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> Gershwin is a desktop environment based on GNUstep welcoming to switchers. Might be just me, but that feels like an odd description. Assuming I'm understanding the intent correctly, perhaps something like > Gershwin is a desktop environment based on GNUstep but made more intuitive for users coming from other desktops might be easier to understand?
Really, anything that can adhere to the old-school HIG well enough to offer A) consistent keyboard shortcuts across the apps that B) use a dedicated, thumb-actuated command key, I'm sold. (The `control` key, and thereby your pinkie finger, should both only be used for sending terminal escape sequences, as god intended [1].)
Interesting. I wonder what happened to Étoilé which was supposed to fill this niche and was chucking along fine until about 2015 or so. It got pretty far too with the underlying components.
At least one of the lead developers of Étoilé moved on to CHERI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m working on something similar for Linux. Would love to chat if this is interesting to you. The idea is to bring the UX of OSX Snow Leopard back, adjusted for today’s possibilities (better developer experience, AI, etc.). I’m developing a DE, SwiftUI/AppKit-equivalent, and a bunch of reference apps I‘m personally missing in terms of quality (e.g. Raycast/Spotlight, Mail).
Is there a link for this project? It sounds exciting!
Why not use elementary OS which looks far better?
Mac users looking to switch want the whole package: the aesthetics, the functionality, the design philosophy, and the holistic approach.
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> There were a few other similar projects a few years back Notably the Hello System, by Simon Peter, AKA probonopd. I looked at that, too. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/hellosystem_08/ Probonopd is now involved with Gershwin and was quite active in its Github when I looked.
I am absolutely blown away to have the author of AppImage (Probono) partnering with me on a project I started that to be honest I didn't know if it would ever go anywhere. There is no better validation, and this is exactly what the spirit of creating open source solutions is all about for me. I wish I had known now years ago about GNUstep earlier. I took a path of learning FreeBSD deeper instead in 2004 when I starte…
:-)
> which eventually brought me to making FuryBSD for a short time.
Ahaaaa. I did not realise that. Perhaps you should mention that in a FAQ or something? I think tying the different projects together like that would make it clear there is a quite considerable bit of history in here.
> I am very much looking forward to seeing the cool things we can do together in 2026!
Kudos for the positivity.
I left the GNUstep community a year or so back, after the admins got angry with me for daring to have opinions about the project that differ from theirs.
I think that as well as (1) a set of development libraries, it's also (2) a quite impressive set of apps, (3) an app packaging format, and perhaps most importantly (4) a quite complete desktop environment. They only seem to care about #1 and regard points 2-4 as annoying distractions.
For what it's worth, I know of two other active, current GNUstep-based desktop environments, which have slightly different focuses.
1. Ondrej Florian's GSDE: https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html
I've written a bit about this:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_deskto...
I had great difficulty getting it to build on Debian 13, but I should try again at some point.
2. Sergii Stoian's NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
Slightly more mature but Stoian's been distracted recently by Russia invading his country, so it's not seen much work of late.
Why not use elementary OS which looks far better?
It's a good distro and I like it. It's easy, it has good accessibility, and as you say, it looks great. But I tried daily-driving it for a short time and found it too limiting for me. Once I'd manually installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, VLC, LibreOffice, Ferdium, Panwriter, VirtualBox and my other everyday tools, I wasn't using a lot of the distro's own tools any more, and suddenly the ones I was (settings, file manager, app launcher) became limiting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am absolutely blown away to have the author of AppImage (Probono) partnering with me on a project I started that to be honest I didn't know if it would ever go anywhere. There is no better validation, and this is exactly what the spirit of creating open source solutions is all about for me. I wish I had known now years ago about GNUstep earlier. I took a path of learning FreeBSD deeper instead in 2004 when I starte…
> I am absolutely blown away to have the author of AppImage (Probono) partnering with me :-) > which eventually brought me to making FuryBSD for a short time. Ahaaaa. I did not realise that. Perhaps you should mention that in a FAQ or something? I think tying the different projects together like that would make it clear there is a quite considerable bit of history in here. > I am very much looking forward to seeing t…
We do largely operate outside of GNUstep. Now we approach it like let us be the desktop, let them be the core libs. My take is I do think GNUstep should be marketed as more of a cross platform solution to build applications than anything else. You are more than welcome to come discuss ideas with us at Gershwin anytime.
GSDE (Screenshot.app), more so NextSpace a lot of things do not work with a lot of modifications on FreeBSD for example and I found the build systems unexpectedly difficult. I am a fan of the efforts otherwise and will try to make Gershwin components like WindowManager.app something they could use if they want to make use of in the future. I think each project has a place, and a role in promoting GNUstep. I wish they each had Live ISO's with installers. There is also agnostep now that looks promising by the way. https://github.com/pcardona34/agnostep
Why not use elementary OS which looks far better?
I recently began porting Ladybird from QT to GNUstep and the results are a 20 minute build on low powered raspberry pi vs 3 hours using most of the same APIs from AppKit. I believe I can take the same code, and make it build on Windows. I suppose this is my elevator pitch as to why.