Other Mixing Motif and Gnome/KDE

I am not familiar with X11 in depth. I have used mainly Gnome on Linux. I like the view of Motif - shape of windows, maximize buttons, etc. I am not sure is it possible to install and use in the same time Motif and Gnome UI? Motif as base GUI and run programs developed for Gnome (or KDE)? Or they are alternatives and cannot work together.
 
If I'm remembering correctly Motif is a widget set, nothing more. It's not a GUI, it's not a Window Manager, it's effectively a "look and feel".
So can you use that and Gnome at the same time? Probably.
But a lot of Gnome Desktop Environments (and others like KDE) do "theming" so you can set a theme and set the way buttons, windows and everything look. Someone may have already create a "motif-like" theme.
 
They work together no problem at all. Similarly to using Qt and Gtk programs together.
Solaris even went through a period where they would use Motif themes for Gtk so that it looks consistent with the native motif programs.

Likewise even if you use the Motif Window Manager (mwm) or CDE's dtwm, these still can render Gtk widgets due to the consistent use of X11 protocol via xlib (or xcb).
 
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motif as an application style in KDE Plasma:

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Funniest part of this whole thread (at least to me) is at one point in time Motif was trademarked and commercial/proprietary. That created "Lesstif" which was effectively "open source" Motif look and feel.
 
Funniest part of this whole thread (at least to me) is at one point in time Motif was trademarked and commercial/proprietary. That created "Lesstif" which was effectively "open source" Motif look and feel.
Lesstif was excellent. A long while back I started the OpenCDE project and used Lesstif so I could easily make tweaks to it and hook in a few things to make the motifmm (C++ bindings) a little cleaner.

Even today I use the Lesstif version of the mwm Window Manager. Mainly because it doesn't have the virtual desktop code stripped out. I consider it a "clean" simple version of Fvwm (which I believe it was originally based on) without the (admittedly impressive) amount of customization.

Motif was big business back then (as demonstrated by the effort needed to make a clone). I predict if Wayland ever actually starts appearing in commercial software, we will see a port of Motif ontop of SDL2 (for portability across fragmented display systems) or something.

Edit: The cool thing on official mwm was that code using the Motif API could draw into the iconified window icons (like an updating clock face or even a 3D rotating model). That was so unbelievably cool. But alas, all those interesting ideas disappeared from common knowledge.
 
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