Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep • Hacker News Board

I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue.

Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#6

Post by totallykvothe » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 3:56 AM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #5

It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around. I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue. Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.

What are your gripes with Elementary? I personally use KDE now, but I used to use Elementary a while ago, and it was very polished

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#7

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 3:59 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#8

Post by alephnerd » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:00 AM UTC

totallykvothe wrote: post #6

alephnerd wrote: post #5

It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around. I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue. Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.

What are your gripes with Elementary? I personally use KDE now, but I used to use Elementary a while ago, and it was very polished

Last I played with Elementary (couple months ago), there was a finickiness and latency issue with icons.

Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective.

Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#9

Post by pabs3 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:15 AM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #3

Not loading for me. Here's an archive mirror [0]. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.c...

Works fine if you don't use https, possibly your browser tries that first?

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#10

Post by pabs3 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:16 AM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #5

It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around. I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue. Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.

There were commits in 2024:

https://github.com/orgs/etoile/repositories