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Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
71–80 of 116 posts
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#72Étoilé 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…
Sounds nice, but back in the day I couldn’t get it to work…
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#73I think if you're going to use words with ambiguous pronunciations as your product name you should at least let the reader know what it rhymes with.
That being said, this looks like it could turn into a really cool project.
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#74Earlier 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.
It only having first class bindings for C++ and Python is a problem for a lot of folks, though. Plenty don’t want to write either.
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The churn is real. For this reason, I’ve thought for a while now that a DE that intentionally locks its overall design and feature set once it hits 1.0, with 95% of engineering effort being put towards optimization and bug fixes afterwards would do well. A DE that doesn’t unexpectedly change even over the course of many years is massively attractive to many.
Probably the closest to this that exists now are XFCE and Cinnamon, but it’s for the wrong reason (those projects’ lack of resources).
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#76I 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…
> 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.
I dunno if it was a joke or not, but I can confirm that I used Windowmaker as my daily driver from around 2004-ish to 2019-ish.[1]
The only reason I switched, and did not switch back, is due wanting my virtual desktops to be arranged in a 3x3 grid, and Windowmaker did not have that, nor was it on any roadmap.
The thing I miss about my Windowmaker days is how focused it let me be - the entire screen was devoted to a window (or multiple windows); nothing crying out for attention in some bar at the bottom of the screen.
Should I get a few free moments in the near future, I'm tempted to actually add that feature in.
All the other things (taskbar, wifi/sound/etc controls in the taskbar) I can either do without (i.e. I don't need it if I have a decent launcher that is bound to a shortcut), or I can use an existing dockapp.
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[1] Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W_4fH_ccQE
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for sharing this interview link! I didn’t know that Étoilé was inspired by Alan Kay’s STEPS project. It makes a lot of sense. It would have been really cool to see a desktop environment that pushed Alan Kay’s ideas further.
Chisnall has stated several times over on Lobsters that he's thinking of basing is future project on Arcan ( https://arcan-fe.com/ ). It's a very interesting project.
This thing about Arcan is that the writing about it is almost deliberately incomprehensible.
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that most active, current Linux users see fragmentation as a good thing, because they absolutely don't want consolidation of power. Many will point to a time when GNOME reigned supreme, and how did they use that power? To repeatedly completely redesign the GUI in ways that the community hated, because "we know better". There is a much larger group of people who would support "One Desktop Framework To Rule The…
Wait, did Gnome ever reign supreme? I feel like there was always a back and forth with Gnome and KDE?
I'd say that the momentum in the 1999-2001 timeframe was almost overwhelming, with a lot of buzz around the likes of Eazel and Helixcode, together with the excitement of Sun choosing it for Solaris.
It was certainly enough to push GNUstep/Windowmaker and Enlightenment into "also-ran" territory.
If Gnome 2 had come out a year before the dotcom crash rather than the year after, I think it probably would have definitively overtaken KDE as well. In the event, it didn't work out that way - and, as you say, KDE did enough to hang on (thanks largely to Konqueror!)
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#79GNUStep 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.
The main issue of GNUStep was that, when KDE appeared, the GNU project used GTK+ as a base for GNOME, instead of GNUStep. This basically killed the momentum behind GNUStep as a base for the official GNU Desktop. It is sad because GNUStep is incredible, the IDEs alone are more advanced than anything in GNOME-space, even today. Oh well...
There's a lot of "oh well" in the tech space. I was watching something on Pick OS yesterday, which I hadn't even heard of, which was a kind of filesystem/database/OS all together that was, if the comments on the video mean anything, quite loved.
But like BeOS (also loved) and other things just never got traction for various reasons.
I used Windowmaker for a lot of years as it was lightweight and I liked the UI, and always wondered "why not this? why ape Windows of all things?" The answer is usually something along the lines of "that's what people know," and I get it, but still.
I guess I miss the times when computers were cool.
Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep
#80Relevant -- there are 2 other desktop environments built on GNUstep that are in more active maintainance. NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace GSDE: https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html <- More recent, native to Debian but runs on other things.
Thanks for this. So, if I were to run GNUStep as my desktop, what would I be missing from KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc?