Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[Gregory Casamento]

Micheal,

I couldn't have said it much better myself.

GNUstep's current look is good enough for some, but it's not inspiring
new membership.   I, personally, like the current look myself, but I
realize that many people are looking for something more modern.

This is why theming is so important.    I would say that apps are of
equal significance in this equation.

GC

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Michael Thaler
<michael.thaler@physik.tu-muenchen.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> 1. Marketing to get people to give us a look.
>
> To see what? A user interface that most people consider looking really dated?
>
> Here are some numbers from the 2006 Linux Deskop Survey:
>
> http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-
> bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archive&id=0821200617613
>
> BlackBox   1.6 %
> GNOME   35.1 %
> Enlightenment   3.8 %
> Fluxbox   3.9 %
> IceWM   3.2 %
> KDE   37.7 %
> WindowMaker   2.2 %
> Xfce   9.8 %
> Other (please email us)
>
> I could not find any results for 2008 or 2009 but I doubt that the market 
> share
> of WindowMaker increased. Don't you think that a huge majority of Linux users
> prefer a more modern looking desktop environment with some eye-candy and will
> be just dissapointed if the see gnustep in its current state?
>
> I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at
> work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer
> Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I
> think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort
> of ok.
>
> But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a
> masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I
> want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the
> openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something
> using gnustep, the old-fashened Look & Feel kills my motivation because I
> think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am
> actually a former KDE developer).
>
>> 2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out
>> (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group
>> of three or four good themes to appeal to different people)
>
> For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take. Does
> gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep want
> to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former case
> I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a nice
> API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep
> being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with a
> Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop
> environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't think
> gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to
> Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to MacOS
> X. A simple theme will not be enough to make a gnustep desktop really look
> cute and appealing.
>
>> 3. Enough good quality stuff so that people don't try once and then
>> give up.
>
> For this to happen, gnustep needs more developers. In my opinion the only way
> that this can happen is if more people start to use gnustep. Apparently
> gnustep did not attract a lot of users / developers for the last 15 years. So
> maybe it is time to change direction?
>
> Greetings,
> Michael
>
>
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>



-- 
Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
## GNUstep Chief Maintainer
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell), (301)362-9640 (Home)