Re: Plans for ahead

[Gregory Casamento]

German,

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 12:48 AM, Germán Arias <germanandre@gmx.es> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> El dom, 29-11-2015 a las 00:05 -0500, Gregory Casamento escribió:
>> Riccardo,
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 10:25 AM, Riccardo Mottola
>> <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > David Chisnall wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I agree.  The FreeBSD GNUstep packages include a lot of things, but you
>> >> need to do a lot of tinkering to make them integrate even vaguely with
>> >> typical environments.  For the ones that we use in the lab, I’ve 
>> >> configured
>> >> a more modern looking theme[1] and the in-window menus.  With this, the 
>> >> apps
>> >> still look fairly distinctive, but work quite well and people don’t
>> >> complain.
>> >
>> >
>> > I absolutely want "our" menus, they are distinctive and useful and if I 
>> > were
>> > to make a reference distribution, I'd want to retain that.
>>
>> They are OLD.   More important than their usefulness is what they
>> invoke and that is they make people think that we are NeXTSTEP and
>> OPENSTEP only.  Like it or not our old look is part of our problem.
>> I'm sorry you don't like this fact, but it is based on tons of first
>> hand observation over the last ten years.
>>
>> GC
>
> I don't think so. I think the problem is that there isn't enough
> presence of GNUstep on internet. I mean youtube, blogs, images ... If
> you search images of GNUstep. most of them show gnustep using the
> default theme. So we need upload more images showing GNUstep on Gnome,
> KDE, Windows.... We need more videos on youtube about how use GNUstep on
> other desktops and OSs. The vertical menu is not the problem, the
> problem is when people think that GNUstep don't offers more options.
>
> Germán
>
>

This is one aspect of our problem, yes.  By pointing out one issue I
wasn't denying the others.  You may note I said "part of our problem"
not "all of our problem."  However, during the 3 years I attended
SCALE.   Every time I was approached by users there were several
observations, universally, on GNUstep:

1) Do we have to use ObjC (yeah, at the time we did and still do)...
which is okay, because ObjC is cool... back then, people didn't think
so.
2) Why is it so ugly?
3) It's a clone of NeXTSTEP, right?

This was not at one show, or two, but every one I've been to.   Not
only that, it was nearly every person I talked to.   Other questions
included:

1) Oh, you guys are still around?
2) Isn't it JUST OpenStep?

We have several issues, this not necessarily complete or sorted in
order of importance, but I will try my best:

1) Lack of exposure/presence
    This is something we have always sucked at.   We don't put
ourselves out there enough.  We need a set of tutorials, a weekly
GNUstep project channel on youtube... something to get the attention
of those interested

2) Lack of applications to form a complete desktop.
    Simply put we need something to approximate a decent desktop
environment.   While NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP / Mac OS X were not
distributed with a free word processor, we should have some tools
which allow the user to

3) Default theme looks old and antiquated
    In spite of what some may believe, and you know who you are, what
GNUstep looks like out of the box DOES matter.   The current default
look evokes memories of 1985 and, no matter how much people in this
group love the NeXT look, it is projecting the WRONG impression to the
rest of the world and telling everyone that we have not advanced and
gives the definite impression that we are standing still

4) Lack of support for some current ObjC features..... among them
proper support for properties (partly in clang and in gcc).    Lack of
ARC, etc.

5) Missing features in GNUstep itself: Printing, after 20 years, is
still not complete.  This is something various people, including
myself, have worked on in the past to make it somewhat passable.
Issues with this are partly related to the backend.   We currently
generate postscript directly.   I am wondering if it would not be
possible to sidestep this approach and write directly to a Cairo
surface.... discussion should open on this as I will not cover the
complete topic here.

6) Lack of support for Wayland.   While this is not high on the list
(it is #6 guys) it is something that, if we had taken the initiative
in the beginning, we would have been one of the first adopters of it
and that in and of itself would have gotten us some attention.

While this list is not complete, it is but a taste of the issues we
are facing on this project.   It is my fault on some level that we
have not organized ourselves enough to tackle some of them, but that
problem stops here.

GC
-- 
Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
http://ind.ie/phoenix/