Re: [Announcement] Window Maker Live 12.8 with GNUstep

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Paul,


Paul Seelig wrote:
> Of course, i am already aware of both the excellent GS-Desktop and
> NEXTSPACE projects, although my approach is more simplistic and 
> different.

To each its own, also good to know there is no replication, you choose a 
more standard way. That's fine.
> Window Maker Live doesn't aim for being a GNUstep desktop, but rather
> intents to be a Linux system using Window Maker as its default GUI, and
> that contains and uses GNUstep components without actually depending on
> them. The idea is to have a fully working system even if the user
> decides to uninstall all things GNUstep apart from Window Maker.

I understand, although making it mandatory for the part that some apps 
are GNUstep would make it feel "less add on".
As an intermediate approach, maybe it can be made a little more 
GNUstep-ish without really depending on it, but your choice.

> Unfortunately the Window Maker Live desktop cannot easily be made to
> *not* look as retro as it currently does, because the WINGs widget set
> used by Window Maker unfortunately dictates and limits what theming
> could accomplish, and thus effectively becomes the lowest common
> denominator for a unified look. Probably someone capable enough should
> rewrite Window Maker to use the GNUstep GUI libraries instead of WINGs
> (and also leaving out its unnecessary feature creep) .

I have something similar on my TODO, replace some WindowMaker parts to 
run with real GNUstep, without actually replacing/rewriting wmaker. E.g. 
Preferences. But there would be harder things like Menus and 
WindowDecorations.

But as for know... I thought to concentrate elsewhere
> In addition, five typical GNUstep themes and also Thematic.app were
> packaged and added, in order to enable interested parties to actually
> try and verify GNUstep's theming capabilities instead of just relying on
> hearsay and screenshots. The GNUstep variant of current release version
> of the Netsurf web browser has been packaged and included under the name
> of of WebSurf and added in GWorkspace as its configured web browser. The
> current GNU Emacs was included in its GNUstep variant. The vector
> drawing application Graphos, the editor Gemas, and the directory syncing
> tool StepSync have also been packaged and included.

Nice work and cool to find some of my apps mentioned.
The Browser topic is quite "hot" whenever you try to depart from 
Chromium and Firefox...


Keep up the work,

Riccardo