Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Ivan Vučica]

On Thu Dec 19 2013 at 10:42:51 PM, Pirmin Braun <pb@intars.de> wrote:

> as there are different directions and interests there is nevertheless the GNUstep base we all share.
> Maybe we can agree on putting common effort into a thing called "the non-Apple ObjectiveC toolchain and runtime"  and make it more visible, documented, easier to approach, install.

 

Just base?

I would agree, if the current free desktop environments were acceptably usable to me.

I personally would love to bring about a simple desktop environment built around GNUstep, so that I can "dogfood" GNUstep. Currently, I cannot be efficient in a WindowMaker+GWorkspace-based environment; I'm simply missing too many things or too many little things annoy me.

How about starting with a window manager that does several things I'm really used to:

- knows the concept of a global menu (but does not try to be the center of your life like Unity, instead trying to get out of the way)

- knows the concept of a document-per-X11-window so I can quickly access a folder where a document is saved

- can pick up notifications and store them away for quick retrieval

- has a nice decoration that happens to be close to what the underlying GUI toolkit uses

- uses animations and compositing tastefully

- does not (necessarily) include a dock, but launches it and plays nicely with it

That's a really short list which might form a nice basis of a desktop environment. Working on it should be a fun journey in itself. Who knows, maybe along the way this thing can pick up a few NeXT purists as well (and be shaped by their needs and wishes).

And these thoughts are far less ambitious than Etoile, which makes them less fun and interesting. But I hope I'll work on this, as it would help me personally and entertain me personally, and maybe help others.

Just having -base doesn't inspire me, personally. It helps me and supports me, and I love to use it. But it's just one piece of the puzzle.

And having a desktop environment means we can assemble a distribution that boots into something beautiful out-of-the-box, opens a development tutorial by default, and thus introduces another person to developing with GNUstep.

PS The list above outlines what I'd like to and probably will do as my final university project next semester. So it's not a completely randomly invented vague goal that "someone else should implement". Let's see how that goes.