Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep • Hacker News Board

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#81

Post by wirrbel » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

LeFantome wrote: post #23

linguae wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, GNUstep has always had an Interface Builder: https://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html My own take is actually that GNUstep spent too long trying to be an OpenStep successor instead of being a way to run Mac apps on Linux. It took them ages to even clarify if it was a desktop environment or an SDK (and I am not sure it is even clear now). There has never been a tonne of love for Objective C either. Prett…

I think there was a funding campaign once where a developer offered to re-implement the missing Apple APIs, but since they basically put up a standard salary it didn't reach the funding target.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#82

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

roryirvine wrote: post #78

tombert wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 definitive…

Meanwhile many of the folks responsible for those companies are now working with Microsoft and Apple technologies, which kind of tells how much they runned out of steam trying to make a useful GNU/Linux desktop.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#83

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

wolvesechoes wrote: post #39

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 rejecte…

At least with Microsoft there is still Win32, with Linux fragmentation not even that, Xlib and Athena are long gone, and aren't full stack as Win32.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#84

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 2:56 PM 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.

Unfortunately D is still trying to find out what is the killer application that would push for industry's adoption.

Also D semantics have nothing to do with something that builds out OpenSTEP.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#85

Post by lproven » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 3:13 PM UTC

chrsw wrote: post #80

lproven wrote: post #69

Relevant -- 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?

Hmmm. Interesting question.

Obviously enough there are not a great many native GNUstep apps. It's Linux, though, so there are a million alternatives, but they won't share GNUstep's look, feel, keystrokes, etc.

It comes with a file manager, both plain text and rich text editors, image viewers, a chat client, a pretty good email app, a terminal emulator (possibly a choice of them too), and GSDE also provides a web browser, although it's a wrapper around Chromium. It works pretty well.

There are lots of programming tools available too, including Gorm, which broadly replicates NeXT's Interface Builder.

Pic from one of my own machines here:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/07/05/deb_11_gsde.jpg

I wrote about it (and Lomiri):

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_deskto...

I think it's beautiful, myself, but then I consider NeXTstep to be the high-water mark in desktop GUI design thus far.

I find GNUstep's choice of accelerator keys weird and frustrating, though.

I do not run it as my daily driver, but I am thinking about it.

The installation takes a while but it's a `git clone` followed by a few scripts. It's not actually difficult. It took me a few hours but that's because my VM kept crashing.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#86

Post by const_cast » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

wolvesechoes wrote: post #38

qiqitori wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Current desktop frameworks are quite good. KDE/Qt are incredibly mature at this point. GTK still has a decent amount of churn.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#87

Post by guestbest » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

They had a really good blog with the intricacies for objc, but when swift came out in 2014/5. It all stopped. It’s good to hear that they moved on to to other things, though.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#88

Post by mongol » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

Isn't GNUStep extremely old? I remember seing a webpage before even KDE existed. But I have never seem a GNUStep desktop. Just the window manager, it was popular for a while

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#89

Post by lproven » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

lproven wrote: post #85

chrsw wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. So, if I were to run GNUStep as my desktop, what would I be missing from KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc?

Hmmm. Interesting question. Obviously enough there are not a great many native GNUstep apps. It's Linux, though, so there are a million alternatives, but they won't share GNUstep's look, feel, keystrokes, etc. It comes with a file manager, both plain text and rich text editors, image viewers, a chat client, a pretty good email app, a terminal emulator (possibly a choice of them too), and GSDE also provides a web brow…

I forgot to mention... GNUstep's recommended window manager is Window Maker, which is still alive and in active maintenance with new versions coming out.

There are lots of little Window Maker applets out there to choose from, so you can accessorize your GSDE (or NEXTSPACE) setup with wm-applets and docklets for volume, sound output, mic control, power management, and all those little fripperies that other desktops come with or can do.

A slight limitation is that GNUstep has its own dock and suggests disabling the Window Maker dock, but you can go the other way round and disable the dock provided by GNUstep Workspace and use the WM dock instead.

Also, it is worth mentioning that there is a new entrant in the "GNUstep based desktop environment" race: Gershwin.

https://github.com/gershwin-desktop

Currently only available in GhostBSD though.

Re: Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

#90

Post by xvilka » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

gnoack wrote: post #35

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/

First, they should move to GitHub or GitLab (or Codeberg) to attract more contributors and make the process of development easier. Maybe it could also be ported to support Wayland and Unicode properly, and remove some legacy code to ease up the maintenance.