouse to change windows. On Mac's more interaction is done with the mouse.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    stimulistimuli Posts: 564member
    davechen: in what WM? Irix? I use X w/ fluxbox on top, and all my interaction is w/ the mouse. Scroll wheel to different desktops, right-click for menu, left-click to select.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    My friend and I found a couple of old Indy's (With the 5300 MIPS, no less) in a dumpster. Too bad they are looking to netboot. Gotta dig the cheesy startup power-chords.



    But I see what you mean. Irix's GUI looks like a nicer version of what I consider Gnome to look like.



    We'll find a way to get IRIX loaded on. They all have SCSI internals.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    davechendavechen Posts: 56member
    [quote]Originally posted by stimuli:

    <strong>davechen: in what WM? Irix? I use X w/ fluxbox on top, and all my interaction is w/ the mouse. Scroll wheel to different desktops, right-click for menu, left-click to select.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    On Irix I use the default 4Dwm. On Linux is run KDE 3. I just find that on Unix systems I do most things in shells using the command line. With the mouse I just change occasionally resize windows.
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