Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Alessandro Sangiuliano]

Il 20/12/2013 02:05, Ivan Vučica ha scritto:

On Thu Dec 19 2013 at 10:42:51 PM, Pirmin Braun <pb@intars.de> wrote:

as there are different directions and interests there is nevertheless the GNUstep base we all share.
Maybe we can agree on putting common effort into a thing called "the non-Apple ObjectiveC toolchain and runtime"  and make it more visible, documented, easier to approach, install.

 

Just base?

I would agree, if the current free desktop environments were acceptably usable to me.

I personally would love to bring about a simple desktop environment built around GNUstep, so that I can "dogfood" GNUstep. Currently, I cannot be efficient in a WindowMaker+GWorkspace-based environment; I'm simply missing too many things or too many little things annoy me.

How about starting with a window manager that does several things I'm really used to:

- knows the concept of a global menu (but does not try to be the center of your life like Unity, instead trying to get out of the way)

- knows the concept of a document-per-X11-window so I can quickly access a folder where a document is saved

- can pick up notifications and store them away for quick retrieval

- has a nice decoration that happens to be close to what the underlying GUI toolkit uses

- uses animations and compositing tastefully

- does not (necessarily) include a dock, but launches it and plays nicely with it

That's a really short list which might form a nice basis of a desktop environment. Working on it should be a fun journey in itself. Who knows, maybe along the way this thing can pick up a few NeXT purists as well (and be shaped by their needs and wishes).

And these thoughts are far less ambitious than Etoile, which makes them less fun and interesting.

I don't understand why you said Étoilé is less fun and interesting, so briefly I tell my story.
About 2 years ago I bought my first mac, with 0 knowledge of Obj-c and Cocoa; I asked to myself, "In the FOSS world there are reimplementations of the most important frameworks and apps"; I started to search; I found GNUstep, and also seen that there was a Desktop Enviroment built on top of it, at early stage, but with active devs, Étoilé.

I introduced to them myself, explaining I had no knowledges of objc and Cocoa, but with the intention to contribute to the project in someway in the freetime, they did appreciate, and I started to learn a lot of things, and just this was a kind of "a lot of funny".

Someone in this discussione said that FOSS people tend to start from scratch projects or fork them too often. Is it maybe true?

Étoilé has a window manager, its name is ProjectManager, it is in early stage, so should be easy to start hacking on it, instead of writing another one from scratch, just ask to some of the Étoilé's project manager is some kind of contribute is appreciated.

I'd want remember that actually, Étoilé is the only one project that trys to be a complete DE built on top of GNUstep, and that shows the GNUstep potential.

I'm trying to bring people to the GNUstep, in my little world, and with data in my hands, I can say this:

I talk of GNUstep, what is, what does, the Cocoa compatibility etc etc, people are interested, but when I start  to show some examples the "hype" starts to decrease; this happens due of an argument we treated in the recently past, the "looks" of -gui, so as we concluded in a private conversation with Riccardo, they are incompetent, because they looks just at the theme of the framework, but as recently I do, after some gnustep starting exemaples, I show Étoilé as an example too, the interest doesn't decrease, but tends to increase to both of the projects (GNUstep and ET).

This is why I don't understand why Étoilé hould be less interesting.

Regards,
Alex (Slex)