Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews

[Liam Proven]

On 31 July 2017 at 15:20, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:
> On 31 Jul 2017, at 12:58, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
>>
>> I don't think it's a loosing battle as long as it is kept light. LXDE, LXQt,
>> and XFCE are successful while they offer far less "fun" than the big ones.
>
> There’s one thing that these all have in common: they’re completely unlike 
> GNUstep.  They all use mature toolkits that are also used by larger desktop 
> environments, making it trivial to substitute GNOME or KDE applications when 
> they don’t have a native one.

Considering GNUstep *as a desktop*, then I do not see any important difference.

Seriously. I run XFCE on my low-end machines, and also sometimes LXDE;
I used to run Crunchbang.

All have fairly lightweight minimal desktops with limited sets of
apps. If I add a new app from a different desktop, it appears in the
menus, I can launch it, it can cut'n'paste from other apps, it appears
in the window list, etc. It's just another app. It may look a little
different but it's just another app.

Users don't care if it has a different object model or was written in
a different language, as long as it works and the default keystrokes
are more or less the usual ones and the menu bar is in the usual
place.

The main concern is if installing a 5MB app sucks in 500MB of
dependencies and thrashes the disk for 10sec when you load it.

None of that would be massively hard to arrange for
GNUstep-as-a-desktop. App missing from the portfolio? Fine, stick in
the most popular lightweight equivalent and its libraries. Job done.

>> Even EDE (http://equinox-project.org/) has success in the small FLTK world.
>
> If your goal is a desktop environment that enjoys success in the small 
> GNUstep world, that’s one thing.  If your goal is one that encourages new 
> developers to use (and, ideally, contribute to) GNUstep, that’s a completely 
> different thing.

Why?

Please explain this. It is only the 2nd that interests me. Why is it different?

>> Without forgetting Enlightenment…
>
> Life is much better if you forget Enlightenment.  The person who wrote the 
> Daily WTF article was far more kind than the design deserves.

I had not seen this. I googled.

Do you mean this?

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

That's rather amusing. I had long wondered why it remained so obscure.
Now I am less puzzled.

>> Also, remember that many distribs offer
>> GNUstep as a desktop install option.
>
> Do they?  I can’t remember the last time I saw one.

No, me neither!

> I can talk for a long time about why Étoilé failed, but the key problem was 
> that we didn’t provide an incremental adoption path.  This is partly my 
> fault: I was opposed to making it too easy to run our stuff on OS X, which 
> meant that we never tapped into a large pool of Mac and iOS developers who 
> would write code that could have then been easily ported to a developing 
> Étoilé system.

I can no comment on that.

My take is much simpler:

The project never released anything.

Any instructions that begin "download the source and run MAKE" and I
walk away, basically. Life is too short.

As (I believe) Eric Raymond said, the FOSS mantra is "release early,
release often". I regard, for a desktop, GNOME's every-6-month model
as a good basis. It's more predictable than KDE's "whenever we feel
like it, and don't call it KDE" attitude.

> What do they mean by macOS compatibility?

There are different meanings but I can elucidate a few.

>  Something that looks and behaves like macOS?

Elementary OS. A *vast* missed opportunity for GNUstep as this is
exactly what they wanted, and they ended up re-inventing the whole
wheel, axle and indeed car. Their own libraries, look'n'feel, even
programming language. Elementary should have been GNUstep-based: the
synergies were clear, but they'd probably never heard of it.

>  KDE with the right theme will get a lot closer than a GNUstep-based desktop 
> at the moment.

Only in trivial cosmetic ways, which don't really matter.

>  The ability to run Mac apps?  No going to happen for the foreseeable future.

Well no.

Although integrating and supporting Darling might have merit.

http://www.darlinghq.org/

>  Source compatibility with the same APIs?  We can give them that (to a 
> degree), but it doesn’t sound like that’s what they want.

Bingo. There is 1 answer that gets a "yes", but you dismiss it. Why?

What GNUstep could provide, it seems to me, boils down to these things:

[1] A NEXTstep-like desktop for Linux (and other free Unices)

As a clean, attractive, lightweight desktop, and a re-creation of one
of the most widely-admire desktops ever, this has clear appeal.

[2] A rich, clean set of libraries and programming tools for app development

Something that few other desktops can offer and a selling point to
FOSS developers.

[3] Tools for building cross-desktop and cross-platform apps

A clear message that the tools do not limit you to the GNUstep
desktop, but will run on other desktops as well as Windows and Mac.

[4] Tools for building apps against both native macOS and Linux.

If 4 selling points aren't enough, what are?

But first, there must be something to show people, and the obvious
candidate, ISTM, is to show working code. And the way to show working
code is to show an installable distro that you can use for your whole
computing life, with a whole set of apps.

And, just like macOS, as an _optional install_ for the 1% of users who
also program, dev tools and libraries.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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