Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews

[Xavier Brochard]

Le 31 juillet, 14:20:27 David Chisnall a écrit :
> On 31 Jul 2017, at 12:58, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
> > I don't think it's a loosing battle as long as it is kept light. LXDE,
> > LXQt, and XFCE are successful while they offer far less "fun" than the
> > big ones.
> There’s one thing that these all have in common: they’re completely unlike
> GNUstep.  They all use mature toolkits that are also used by larger desktop
> environments, making it trivial to substitute GNOME or KDE applications
> when they don’t have a native one.
> > Even EDE (http://equinox-project.org/) has success in the small FLTK
> > world.
> 
> If your goal is a desktop environment that enjoys success in the small
> GNUstep world, that’s one thing.  If your goal is one that encourages new
> developers to use (and, ideally, contribute to) GNUstep, that’s a
> completely different thing.

My goal is to start with something small, "not professional as GNU", and 
improve it later ("incremental adoption path"). ;-)
Let's tart with a desktop environment that help users who wants to try.

Market share can be small if market is growing. What's the better between 
having 5% from 100 000 users in 1994 or 0,1% from 6 000 000 users in 2015 ?

> > Without forgetting Enlightenment…
> 
> Life is much better if you forget Enlightenment.  The person who wrote the
> Daily WTF article was far more kind than the design deserves.

And ? Even if EFLs are bad, Enlightenment attract users, developers and is 
well packaged in distributions. That was my point.


> > Also, remember that many distribs offer
> > GNUstep as a desktop install option.
> 
> Do they?  I can’t remember the last time I saw one.  On FreeBSD, we have a
> GNUstep metapackage that installs around a hundred GNUstep applications,
> but I wouldn’t call that a desktop install option.

You are right, I was wrong. But from my end user point  of view, it is not 
that clear. When I see a gnustep meta package I see it as a desktop set of 
applications. Specialy when I read "GNUstep is a GNU project to implement a 
Openstep/Nextstep-like environment on normal unix/linux systems." (Fedora).

> > My purpose is only to to write some recipes to have various light usable
> > desktops. For example WindowMaker + PCMan + TextEdit + ... or Fluxbox +
> > Gworkspace + ... It doesn't have to be "full GNUstep" at the beginning.
> > 
> > To attract more developers, you can also be more attractive : offer
> > something that is easy to try, release often the desktop, offer small
> > tasks to work with, ...
> > I don't see the desktop as a requirement to atract devs, but as something
> > that can help, because people will try it and talk about it.
> 
> And they will say ‘hey, it looks like GNOME did 15 years ago, avoid that
> crappy project’.

Why are you that pessimistic ?
GNUstep apps and environment doesn't look old. It looks different.

> > I don't know why Etoilé failed, but IMHO it was may be too ambitious, it
> > couldn't release often and it was not easy to try (lack of packaging).
> 
> I can talk for a long time about why Étoilé failed, but the key problem was
> that we didn’t provide an incremental adoption path.  This is partly my
> fault: I was opposed to making it too easy to run our stuff on OS X, which
> meant that we never tapped into a large pool of Mac and iOS developers who
> would write code that could have then been easily ported to a developing
> Étoilé system.
> > Also, as a sysadmin I have many friends developers who ask to macOs
> > compatibility. Then I talk about GNUstep but they ask "show me, show me
> > something that works" and they mean show me a complete environment because
> > they want to be convinced that everything will work, from file selector to
> > theming.
> 
> What do they mean by macOS compatibility?  Something that looks and behaves
> like macOS?  KDE with the right theme will get a lot closer than a
> GNUstep-based desktop at the moment.  The ability to run Mac apps?  No
> going to happen for the foreseeable future.  Source compatibility with the
> same APIs?  We can give them that (to a degree), but it doesn’t sound like
> that’s what they want.

Something that work like macOs : simple, easy, evident.
For example, in GWorkspace inspector, services, shelf, dockable icons, etc. 
are all like that.

Xavier