Re: A Critique: Getting Started with GNUstep on Windows

[Dan Hitt]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 9:02 AM, Doc O'Leary
<droleary@2015usenet1.subsume.com> wrote:
> For your reference, records indicate that
> Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Absolutely --- an entire OS which you just install on some partition
>> of a gpt disk
>> would be perfect, imvho.
>>
>> I would certainly download and use it.
>
> For what?  I mainly use a Mac, but I have a number of images for virtual
> machines that I run for specific purposes.  If GNUstep is going to
> bother with the efforts of building an entire OS/distribution around
> itself, it needs to explicitly state *why* that is important to the
> project.

For developing software --- it was easy and pleasant
to bang out applications using NeXT, and imvho there
is still nothing comparable, certainly not in the free world.
("Nothing comparable" meaning competing results are worse,
and harder to produce besides.)

I also use a Mac for work, and i also have virtual machines
running on it.  But that's not the same as being able
to easily build a top-level application that feels as
rugged as the ones that ship with the box and interacts
with them easily.

>
>> And, to me, it would be infinitely preferable to a piece of middleware.
>
> Having an OS doesn’t eliminate the need to support Cocoa as “middleware”.
> People aren’t going to bother with a custom OS if there are no apps that
> make it worth running.

I think many would agree with you.

And as Doug Simons and others have pointed out, there are
a lot of competing visions.  What's good for my use case
may be worse than useless for his.

To be more specific here, there was another box from the
same era as NeXT, namely the BeBox.  And there has
been more than one project to reincarnate it, in the free
world, most notably Haiku.

I think there's a lot to be said for that kind of path,
but it is also very slow and difficult, in part because they
really are making a custom OS down to and
including the kernel.  (So while i think 'custom' is
ok, i wouldn't want to reach down to the kernel,
or even to the command line --- just from the
windowing system up.)

I think i agree with or at least am pretty sympathetic
to the rest of your points, and thanks for
responding in such a detailed way.

dan