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linguaeHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I’ve been periodically keeping up with GNUstep’s progress since 2004, when I first learned about it …

I’ve been periodically keeping up with GNUstep’s progress since 2004, when I first learned about it as a high school student brand new to Linux and Mac OS X (I grew up on Windows at home and on classic Macs in elementary school). I even wrote a report for a community college class on the history of Mac OS X. I’ve wanted to see GNUstep succeed, but unfortunately it never got as much attention as the KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK ecosystems. I have some theories as to why, but I think the biggest barrier is those who really wanted OpenStep/Cocoa in the 1990s and 2000s could’ve used readily-available NeXT/Apple software instead of waiting for GNUstep. It’s the same issue ReactOS and Haiku have; they’re competing against Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 and BeOS, respectively. Even FreeDOS, which is architecturally much simpler, took quite a while to reach version 1.0; people could just get MS-DOS 6.22. …

Original discussionÉtoilé – desktop built on GNUStep112 source comments · at import
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PJ
pjmlpHN

GNUStep is a good example that the bare bones language and compiler being open source it is not enough, when everything else doesn't come along. Saying this as someone that used Afterstep and Windowmaker alongside GNUStep, and did seat a few times on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM. Last time I checked was at the level of OS X Panther, and modern Objective-C still wasn't supported.

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LE
LeFantomeHN

Actually, GNUstep has always had an Interface Builder: https://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html My own take is actually that GNUstep spent too long trying to be an OpenStep successor instead of being a way to run Mac apps on Linux. It took them ages to even clarify if it was a desktop environment or an SDK (and I am not sure it is even clear now). There has never been a tonne of love for Objective C either. Pretty much the only reason to use it for most people has been because you had to for access to Apple APIs. Which would be the only reason to use it on Linux too. It always amazed me that Darwin + GNUstep did not result in a macOS clone. Neither of them really went anywhere. Have you seen Gershwin? https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop

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FL
flomoHN

> I have some theories as to why Curious what those might be. I think might not have been so simple as well "Jobs = Le Bad". There might have been some oldskool unix thinking about linking. (Both commercial and gnu.) And *Step was a dynamic message API, so it "didn't fit their model". Total speculation I have to admit. It also seemed like a commercial dead-end pre-iphone.

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SO
SomeoneHN

> I’ve noticed that most commercial Mac OS X software in the early days were Carbon applications, not Cocoa applications I think it’s a safe bet there were many more Mac applications than NeXT applications (that’s one of the reasons Carbon was created), so I don’t see how that’s surprising.

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