Re: GNUSTEP on OSX 10.6.8

[jimserac]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 10:59:24 AM UTC-4, Dr Slivnik Tomaž MA (Cantab) 
MMath (Cantab) PhD (Cantab) FTICA wrote:
> Yes. We have computers with more processing power than supercomputers did 20 
> years ago running on our laps (even running our phones), but the software 
> seems to have gone backwards. In terms of quality of design, for me, NextStep 
> 3.x was the high point. You had bundled Mathematica, TeX, Ensemble, 
> ScorePlayer, RenderMan, Objective C, IntefaceBuilder, ProjectBuilder, 
> WriteNow, Improv, Distributed Objects, etc., a really well-designed, 
> ergonomic and usable GUI, and a system that was well-designed, everything was 
> orthogonal and made of inter-operating components.
> 
> 
> 
> Today, the best we have is Mac OS X - I find the GUI to be an unergonomic, 
> poorly thought out rat's nest, different widgets everywhere, apps with 
> inconsistent user interfaces, input gestures that are overloaded so that they 
> do not act consistently everywhere, monolithic 200MB+ sized conglomerates 
> like iTunes, HFS+ file system, Finder, non-determinism introduced by AI 
> algorithms everywhere so you never know quite for sure what your computer is 
> going to do, apps with hard-wired dependencies on other specific apps, chips 
> and operating systems so complex they are full of bugs, security 
> vulnerabilities and surveillance backdoors. Lots more software, but poorly 
> integrated, poorly designed and full of bugs, including the O.S. itself. My 
> NeXT never crashed, I had it running for close to a year without rebooting, 
> Mac OS X crashes and becomes unstable all the time.
> 
> 
> 
> It would certainly be interesting to have an industrial-strength simple 
> stripped-down developer's/scientific/engineering/technical user's 
> distribution based on some simple underlying unix-like O.S., advanced 
> filesystem like ZFS, running GnuStep on top, and have the old NeXT apps 
> reproduced for a more well-designed NeXT-like experience - with the added 
> benefit of a 2GHz+ multi-core CPU, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage.
> 
> 
> 
> On 2 Sep 2014, at 15:04, jimserac@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 9:47:28 AM UTC-4, Ivan Vučica wrote:
> 
> >> On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 2:41 PM,  <jims...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >>>     I have hardware greater than anything I could have dreamed of back in 
> >>> the 80's and yet the software is totally inadequate.    The solutions 
> >>> came long ago, Lisp Machines, Xerox Alto, Symbolics,  NeXt.....and yet 
> >>> nothing of that is available to the vast majority of us.
> 
> >> 
> 
> >> OS X is decent.
> 
> > 
> 
> > We are 14 years into the next century.  I was hoping for more than 
> > "decent".   And this irrespective of the tremendous work that you, Greg and 
> > others have done on GNUStep for which I have the highest regard.  
> 
> > 
> 
> > :)
> 
> > J.

My God !  Next came with Mathematica !!!   And the other bundled goodies...I 
didn't know that.  

Anyway,  so far, GNUStep is the closest I've come to the kind of integrated 
gaphical/algorithmic development environment that I would like to use.  

And yes, in both the Linux world, and Apple and most certainly that pathetic 
bug filled patch quilted over morass of versions, security hole ridden 
misbegotten proprietary control corrupted crap known as Microsoft Windows 
operating system,  each new release seems to bring new setbacks, deprecations, 
disablings of old software that worked beautifully and a strategically 
imbecilic obeisance to the "Cloud", the final attempt to force the "network" 
computer down our throats and undo the liberating empowerment of the personal 
computer revolution.   GNome has been disabled to the point of being a useless 
piece of crap which even led the inventor of Linux to drop it in disgust.  And 
a host of semi-incompatible kludges like cinamon and other "replacements" for 
gnome have sprung leading to a wild nightmare of inconsistencies,  missing 
dependencies and other sabotage to what was once the only logical alternative 
to WIndows or OSX.   Sic transit gloria money.

J.