I had to dive into our archive all the way back to 2017 to find the last reference to the MaXX Interactive Desktop, and it seems this wasn’t exactly my fault – the project has been on hiatus since 2020, and is only now coming back to life, as MaXXdesktop v2.2.0 (nickname Octane) Alpha-1 has been released, alongside a promising and ambitious roadmap for the future of the project. For the uninitiated – MaXX is a Linux reimplementation of the IRIX Interactive Desktop with some modernisations and other niceties to make it work properly on modern Linux (and FreeBSD) machines.
MaXX has a unique history in that its creator and lead developer, Eric Masson, managed to secure a special license agreement with SGI way back in 2005, under which he was allowed to recreate, from scratch, the IRIX Interactive Desktop on Linux, including the use of SGI’s trademarks and IRIX’ unique look and feel. It’s important to note that he did not get access to any code – he was only allowed to reverse-engineer and recreate it, and because some of the code falls under this license agreement and some doesn’t, MaXX is not entirely open source; parts of it are, but not all of it. Any new code written that doesn’t fall under the license agreement is released as open source though, and the goal is to, over time, make everything open source.
And as you can tell from this v2.2.0 screenshot, MaXX looks stunning even at 4K.
This new alpha version contains the first changes to adopt the freedesktop.org application specifications, a new Exposé-like window overview, tweaks to the modernised version of the IRIX look and feel (the classic one is also included as an option), desktop notifications, performance improvements, various modernisations to the window manager, and so, so much more. For the final release of 2.2.0 and later releases, more changes are planned, like brand new configuration and system management panels, a quick search tool, a new file manager, and a ton more.
MaXX runs on RHEL/Rocky and Ubuntu, and probably more Linux distributions, and FreeBSD, and is entirely free.