Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews

[David Chisnall]

On 31 Jul 2017, at 11:38, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
> 
> As I've always wanted to work on a light desktop using GNUstep, I propose to 
> work on this :
> Even if the project is not about building a desktop, a lots of components are 
> already present. My idea is to write a short how-to that can be polished 
> along 
> the time. It should answer to such basic questions that are evident for the 
> team but not for the others :
> - which Window Manager can I choose ? which one for that task ?
> - how should I configure GWorkspace ?
> - where can I find themes ?
> - can I take some Etoilé components ?
> etc.
> 
> Hence, starting with something light and extending it later. Nothing related 
> to development but to building a working environment. I think it can help to 
> attract devs because one can see what small apps / components are missing, 
> and 
> start to develop using GNUstep framework and tools.

I see this as a losing battle.  A GNUstep desktop will not be competitive with 
a Qt or GTK desktop unless GNUstep attracts a lot more developers and a desktop 
that is obviously not competitive will not attract mode developers.  We tried 
this with Étoilé and it didn’t work.  The best way to attract new developers is 
to show them that GNUstep *doesn’t* require them to throw away all of their 
existing investment.  Show them great apps written with GNUstep that integrate 
closely with their KDE or GNOME desktop.  

There’s some great work in this direction.  For example, DBusKit allows us to 
integrate with other desktop services.  In an ideal world, we’d use DBUS to 
replace gdomap and gdnc on systems that are running DBUS already, rather than 
reinvent the wheel (it doesn’t matter that our wheel came first).

Better integration with other fd.o technologies would make the risk of using 
GNUstep a lot lower: if no one can tell that your app is written with GNUstep 
and it integrates seamlessly with their GNOME or KDE desktops, then you don’t 
lose market share for your app by going with GNUstep (and you get good a Mac 
port basically for free).

David