Re: Package building

[James Carthew]

I've been toying with NextSpace in a VM. From my experience, if this gains a web browser and network settings panel (mostly for Wifi config), (and gets Debian packages) it could easily replace Mate on my machines. Linux desktop application development is terrible at the moment. GNUstep may not be the right answer for me, but I'm open to at least exploring it. NSMacintoshMenuStyle works in NextSpace, and I had Rik.theme built/working properly. I was hoping to get Etoile WildMenus running as well but ran out of time. NextSpace is definitely moving in the right direction. I think the focus on System settings is definitely the way to go. As someone who would like to get a mac-like desktop out of this eventually I'd like to see some of the options ported into SystemPreferences.app just because it's a more mac-like application. But I like how NextSpace has the look/feel of NextStep, definitely keep it up. I know the ideal would be to port webkit to gnustep but at this point I'd be happy to just throw firefox into a gnustep window with an application menu.

On Tue, 19 Nov 2019 at 22:49, Ivan Vučica <ivucica@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019, 23:40 Sergii Stoian <stoyan255@gmail.com> wrote:

Plus themes support bloats the GNUstep codebase. I understand that the initial idea was to attract more users/developers, but… It’s not working.

Have you guessed why it's not working?

Users who would be attracted by a different theme are not aware there are different themes or how to set them up.

A solution is to ship a "gnustep-recommended-config" package as a Recommends of the libgnustep-gui package. Speaking in Debian terms; same goes for other OSes.

This package would pull in a theme and a systemwide plist configuring a modernized theme etc.

Today, if a KDE user born in 2001 installs a GNUstep program (they may not care about the rest of the environment), the UI is totally out of sync with their expectations. And if they go through the effort to explore an entire environment, they get greeted by the 90s — whether they want it or not.

Am I misreading expectations of a prospective user?

I mean, these are my expectations, and I'm born in the late 80s. I love e.g. System 7 look. NEXT look is decent to me (but just decent). I'm personally around for the programming language and the frameworks, not for the default theme.

Nextspace seems cool and I should get around to trying it out.