Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

On 2017-07-29 19:42:02 +0200 Ivan Vučica <ivan@vucica.net> wrote:

> \o/
> 
> On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 2:42 PM Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> http://www.osnews.com/story/29939/GNUSTEP_live_CD_2_5_released
> 
>> Also, there's a new release of GNUstep Live! :-)
> 

"cool": the GNUstep LiveCD gets us in the news again!
Sadly, the LiveCD has never been the best way to present us and it apparently 
is even less so now.

I haven't played with it myself this time, so I don't know exactly which 
applications are packaged in, which version they are and how things are 
configured. Apps used to derive from the Debian packages, with all limitations 
of availability and versions, since GNUstep on Debian is surely "not the best 
way" do showcase us.

Sure, GNUstep lacks many things and "continues" to lack them and I don't want 
to start again a discussion on what should and should not be done, because they 
are the most useless and irritating threads that happen on this mailig list, 
while our few energies should be catered in doing things.

However, reading that "nothing changed" in 8 years is quite irritating, by 
people who click for 10 minutes on a LiveCD. There you can only check a couple 
of windows and menus, not much more.

I just had a look at the screenshots on the LiveCD sites and they are all "old" 
and made a quick mental comparison.


The progress has been a lot on most applications displayed there, deep 
progress. Back then most applications there (e.g. GNUMail and GWorkspace 
itself) were bitrotting, quite unportable and could even crash with a few 
mouseclick.
In so many years, we gathered a lot of new core functionality (we caught up 
with API, Objective-C 2 and the Apps had to evolve with them and most of them 
did well! Theming capabilities refined in the last years!

Also, perhaps we don't have a Browser, little progress on the Preferences 
side... but our some of our apps did improve way beyond simple maintenance! 
Just the amount of bugs fixed in GNUMail in the past 2 years is notable

And we have new nice apps too. Does the LiveCD have PikoPixel for example? A 
very nice and polished application.
And Laterna Magica? Battery Monitor? Graphos? just to mention apps that 
practially did not exist or were unusable 8 years ago.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070220161636/http://gap.nongnu.org:80/

And now - back to work GNUstep!

Riccardo