RE: GNUstep on the rise!

[Sašo Kiselkov]

Quoting "Vaisburd, Haim" <HVaisbur@Advent.COM>:

> Cris Vetter wrote:
>
> [...] [ GNUstep separate OS ]
> >
> > AFAIK, xMach is dead :-( So does anyone know how far Hurd is with
> > respect to usability?
> [...]
>
> Sorry, I deleted the essential part of Cris' letter that I'm going to
> reply.
>
> I guess when Chris was talking exclusive GNUstep experience he meant the
> distribution, not the OS per se (kernel). It seems the obvious choice
> for that distribution would be the Linux kernel. As far as I understand,
> nothing in the kernel dictates unix standard FHS, unix standard
> configuration
> (/etc content), a type of window system or other things that might annoy
> a person who experienced NeXT ( I never did ).
>
> On the other hand it's well supported for several architchures and many
> periferal devices.
>
> Other post suggested Darwin, I believe it would be as good as Linux,
> but why to look for something else?
>
> Tima.
>

Exactly. When I did my small GNUstep OS experiment I thought long about jumping
to some more interresting platform (I tried Hurd, and Darwin and BSD came to my
mind as well), but later I realized that it is not important to have a specific
kernel (since it's development isn't connected to GNUstep anyway) and the
following are facts:
Linux ...
 - is stable
 - has much support
 - has drivers for almost everything under our Sun
 - is layout independent and flexible (it's "just" a kernel after all)

However, the question of file system layout and other "under the hood,
complicated" features, isn't important - history has shown us that NEXTSTEP,
OPENSTEP, Mac OS X and other "pure" OpenStep-ish systems can be Unices without
any loss of ease of use. For example, on NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP all folders like
"/bin" or "/usr" were simply hidden by the Workspace from the simple user,
until unhidden by a user default. This is even better than trying to reinvent
the wheel and define a different file system layout - lamers don't see what
they don't need, and experienced UNIX experts find themselves like at home
immediately. Don't make the same mistakes as Microsoft does, when they
forcefuly degrade experienced people to the level of trained monkeys.

Regards
 Saso