RE: Themes (again)

[Slex Sangiuliano]

As I said some days ago, I post here some screenshot of my hybrid "distro":

This is the link to the album on G+:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/103857560885989846487/albums/5895682742623263009

here for facebook users:

https://www.facebook.com/alex.sangiuliano/media_set?set=a.10201360513362793.1073741826.1472518030&type=3

dropbox  screenshot images:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17319831/Etoile_Gnustep_DE.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17319831/developing.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17319831/new_wall.png

Here the theme is Nesedah from Étoilé.

I use it EVERY day as production system, it is quite stable. I can develop, study, surf the internet, play flash game (is not true I don't play them, but I could if just I want)

I wrote in another email what I need to make a real distro, hoping someone read it.

In my opinion, doing a distro at the state of the art, is not a good idea for some reasons; as we know GNUstep is not a desktop but a framework, so it doesn't fit the requests of a DE. For e.g a window manager, yes we can say, "we have WMaker", but wmaker is missing features that a modern window manager need and has. 

A system tray, today are usefull and wmaker  hasn't one. So I had to do triky things to get trayer to work without the "ambient" of the DE. I tried others systray as stalonetray, I was not able to configure them as I want. This is a limit, because for e.g. nm-applet needs a systray, or you can't manage your network. Pidgin wants a systray or you will get annoyed of the thousand times you close wrongly the window, making stepchat to terminare; so you have to minimize to icon and you will have the icon of the roster winod plus, all the chat windows minimized, not so nice to see nor to use and confortably.

The GWorkspace: I use it every  days, to me is stable, but it falls in easy things: If an App is running if you click again on it on the Dock, a message will appear saying: "The app seems to hang", then it will be closed and restarted. I would want that if an app is running, it will be not terminated but just all its windows shown (or the principal one), how to do that? Just a flag.. -(BOOL)isRunning then if yes show window(s) else run the app.

Also, I noticed Gworkspace handles files based on the extensions. I mean, if there is an extension for e.g. jpg it will open the jpg with PRICE (I use it), if no extension is present on a file, it will open it with the default TextEditor (Gemas to me); this means that if the file is  a giant binary, GWorspace wll try to open it with Gemas, and... it will hangs until all the billions of unreadable characters are loaded in the text editor, often this means the crash of the GWorkspace after minutes of waiting (And I tested it more then one time).

Also, WindowMaker has a script, autostart, where you can put things to be automated at startup. This is the way I use to run trayer at startup and other things.

My opinion on the theme: I'm trying to expose GNUstep to people, in my University and thinkig to open a site with video tuorial on how to install it, developing with it etc etc. They are qquite excited when I talk of " an OO frameworg Cocoa compatible", but when they see the classic theme their face seems a piece of ice and also to me someone sayd "it looks like 80's late". So if you want to believe or not, a new and modern theme is needed, but this doesn't mean that the classic one have to be trashed, but just give the possibility to the people to choose between the old_classic one and the modern_classic one. This is not a thing I'm asking, is a thing that users and potential developers are asking, developers will not develop app that no one will use just because it looks like 80's, it's a waste of time.  

Alex (Slex)

> Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 23:07:44 +0200
> Subject: Re: Themes (again)
> From: xavier@alternatif.org
> To: p.o.roussel@free.fr
> CC: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
>
> On 2013-09-27 21:43:01 +0200 Philippe Roussel <p.o.roussel@free.fr>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 09:18:51PM +0200, Xavier Brochard wrote:
> >> On 2013-09-27 18:56:05 +0200 Philippe Roussel <p.o.roussel@free.fr>
> >>>
> >>> Have you tried the packages I build from time to time ? There are
> >>> debian and ubuntu versions.
> >>
> >> And it works well !
> >> But we are missing something to automatically setup the desktop. I
> >> would like to work on that.
> >
> > I guess we could create a package that install a gnustep session in
> > (x|g|k)dm and a gnustep meta package that depends on all gnustep stuff
> > and windowmaker or something like that.
>
> One need also the automatic start of Gworkspace, installation of icons,
> some wrappers for common apps, etc. It would be a good basis.
>
> xavier
>
>
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