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Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37


From: Richard Frith-Macdonald
Subject: Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 36, Issue 37
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:54:31 +0000


On 26 Nov 2005, at 13:25, Michael Thaler wrote:

On Saturday 26 November 2005 12:57, discuss-gnustep-request@gnu.org wrote:

My idea of a good desktop follows along the nextstep design and thats
it. Did Steve Jobs intend nextstep to be a good citizen of other
desktops? I dont think so. I dont know about openstep but it seems
that its not a good citizen of other desktops too. Maybe thats why
next was never able to make a sustainable business on it.

The problem with this is, that gnustep is not useable as a desktop at all right now. For instance, there is no browser, so you have to use Firefox or
Konqueror or any other browser of your choice

Yep ... I use firefox within a GNUstep desktop and I find it annoyingly clunky/awkward in comparison with the 'native' applications. Perhaps we should try getting in on firefox development with the aim of getting it to play nicely with GNUstep? Seamless integration is probably an unreasonable target, but perhaps we could get an option for its menu system to work like a GNUstep app?

and gnustep apps and KDE/GNOME
apps just don't work very well together because of issues like horizontal menu bar vs. vertical menubar. Furthermore, under KDE gnustep is basically not usable at all. The gnustep menu doesn't work correctly. I don't know if
this is a kwin bug or a gnustep bug.

Any KDE users want to fix this?

And nextstep/openstep is dead for a long time. Without Steve Jobs noone would care for nextstp/openstep at all anymore. Steve Jobs did the right thing. He turned nextstep into something the average Joe user can and wants to use. Steve Jobs allways managed to make things that excite people. But gnustep is
not exciting for the average Joe user. It is an excellent development
framework based on an excellent language, but there are absolutely no
applications which make it worth using gnustep, it looks ugly compared to MacOSX, KDE or GNOME (this is of course personal preference but I am quite sure if you ask 100 average computer users which look they like most, gnustep
will be the loser by a wide margin),

True if you show them it on a 14" display ... the gui was designed for 19" and more, and really is far and away better than any of the others on a 21" ... one of the reasons I want better theme support in the gui is so that we can have a modified look/feel that works well for small displays. Personally, I think the GNUstep gui is still a winner down to 17", but below that MacOS-X definitely seems to work best.

it interoperates badly with every other
free desktop environement (which is bad because there are essential apps like
a browser missing in gnustep) and it is hard to install.

The last I'm unsure about ... whenever I've tried to build/install kde or gnome it's been a hell of a mess, and I've only ever had a smooth time of it when depending on some distribution to have packaged it so I don't have to do it myself. I strongly suspect that gnustep is actually comparatively easy to install. However, we are coming from behind in the race ... it's not good enough to be the easiest to build/install if the alternatives (and everything they depend upon) come pre-installed as part of the distribution.

I wish there would be someone like Steve Jobs who could make gnustep more popular. It is such a nice framework based on a really nice language. But without a bigger community, gnustep will never gain enough momentum. And without some radical changes in look and feel and interoperability this will
not happen.

Since I think we have easily the best look and feel on large/modern displays, obviously changing the look/feel would be a BAD idea on those systems. However, the rest I agree with ... we need themes for alternatives on smaller displays and to give us the option of fitting into essentially non-gnustep environments. As a happy byproduct of such themability people who simply don't like the GNUstep look/feel would be able to adopt others irrespective of the actual merits in terms of usability.

It would also be nice to improve select non-gnustep applications (firefox my favorite) to work better in a GNustep environment.

Another thing I'd like to see is thought on how to integrate better into non-gnustep environments, as this seems a fairly obvious first stage to getting people to look at GNUstep. For instance, app icons are a big advantage of GNUstep ... you can use drag and drop to put things on them ... eg have the app open documents dropped on it. you can have the app icon display application status information etc. We could have a dock application to hold app icons where the window manager doesn't use them, retaining the enhanced functionality they provide for GNUstep apps, but managing the icons so they don't look so out of place on a system not designed to work with them.






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