Re: Why is GNUstep less successful than GTK and Qt??

[Boudewijn Rempt]

jonathon wrote:

> Is it because they are C/C++ based?

Well, I've been playing with GNUStep for over a year now, and I can offer
the following reasons:

* A GNUStep GUI application needs a complete GNUStep environment to be
useful; the applications don't mix very well with other X11 apps, yet
GNUStep specifically states they are not building a desktop environment.

* It's only in the past six months or so that GNUStep is becoming usable at
all, and even now it's quite hard to follow the simplest ProjectCenter +
Gorm tutorial because of crashes.

* Most GNUStep applications are quite primitive compared to comparable KDE
(and perhaps Gnome applications)

* Getting a decent set of apps together demands hunting all over the net,
instead of fishing them from a single CVS repository.

* GNUStep and objective-c look like a good, clean API and lots of fun to
hack against, but so's Qt got a good, clean API and is lots of fun to hack
against. And Qt's got good Python bindings.

On the other hand...

* The promise of Free portability between OS X and X11 (and Windows, but I
don't care much about that) is very enticing. Qt is portable over those
platforms, too, but Qt for Windows or OS X is not free. The reason I've
been looking into GNUStep is that I need to write an application that is
native to both Linux and OS X (ie. doesn't use X11 on OS X) -- and I hate
Swing.

* Objective C apps compile _very_ fast compared to C++ apps.

* GNUStep promises the same ease of application distribution and extension
as OS X (not surprisingly).

* The defaults GNUStep look is gorgeous in a very clean and understated way.
Vertical menus means at least one more visible line of text in my
application, too, compared to horizontal menus.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org