Re: GNUstep theming (was Re: Objective-C 2.0 and other new features in Leopard)

[Riccardo]

Hi Dr. Toma,

I appreciate the enthusiasm you put in your emails. I must say i share 
many things you say, but not everything, especially not some of your 
conculsions. While I appreciate your "OpenStep-purism" to the most 
since I always fear too that gnustep looses itself and morphs into 
ither stuff I highly despise, my long stay with this project has led 
me to appreciate more point of views on the project compared to the 
Beginning, let me share some of them with you.


> wrong etc. The question of gummy  never even arises.
a bit false. While there are foruntatley people who go beyond a bit of 
looks and are interested in substance, sometimes there is a little 
barrier to get their attention. It might be even as little as a color 
which gets disliked but can't be changed.

> Here's a question for you - if you have the choice between GNUstep  
> taking 
> over the world but becoming MS Windows in the process, or,  staying a 
> nice 
> environment but only being used by a select and  organically growing 
> core of 
> tech. savvy users who appreciate it,  which would you rather have?
May I sound more idealistic? I want to take over the world or, at 
least, be recognized by it, without changing the soul of gnustep.
I perfectly get your point, but our niche may be bigger than what you 
think without betraying ourselves.


> I have always kept an eye on it.  I've never been happy with Apple 
> and I am 
> growing more and more  unhappy with it. I would love to have an 
> alternative, 
> and am  seriously looking at migrating to a Unix variant + GnuStep. I 
> think 
> it's very realistic that I do so. If I can do it, if it's viable for  
> me to 
> do it, I would love to do it and I will do it.
I perfectly share your ideas. I can understand them. I dislike more 
and more where Apple is going. But udnerstand: Apple doesn't make 
computers anymore. It changed even its name. It makes digital stuff. 
That is the business.
Even after the switch, even with its worse styling, macs are still 
great if compared to other though! Even Sony Vaios are not what they 
used to be and if you use Vista and Office XP you think the wold has 
gone totally crazy.
So maybe nice ideas would be to use NetBSD+GNUstep on an Apple 
hardware. Or even use GNUstep over plain Darwin on their own boxes.
I admit that for workstation and server use, a SPARC box running 
Solaris but with a complete GNUstep+WIndowmaker environment is 
interesting!
GNUstep can be flexible! Buy the best workstation you want and use the 
nicest Laptop and use the OS that best suits it, GNUstep over it.


> The main apps I can't do without are the development environment,  
> TeX, 
> Mathematica, Terminal, OmniGraffle, Mail, Address Book, web  browser, 
> VOIP, 
> software to run a scanner. I believe GnuStep has a lot  of these and 
> is a 
> real possibility; I am interested in finding out  now just how good 
> it has 
> become.
Everyone has a set of Application he wants most. We at GAP do the best 
to provide you them. But it is no easy task writing stuff from scratch 
or porting without sources! And developers are needed.


> Nope. Just can't get it to install at all - I repeat, I've just tried 
>  doing 
> everything I can to install GnuStep on a fresh, clean,  unmodified 
> installation of Leopard, and I can't figure out how to do  it (other 
> than 
> perhaps to spend the next 3 weeks manually compiling  GCC and every 
> package 
> needed). I can't figure it out at all!
because you complicate things more than you need to.
On linux/x86 and linux/ppc it is a matter of configure + install
On NetBSD/x86, NetBSD/ppc too.
On NetBSD/sparc the only problem is that stupid ffcall, else it is the 
same!
On Solaris/SPARC little more is requried. Maybe even the same.
Not to say that running on mac or darwin isn't nice and I hope we will 
do, but I prefer to invest my time elsewhere. I try to make my apps 
compile natively on mac.

So let me specify some points you have so much at heart.
You despise theming. Look it at another point of view. Done well, 
theming wont hurt us NeXT-lovers. I would prefer the default theme to 
stay NeXT. But why not attract more people?
Still the point is another one: GNUstep is a flexible framework and 
one of its strength is (and can be mroe in the future) portability. 
Like OpenStep and yellow Box, a lot of serious professionals (bankers, 
researchers...) would love their app on mac, unix, linux, bsd, and 
even windows. Since there not a full enviroment is seeked it is best 
that GNUstep merges smoothly in the surrounding environment.
So imagine a theme with windows 2000, one with XP and one with vista 
look. It would ease acceptance of that application. One application 
after the other you gain acceptance of the rest too.
Microsoft started with a crappy office suite which just got worse and 
worse and a couple of other crap... now it runs servers and datases of 
whole industries, even mission critical stuff.
Maybe some of that started because some bean counter which made 
decisions had windows and word and preferred Application X that runs 
on windows instead of Y which required a solaris box.

You complain about applications. This is like kicking an open door. We 
all know that. Everyone has its needs. Why would GAP (GNUstep 
Application Project...) exist then? What are the Etoile guys and 
Backbone guys seeking? If you speak about "workspace, desktop 
environment" Applications are needed by default.
Help porting, testing, coding, writing new ones. That is what helps.


last but not least, our current NeXT theme isn't that nice. Maybe you 
got used to it, but it is not really clean as OpenStep: we lack 
nexti-ish icons almost everywhere....

Riccardo