Re: What would be the most complete GNUStep system?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Gregory Casamento wrote:
> James,
>
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 12:12 AM, James Carthew <jcarthew@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Realistically GNUStep is not ready to replace OSX by a long way. I was
> > experimenting with doing so for a long time, but there hasn't been enough
> > changes to the core components of the system yet, a lot more focus is on API
> > features than application features. (System Preferences exists but lacks
> > everything useful: Screen Resolution
> > Changing/multimonitor/Wireless/Networking(Network manager or equivalent,
> > wrapped)/Sound(Pulseaudio Wrapper)).
> Currently SystemPreferences focuses on GNUstep specific things.  It
> would be, however, pretty cool to have some pref panel plugins for the
> things you mention.
SystemPreference is just the case and it is essentially Mac-compatible 
in the interfaces, what is needed is the hard work.

Writing portable preference modules is hard, I do not want to put in the 
official repository "unportable" stuff.
However, each panel is a bundle, so you can write your own bundle just 
for your needs and install it and distribute it for your OS.

I started writing a tool to handle audio Volumes and found it to be an 
incredible maze, so it is unfinished, being low-priority
> > The GWorkspace application is quite good, but could be tweaked to be more
> > like the Mac Finder. It already has everything you really need.
> Thanks, I'm sure Enrico and Riccardo (former and current maintainer of
> GWorkspace) appreciate those comments.
I do :) I actually dislike the "Finder", but there are a couple of rough 
edges where I'd like to import features from Mac but also from Windows 7 
into GWorkspace, in a clean, non-intursive way. Especially in things 
like path handling, copy&paste, handling of directories as targets and 
other conveniences.
The GWorkspace code base is however big and difficult to maintain, 
putting hands into any small thing is difficult! I try to clean it up 
and modernize everytime I touch it, but it hard.
Right now I was improving the file operation experience and it has been 
weeks of work and I am not done yet.

One thing I miss in GNUstep for that is the ability to hide/show a 
toolbar like you do on mac (the extra button in the window decorations). 
That would allow for additions that can be disabled.

> > The big dealbreaker for me is Vespucci.app, realistically a web browser is
> > critical to using gnustep on a daily basis, and right now it just doesn't
> > have one. There used to be Mantella under Etoile which wrapped Firefox into
> > a gnustep window which was pretty decent. But the subsystem of firefox it
> > used has been deprecated so the code no longer works.
> The solution here is simple.  I've been thinking of creating a WebView
> based on CEF3 which should be sufficient for creating a GNUstep based
> browser.   Basically it would just be CEF3 rendering to a view in a
> GNUstep window.  This would solve a lot of issues.
You could also port web.kit, but you still need a "browser", the 
rendering engine is only half of the part. Vespucci is currently only a 
very crude test example, although if used with Apple's WebKit it is 
usable, it lacks certain basic stuff like bookmark editing, download 
management, history management. I'd like to keep it quite minimal in any 
case.

Another option would be to see if Firefox or SeaMonkey can be "ported" 
to GNUstep. They run under Mac and they can't use Carbon, so I wonder 
what components do they really use. Of course, heavy use of Core kits 
would be a problem for us, but perhaps CoreBase could be improved for that?

> > A multi-tabbed terminal.app would also fix a lot of the frustration in using
> > GNUStep as a standalone desktop system.
> Honestly, I don't even use the tab features as much on OS X as one
> might think so I don't miss them too terribly in Terminal.app.
Actually, I even dislike tabs, I never used them in Mac and it confuses 
me that in GNOME Terminal they are visible by default.
It is most probably

Riccardo