Re: This thing we called GNUstep (Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...)

[Dan Hitt]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Pirmin Braun <pb@intars.de> wrote:
> Am Fri, 20 Dec 2013 16:53:25 -0500
> schrieb Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> :
>
>> What is more effective is to change GNUstep's look so that it appeals to a
>> wider audience
>
> do we need another GUI?
> Since 30 years thousands of programmers try to build graphical desktop 
> environments. Probably billions of dollars were spent. Now we've seen 
> Chromium, Ajax, Android, OS/2, GEM, Windows 3.11/95/XP/7/8/8.1 GNOME, KDE, 
> Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment, Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, NeXTSTEP, MOS.. just to 
> name some. Most of them suck. Very few of them are popular. Maybe this is a 
> task too big for mankind. Maybe the whole concept with this one-dot pointing 
> device is wrong. What will GNUstep with no budget and only a dozen 
> programmers do different to bring up the final, long awaited holy grail of 
> ultimate graphical desktop environment?
> We are trying quite some years now. What makes you hope the big break through 
> will happen next year? And even if it would happen, will any user of a 
> popular UI dump it in favour of GNUstep?

Hi Pirmin,

Your points are all very good and your questions are probing and i
should just drop the subject.

But i think the huge attraction of NeXTstep was its combination of an
attractive and very useful gui, combined with a completely integrated
system from the top to the bottom.  Copy paste was easy between any
two applications, all windows were double buffered, and there was none
of this crazy duplicated menu wastage at the top of every window:
exactly one menu active at all times, and draggable anywhere.  And
above all it was easy to program; in fact, i think programming early
1990s NeXTstep is still much easier than anything else i've tried in
the intervening (gasp) decades.

Ubuntu 13.10 is still not as good, although it is ever-so-slowly
improving, and x-code is definitely harder to deal with and much more
complicated, even for simple cases.

However, NeXTstep was much more than the sum of its parts, and to
really shine it had to have deep support from the OS, probably all the
way into the OS kernel.

Nevertheless, those who write the code are entitled to choose where to
take it and how to release it, and everybody else is a whiner, so i
will try very hard not to whine.

(But if there were anything like a gnustep distro, where everything
from the kernel to the [double-buffering] window manager to the
software development apparatus was present and installed by default,
i'd sure have to put it on one of my boxes.)

dan