Re: Starting GNUstep (Debian)

[Adrian Robert]

On Sep 24, 2004, at 5:13 AM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:

> On Sep 23, 2004, at 7:45 PM, Alex Perez wrote:
> > Patrix wrote:
> >
> > > This is a good point and, imho, one of the reasons GNOME and KDE are
> > > more widely used - I remember using KDE 0.0.2 or whatever early
> > > version they had, and I could _use_ it. It had a window manager, a
> > > panel and a file manager that crashed every time I dragged something
> > > to the trash. But I could use it.
> >
> > G.I.N.A.D.E. G.I.N.A.D.E. G.I.N.A.D.E. G.I.N.A.D.E. G.I.N.A.D.E.
> > G N U S T E P   I S   N O T  A  D E S K T O P   E N V I R O N M E N T
>
> G.S.B.A.D.E G.S.B.A.D.E G.S.B.A.D.E G.S.B.A.D.E G.S.B.A.D.E G.S.B.A.D.E
> G N U S T EP  S H O U L D  B E  A  D E S K T O P  E N V I R O N M E N T
>
> > Seriously, it's not. There are several projects to *USE* GNUstep in a 
> > gnustep-centric development environment, but what you are doing is 
> > akin to calling 'kdelibs' a "Desktop Environment". You are comparing 
> > apples to oranges, and not even realizing it.
>
> Seriously, it should be. This is IMHHO the main reason for its low 
> acceptance, or should I say complete lack of acceptance....?

Seriously, it is.  ;-)  GNUstep is not just a widget library.  It 
includes mechanisms for managing resources together with binaries 
(bundles, frameworks, and .apps), interapp communication protocols and 
standards (D.O., notifications, services), developer and application 
documentation frameworks, advanced color, font, and printing 
facilities, UI guidelines, directory structure standards, and much 
more.  It has all of this because it was THE framework for the NeXT OS 
and now Cocoa desktops.  Gnome and KDE are still miles behind (in 
design, not implementation), except in two areas: app component sharing 
(Gnome bonobo and KDE Kparts, copying Windows ActiveX), and session 
managment.

GNUstep could do session managment and Window decoration, except that 
its facilities in these areas were not developed with coexistence on a 
heterogenous desktop in mind.  If every app you ran was a GNUstep one, 
it would work, but not when you are running all kinds of X apps.  
That's why we need WindowMaker.

I think some are getting the concept of desktop environment confused 
with the packaging/setup of said environment.  Neither Gnome nor KDE 
are generally run "out of the box" these days.  Instead you run 
Fedora's setup of Gnome, or SuSE's default KDE configuration.  These 
are the parallel to SimplyGNUstep, etc..  Backbone and related projects 
are similar to these in that they provide packaging and default 
configuration, but they either innovate in trying to add that last 
piece -- heterogenous session management -- or try to improve on the 
existing *step facilities in other areas.  This doesn't change the fact 
that *step already has facilities (not all fully implemented) that 
parallel just about everything in Gnome or KDE.

As far as lack of acceptance, I think what is needed is to finish off a 
few existing areas that don't need much work but make a big difference 
for usability, like Services and Help, and non-clipped text label 
display ;), and improve the packaging.  Perhaps also a "killer app" 
that makes people want to install GNUstep so they can run it...