Re: The need for an official GNUstep desktop

[Rogelio Serrano]

On 8/28/06, Pete French <pete@twisted.org.uk> wrote:
> > > I believe Erico had a Window Maker bundle once. It would be nice if it
> > > can be revived.
> > >
> >
> > Yes but i tried to do significant work with that one last year but i
> > really don't have that much experience with x window manager programming
> > at that time and decided to get some experience first.
>
> But does it actually work though ? WindowMaker as it is right now is  fine
> as a basis for GnuStep (as far as I can see anyway). So just folding that
> info GSW should give a workable system and would be a very good start.

Yes it did work but there were some issues. The windowmaker dock
worked fine but the gworkspace dock worked only with gnustep apps. And
i had a problem with sessions not closing when i close windowmaker. i
think there was a general feeling of non integration and addressing it
led to complexities. if you want evolution to stop windowmaker is ok
but when you want to start adding stuff or switch to a doc centered
desktop then you got a major problem.

Ultimately i swithed to ion as i lost the battle against desktop
clutter. I was beginning to feel that im spending half of my time
shuffling windows around. as long as you can fit all the appicons in
the dock tiles then you are ok but if you start needing more then you
get a very cluttered workspace. problem is with the current
application centered desktop you will always need more and more apps
and more tiles and not enough dockspace and i hate anything that
resembles digging through menus to get at anything like the windows
start button.

if the system become doc centered then all we need is the filesystem
browser and about 3 other tiles. we let the file browser figure it all
out. i think a finder like equivalent would be nice. i wanted to have
a full text finder that can search really really fast and be the
frontend for all apps in the system.

other problems i encountered are more related to the underlying
system. the sheer complexity of the underlying systems can defeat a
gnustep developer thats why im convinced that we need an os for
gnustep before we can port to other systems.

--
things i hate about my linux pc:

1. it takes more than a second to boot up
2. keeps asking about filenames and directories
3. does not remember what i was working on yesterday
4. does not remember all the changes i have ever made
5.cannot figure out necessary settings by itself