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Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

etoileos.com

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Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#41

Post by gyomu »

linguae wrote: post #11

Étoilé was so promising….the idea of using OpenStep (via GNUstep) infrastructure in ways that went beyond NeXTstep or Mac OS X. It felt like an even deeper embrace of the Smalltalk influences of the OpenStep API to enhance the desktop computing experience. Étoilé wasn’t merely a clone of NeXTstep or Mac OS X; it was its own thing that could’ve been a compelling contender to KDE, GNOME, and even macOS. Unfortunately É…

> Apple seems to be abandoning its Xerox PARC influences as the old guard retires and passes away (RIP Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, and Bill Atkinson)

Haven't those people not had any influence on Apple for a very long time now? Steve has been dead for 15 years, Larry & Bill last worked there ~ 30 years ago.

There's definitely been a "change of the guard" at Apple, but it's not from Xerox PARC people...

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#42

Post by gyomu »

alkonaut wrote: post #40

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 othe…

Yeah, strong Xanadu vibes: cool philosophical idea in principle, in practice comes with heavy technical requirements + wouldn't be that useful to 90% of users 90% of the time.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#43

Post by actionfromafar »

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

Elementary was/is perfectly positioned to adopt Objective C and now that Swift is open source, it too.

Ideally it would have adopted gnustep too but I understand that might have been a tall order to get working. But adopting Objective C and now Swift should have been a no-brainer, at least as a first class supported way of interacting with the APIs, if they didn't want to abandon Vala for themselves.

Instead it's become some kind of Vala Purity Contest it feels like.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#44

Post by actionfromafar »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #20
alephnerd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nontec…

> Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure. It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non…

Amen. And a lot of discoverability comes from long term vision and a reluctance to break things. (Yes, I know, Apple breaks some stuff from time to time.) But in Linux land, you can have major UX things change completely from release to release, so that there is no use learning all the intricacies of a user interface, because the rug pull is probably close.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#45

Post by Someone »

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’ve noticed that most commercial Mac OS X software in the early days were Carbon applications, not Cocoa applications

I think it’s a safe bet there were many more Mac applications than NeXT applications (that’s one of the reasons Carbon was created), so I don’t see how that’s surprising.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#46

Post by grahamlee »

chris_armstrong wrote: post #18

Damn this is a blast from the past - it was such an ambitious project with so many interesting ideas to explore. CoreObject itself was revolutionary in its thinking about distributed document sharing and versioning, let alone some of desktop environment ideas for managing projects. I know Quentin Mathé, kept CoreObject going for a decade longer, but I haven't heard from the rest of those involved for a very long time…

David Chisnall is now at MS Research and does cool things with CHERI making a computing platform that's memory-safe by default.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#47

Post by sunshine-o »

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.

20-25 years ago, one of the problem GNUStep had is it was never packaged in the Linux distros. You had to compile everything.

One of the reason might have been GCC refused to include the Objective C extensions or something like that. I vaguely remember there might have been some legal concerns.

Maybe someone can clarify this.

But damn GNUStep was fast, snappy and a much better platform than let's say Gnome at the time. There was simply no comparison.

You could take a GNUStep app like Mail.app and just compile in Apple IDE and run it on Mac OS X (but the opposite wasn't possible).

It was one of the most impressive Free Software project out there at the time.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#48

Post by bitwize »

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".

That's not far from Nakadish (Natchitoches, Louisiana)!

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#49

Post by pdw »

sunshine-o wrote: post #47
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.

20-25 years ago, one of the problem GNUStep had is it was never packaged in the Linux distros. You had to compile everything. One of the reason might have been GCC refused to include the Objective C extensions or something like that. I vaguely remember there might have been some legal concerns. Maybe someone can clarify this. But damn GNUStep was fast, snappy and a much better platform than let's say Gnome at the tim…

Debian woody (2002) shipped gnustep. I tried it back then, but as far as I remember, it was weird enough that anybody who didn't have NEXTSTEP experience would bounce right off. The floating menus, the weird scrollbars, etc. There were also no non-trivial applications that I can remember.

People back then were looking for something that would be familiar to Windows/Mac users. GNUStep (at least at the time) was not interested in being that.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#50

Post by silon42 »

smaudet wrote: post #37
deaddodo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

I wish there was a good Rust binding for classic Qt...
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