Re: GNUSTEP on OSX 10.6.8

[Dr Slivnik Tomaž MA (Cantab) MMath (Cantab) PhD (Cantab) FTICA]

Yes. We have computers with more processing power than supercomputers did 20 
years ago running on our laps (even running our phones), but the software seems 
to have gone backwards. In terms of quality of design, for me, NextStep 3.x was 
the high point. You had bundled Mathematica, TeX, Ensemble, ScorePlayer, 
RenderMan, Objective C, IntefaceBuilder, ProjectBuilder, WriteNow, Improv, 
Distributed Objects, etc., a really well-designed, ergonomic and usable GUI, 
and a system that was well-designed, everything was orthogonal and made of 
inter-operating components.

Today, the best we have is Mac OS X - I find the GUI to be an unergonomic, 
poorly thought out rat's nest, different widgets everywhere, apps with 
inconsistent user interfaces, input gestures that are overloaded so that they 
do not act consistently everywhere, monolithic 200MB+ sized conglomerates like 
iTunes, HFS+ file system, Finder, non-determinism introduced by AI algorithms 
everywhere so you never know quite for sure what your computer is going to do, 
apps with hard-wired dependencies on other specific apps, chips and operating 
systems so complex they are full of bugs, security vulnerabilities and 
surveillance backdoors. Lots more software, but poorly integrated, poorly 
designed and full of bugs, including the O.S. itself. My NeXT never crashed, I 
had it running for close to a year without rebooting, Mac OS X crashes and 
becomes unstable all the time.

It would certainly be interesting to have an industrial-strength simple 
stripped-down developer's/scientific/engineering/technical user's distribution 
based on some simple underlying unix-like O.S., advanced filesystem like ZFS, 
running GnuStep on top, and have the old NeXT apps reproduced for a more 
well-designed NeXT-like experience - with the added benefit of a 2GHz+ 
multi-core CPU, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage.

On 2 Sep 2014, at 15:04, jimserac@gmail.com wrote:

> On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 9:47:28 AM UTC-4, Ivan Vučica wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 2:41 PM,  <jims...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>     I have hardware greater than anything I could have dreamed of back in 
>>> the 80's and yet the software is totally inadequate.    The solutions came 
>>> long ago, Lisp Machines, Xerox Alto, Symbolics,  NeXt.....and yet nothing 
>>> of that is available to the vast majority of us.
>> 
>> OS X is decent.
> 
> We are 14 years into the next century.  I was hoping for more than "decent".  
>  And this irrespective of the tremendous work that you, Greg and others have 
> done on GNUStep for which I have the highest regard.  
> 
> :)
> J.