Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews

[David Chisnall]

On 31 Jul 2017, at 12:58, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
> 
> I don't think it's a loosing battle as long as it is kept light. LXDE, LXQt, 
> and XFCE are successful while they offer far less "fun" than the big ones. 

There’s one thing that these all have in common: they’re completely unlike 
GNUstep.  They all use mature toolkits that are also used by larger desktop 
environments, making it trivial to substitute GNOME or KDE applications when 
they don’t have a native one.

> Even EDE (http://equinox-project.org/) has success in the small FLTK world. 

If your goal is a desktop environment that enjoys success in the small GNUstep 
world, that’s one thing.  If your goal is one that encourages new developers to 
use (and, ideally, contribute to) GNUstep, that’s a completely different thing.

> Without forgetting Enlightenment…

Life is much better if you forget Enlightenment.  The person who wrote the 
Daily WTF article was far more kind than the design deserves.

> Also, remember that many distribs offer 
> GNUstep as a desktop install option.

Do they?  I can’t remember the last time I saw one.  On FreeBSD, we have a 
GNUstep metapackage that installs around a hundred GNUstep applications, but I 
wouldn’t call that a desktop install option.

> My purpose is only to to write some recipes to have various light usable 
> desktops. For example WindowMaker + PCMan + TextEdit + ... or Fluxbox + 
> Gworkspace + ... It doesn't have to be "full GNUstep" at the beginning.
> 
> To attract more developers, you can also be more attractive : offer something 
> that is easy to try, release often the desktop, offer small tasks to work 
> with, ... 
> I don't see the desktop as a requirement to atract devs, but as something 
> that 
> can help, because people will try it and talk about it.

And they will say ‘hey, it looks like GNOME did 15 years ago, avoid that crappy 
project’.

> I don't know why Etoilé failed, but IMHO it was may be too ambitious, it 
> couldn't release often and it was not easy to try (lack of packaging). 

I can talk for a long time about why Étoilé failed, but the key problem was 
that we didn’t provide an incremental adoption path.  This is partly my fault: 
I was opposed to making it too easy to run our stuff on OS X, which meant that 
we never tapped into a large pool of Mac and iOS developers who would write 
code that could have then been easily ported to a developing Étoilé system.

> Also, as a sysadmin I have many friends developers who ask to macOs 
> compatibility. Then I talk about GNUstep but they ask "show me, show me 
> something that works" and they mean show me a complete environment because 
> they want to be convinced that everything will work, from file selector to 
> theming.

What do they mean by macOS compatibility?  Something that looks and behaves 
like macOS?  KDE with the right theme will get a lot closer than a 
GNUstep-based desktop at the moment.  The ability to run Mac apps?  No going to 
happen for the foreseeable future.  Source compatibility with the same APIs?  
We can give them that (to a degree), but it doesn’t sound like that’s what they 
want.

David