Re: elementary OS

[Liam Proven]

On 9 February 2014 20:46, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, I hope you'll fully understand when I say that I'm banning you from it.


Shocking, petty, vindictive and wrong. Terrible, terrible moderation.
"You are saying something that is not permitted so I am banning you."
It's too Orwellian for words.

There is more good sense and well-made points in that one post than in
anything else I've seen on this mailing list in over a year.

The GNUstep project seems to be in deep denial, about what it is, what
it does, why it exists.

GNUstep is a desktop.

No, it is *not* just a set of libraries. Nobody knows or cares about
that; every leading desktop has a set of libraries and dev tools.

KDE is a desktop, GNOME is a desktop, Xfce is a desktop. What this
means, today, is a whole set of tools, libraries, a window manager and
desktop manager, a suite of apps sharing that look and feel, and a set
of tools and libraries for building new apps that share that look and
feel. That is what GNOME is, that is what KDE is, and if those are
desktops, then that is what GNUstep is as well.

But the integration is shockingly poor. The official GS WM, Window
Maker, has its own dock and its own menus which GS ignores. The GS
desktop seems, as far as I can tell, to offer no way to let the user
access the WM menus, so you can't open non-GS apps. You can't even
readily add apps to the GS dock, or move it. The packages for GS in
the leading distros - i.e. Debian and therefore Ubuntu - are
apparently years out of date.

There is no distro with GS as its desktop.

There is no GN office suite or web browser, nor even effort to integrate one.

The GS devs seem to have spent years fiddling with their back-end
libraries while the front-end demo apps are woefully neglected and
feature-poor. There doesn't seem to be any effort to reach out to the
distros and ensure that the bundled libraries are current. There
doesn't seem to be any effort to actually get GS out there in a form
which people can see and try.

It doesn't matter how good your libraries are if nobody knows you
exist. Nobody will code for a platform which cannot be tried or even
seen, and GS is completely below the radar, and nobody involved even
seems to notice that this is a problem.

-- 
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