Re: Starting GNUstep (Debian)

[Patrix]

This is a good point and, imho, one of the reasons GNOME and KDE are
more widely used - I remember using KDE 0.0.2 or whatever early
version they had, and I could _use_ it. It had a window manager, a
panel and a file manager that crashed every time I dragged something
to the trash. But I could use it.

GNUstep however always maintained they were implementing the OpenStep
api and not a desktop environment, and for a long while didn't have a
usable environment (except for GNUMail.app). So of course, users like
me would see this and say - hm? There's nothing to use here and move
on to gnome or kde, even though I liked the elegance of the *step gui
and api.

Even today, with GWorkspace and all those cool applications, they
still don't feel like they're integrated together and make sense
together - It's still just a collection of apps that somewhat work
together. And the project has been going on for 10 years!

I don't pretend to have the solution though ;) GNOME's constant
release cycle seems good - one release every 6 months no matter what
(whch means features that can't be complete for the release will have
to wait for the next release). I suppose there needs to be a team (is
there one already?) actively steering the desktop environment portion
of it, interacting with the gnustep developpers, dedicated to making
something usable out of it. An organized team.

Wouldn't that be great? Hopefully it's not too late... Maybe I'm just
dreaming cause I'm graduating from software engineering and my head is
full of project development theory?

As for starting in GDM, there is no "GNUstep" environemtn in itself. I
have built myself a gnustep.desktop (I just copied and modified
kde.desktop) I put in the gdm Sessions/ directory along with my kde
and gnome sessions, and a gnustep-session script started by the Exec=
line in gnustep.desktop(kinda like gnome-session) that starts:

wmaker &
openapp GWorkspace.app

So the session ends when I quit GWorkspace.

Patrix.

Gisli Ottarsson <gisli.ottarsson@mscsoftware.com> wrote in message 
news:<mailman.403.1093629124.1998.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>...
> It was pointed out to me that unlike KDE and GNOME, GNUstep is not a
> desktop environment.  I question the value of such a distinction. 
> There may be some nuances that make GNUstep unlike KDE/GNOME, but I
> think it would be more helpful to my fellow mortals if GNUstep were
> simply positioned as an alternative to KDE and GNOME and showed up as a
> choice in gdm (but now I am repeating myself).