Re: Thoughts triggered by these NeXTbuntu guys

[Michael Thaler]

On Thursday 31 August 2006 23:54, discuss-gnustep-request@gnu.org wrote:

> Even XFCE, a pretty common environment, let's say the 3rd big usually
> found in linux, doesn't have stuff like a mailer or a browser, you use
> third party stuff. A windowmanager, a set of preferences, a bunch of
> utilities, a dock and a terminal is what it started with. Now it has a
> filemanager, which I don't like but exists.

Firefox and Thunderbird integrate pretty well with other XFCE apps, so users 
don't have a problem here. But Firefox and Thunderbird do not integrate well 
at all with gnustep applications. How many users want to mix gunstep 
applications with vertical menus with other applications with horizontal 
menus?

> CDE, maybe the first to have "desktop environment" had a couple of
> texteditor, terminal, emailer, various environment preferences tool (not
> system dependent stuff), dock stuff, an unspectacular filemanager... no
> ftp application, no browser (mosaic or netscape were often bundled by
> vendors). Still you can't doubt it is a desktop environment, all
> applications have a common look, homogeneous icons and look... and the
> power are the extreme tools to set up CDE in a networked and shared
> environment (customization of icons among users, messages, excellent
> remote desktop: dtlogin is still really very very nice by leveraging  
> xdm). Ah, yes, it had color schemes, but I don't think that was what
> really made it shine, or? 90% of the times I have seen it with the
> vendor-supplied theme.

Again, mosaic and netscape integrated quite well with other CDE apps. But CDE 
is irrelevant for this discussion anyway.

> Even our Beloved Macos-X 10.0 was "much less" than you might think, it
> had no apple browser for example. A crashy IE was available. No iTunes
> either!

But at least there were third-party browsers which integrated reasonably well 
with MacOSX. And Apple developed Safari, so the point is mood anyway.

> My Point? GNUstep is much more "there" than  we might assume, but until
> developers themselves won't realize it and continue to complain, how can
> we market that to users? I use my gnustep desktop daily, pretty easy to

Do you think you can market Gnustep to the users by telling them XFCE, CDE and 
MacOSX 10.0 had no browser either? 

Greetings,
Michael