EMWM is a fork of the Motif Window Manager with fixes and enhancements. The idea behind this is to provide compatibility with current xorg extensions and applications, without changing the way the window manager looks and behaves. This includes support for multi-monitor setups through Xinerama/Xrandr, UFT-8 support with Xft fonts, and overall better compatibility with software that requires Extended Window Manager Hints.
Additionally a couple of goodies are available in the separate utilities package: XmToolbox, a toolchest like application launcher, which reads it’s multi-level menu structure from a simple plain-text file ~/.toolboxrc, and XmSm, a simple session manager that provides session configuration, locking and shutdown/suspend options.
↫ EMWM homepage
I had never heard of EMWM, but I immediately like it. This same developer, Alexander Pampuchin, also develops XFile, a file manager for X11 which presents the file system as it actually is, instead of using a bunch of “imaginary” locations to hide the truth, if you will. On top of that, they also develop XImaging, a comprehensive image viewer for X11. All of these use the Motif widget toolkit, focus on plain X11, and run on most Linux distributions and BSDs. They need to be compiled by the user, most likely.
I am convinced that there is a small but sustainable audience for a modern, up-to-date Linux distribution (although a BSD would work just as well), that instead of offering GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or whatever, focuses instead of delivering a traditional, yet modernised and maintained, desktop environment and applications using not much more than X11 and Motif, eschewing more complex stuff like GTK, Qt, systemd, Wayland, and so on.
I would use the hell out of a system that gives me a version of the Motif-based desktops like CDE from the ’90s, but with some modern amenities, current hardware support, support for high-resolution displays, and so on. You can certainly grab bits and bobs left and right from the web and build something like this from scratch, but not everyone has the skills and time to do so, yet I think there’s enough people out there who are craving for something like this.
There’s tons of maintained X11/Motif software out there – it’s just all spread out, disorganised, and difficult to assemble because it almost always means compiling it all from scratch, and most people simply don’t have the time and energy for that. Package this up on a solid Debian, Fedora, or FreeBSD base, and I think you’ve got quite some users lining up.