Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep • Hacker News Board

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#31

Post by deaddodo » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:30 AM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #28

tombert wrote: post #15

I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it. It bothers me a bit, though. Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, and I think GNUStep could have been that…

> Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass GNOME works great if your language has good bindings for it. Qt is a bit more iffy but still usable if you need cross-platform.

I would argue that it’s heavily in the other direction, having developed fairly extensively in both.

The QT Linux ecosystem is far more cohesive and consistent and QT apps work more seamlessly between KDE, Windows, and MacOS. In my opinion, at least.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#32

Post by flomo » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:31 AM UTC

linguae wrote: post #17

pjmlp wrote: post #12

GNUStep is a good example that the bare bones language and compiler being open source it is not enough, when everything else doesn't come along. Saying this as someone that used Afterstep and Windowmaker alongside GNUStep, and did seat a few times on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM. Last time I checked was at the level of OS X Panther, and modern Objective-C still wasn't supported.

I’ve been periodically keeping up with GNUstep’s progress since 2004, when I first learned about it as a high school student brand new to Linux and Mac OS X (I grew up on Windows at home and on classic Macs in elementary school). I even wrote a report for a community college class on the history of Mac OS X. I’ve wanted to see GNUstep succeed, but unfortunately it never got as much attention as the KDE/Qt and GNOME/G…

> I have some theories as to why

Curious what those might be.

I think might not have been so simple as well "Jobs = Le Bad". There might have been some oldskool unix thinking about linking. (Both commercial and gnu.) And *Step was a dynamic message API, so it "didn't fit their model". Total speculation I have to admit. It also seemed like a commercial dead-end pre-iphone.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#33

Post by SillyUsername » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:35 AM UTC

I miss the days of Sun Solaris' CDE desktop.

Afterstep looks too much like Stardock's Window Blinds from around 2000 (see the weird glass effect, font etc), but Etolie seems to nail the aesthetic for me.

I hope this comes back, I'd love to use it on an old netbook I have for accessing my servers remotely.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#34

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:45 AM UTC

fuzzfactor wrote: post #22

The state of Texas is well-known as the "Lone Star" state, and appropriately enough there is a small town in east Texas known as Etoile, Texas. This is not even that far from the border with Louisiana and some of the unsettled parts of that old French territory. But they can really tell if you are from around those parts or not, since the correct local pronunciation of the word etoile is of course "yeetaw".

[deleted]

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#35

Post by gnoack » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:47 AM UTC

SillyUsername wrote: post #33

I miss the days of Sun Solaris' CDE desktop. Afterstep looks too much like Stardock's Window Blinds from around 2000 (see the weird glass effect, font etc), but Etolie seems to nail the aesthetic for me. I hope this comes back, I'd love to use it on an old netbook I have for accessing my servers remotely.

CDE was open sourced a while back: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#36

Post by gnoack » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

fithisux wrote: post #16

GNUStep lost its opportunity to use D to go further and stuck with old ObjC. Very good piece of software though.

Etoile had its own Smalltalk dialect back in the day, Pragmatic Smalltalk. This was a Smalltalk based on the Objective-C runtime, based on an OMeta implementation and a LLVM backend. David Chisnall, who created it at the time, ended up getting involved more in LLVM in the long run, I believe.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#37

Post by smaudet » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

deaddodo wrote: post #31

bigyabai wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass GNOME works great if your language has good bindings for it. Qt is a bit more iffy but still usable if you need cross-platform.

I would argue that it’s heavily in the other direction, having developed fairly extensively in both. The QT Linux ecosystem is far more cohesive and consistent and QT apps work more seamlessly between KDE, Windows, and MacOS. In my opinion, at least.

Agreed. Qt, for all it's flaws, focused on cross platform. Despite getting sold/resold nearly to oblivion, it had a commercial end (some paying customers), and so it received a level of polish that gtk just never did.

Not to mention, when the gtk3 devs went off the deepend, completely broke backwards compat so they could try some new UI...and you couldn't consistently run gtk on Linux...

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#38

Post by wolvesechoes » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 7:07 AM UTC

qiqitori wrote: post #21

tombert wrote: post #15

I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it. It bothers me a bit, though. Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, and I think GNUStep could have been that…

But what if that One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All had sucked? :)

Definitely wouldn't be worse than multiple desktop frameworks that suck.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#39

Post by wolvesechoes » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 7:15 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #15

I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it. It bothers me a bit, though. Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, and I think GNUStep could have been that…

> Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All

Not going to happen. And even if it would happen, very soon there would be a split, because some super important addition to CoC wasn't accepted, or because someone committed a wrongthink on a public platform, or because some patch of snowflake dev superstar was rejected, or whatever else.

Hell, even Microsoft cannot agree with Microsoft on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, so it is hard to expect that from the Linux crowd.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#40

Post by alkonaut » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 7:37 AM UTC

Technically, how does the "every UI action is a commit on a DVCS graph" work? Would every application that is a native étoilé app use this api to construct its UX and document formats? And every app that is not would _not_ have this?

That feels like an ambitious but perhaps misdirected invention of a new paradigm because you'd basically have a native text editor and two other utilities which use it, and then the other five dozen apps would not?