3 Decades of OpenWindows

 Yesterday - Jan 1st 2024 - I ported OWacomp + XView to RHEL8 and gcc-8.5. Ihad been using OWacomp on RHEL8 but these binaries were being built on RHEL7 and gcc-3.4.

In the process, I tested some of the 64bit XView codebases available on Git Hub but rolled back because introducing the boost pre-processor broke some OWacomp apps (most notably the filemgr).

In the end, I changed less than 500 lines of C code and I'll be suitable for a few more years.

I'm not a C programmer, I work in IT, but I am not a programmer per trade. If I can keep using the Desktop env (olvwm) that I've been using with just a few hours of code each year, I'm willing to see how far the rabbit hole goes.

I tried asking ChatGPT for help, but the bot did not even -look- at the GitHub repo I had provided, and its help was more or less paraphrasing the C compiler errors. It felt like working with 'Captain Obvious'.

I know it's a lost battle, but I already have a contingency plan in place for the future (Gnome + a lot of extensions), which I am using on my Fedora laptops. But on my RHEL Battlestations, it's OWacomp for as long as I can keep it running.