The NeXT-Best Thing: GNUSTEP 0.9.4 Live CD

roard writes "Following the NeXT tradition with mixed case, GNUSTEP is a live CD/distribution while GNUstep is an implementation of the OpenStep API. GNUSTEP is based on Morphix, and uses the GNUstep libraries and GNUstep-based applications to provide a NeXTSTEP-like environment that people can easily test and use. This new 0.9.4 release comes 8 months since the precedent 0.5 release, and brings a lot of new GNUstep applications with it, as well as an upgrade of the GNUstep libraries and the development tools. In other news, a small demonstration of GNUstep development tools is available in Flash or divx. The old dream of having a GNU OS with Hurd and an OpenStep implementation doesn't seems that far now ;)"

Comments

wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[JessLeah]

i'Ve aLWaYs wOndEReD.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[kwerle]

Because you can't trademark a generic word (like next) unless you fuck with the capitalization. Because then it's not just the word- it's YOUR(tm) word.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[BlueGecko]

NeXT has that capitalization because the original NeXT logo had that capitalization. It had that capitalization because the artist wanted to emphasize several adjectives that started with e (I don't remember them at this point, but they were words such as excellent, extendable, educational, and so on) so he made the e lowercase.

NEXTSTEP the operating system is and always has been all caps. OPENSTEP the operating system has also always been all caps. OpenStep the API specification is capitalized in camel case, and I'm not going to touch NeXT's computers, because I always get them wrong.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[Anonymous Coward]

(ScORE:4 FuNNY)

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[Jeremy Erwin]

NeXT is an attempt to render a logo in ASCII. Most of us are stuck with dreary typefaces that don't include a full height 'e', so it looks rather odd. The 'e' supposedly stands for a variety of words: "education", "exponent"...

The logo was designed by Paul Rand, who designed logos for UPS, IBM, and British Petroleum, among others.

The persistent use inter-capitalization (NextCube, OpenStep, AppKit) probably derives from too much exposure to the NextStep api and Objective C-- both of which use inter-capitalization to enhance the readability of code.

e.g the class NSBezierPath implements the method

- (void)appendBezierPathWithArcFromPoint: (NSPoint)fromPoint toPoint: (NSPoint)toPoint radius: (float)radius

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[SharpFang]

Yes... but that "generic word" limits you to your domain strictly. Using unique word and gaining world recognition gives you protection in ALL domains.
I can create "apple candies" (duh, obviously!), "apple" clothes, name a car "apple" and such. But if I tried to produce tiny jelly beans called "Microsoft", I'd have my ass sued (and go bankrupt, nobody buing them from fear of poisoning)
Still, whoever used the brand name outside my domain before the company gains world recognition, can keep the trademark. (see the Linux washing powder :)

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[kwerle]

I don't think that Steve Jobs would nod to the PC even if it deserved it - and especially not back then. I mean - compare the XT to the mac of the day...

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

Windows?

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[kwerle]

I *think* that trademark laws changed in that time. Not sure - IANAL, etc.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[kwerle]

Damn, hit post too fast.

I'm not sure if it is "Windows", or just "windows" that is TM. I'm also not sure if it's "Microsoft Windows" or just "Windows".

Just like McDonalds will sue you if you make your own McFoodItem - it is infringing on their McDonalds TM even though they don't sell McFoodItem, Microsoft will sue you if you sell "Lindows" because it infringes on "Microsoft Windows".

IANAL, etc, etc.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[myov]

MS always seems to refer to the product as Microsoft Windows (TM) or Microsoft Office (TM), rather than as Windows or Office.

The current products de-emphasize the microsoft part though. (look at a Windows splash screen - it hasn't said "Microsoft Windows" since 3.1. Now it's "microsoft WINDOWS".

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[klui]

I read somewhere that NeXT is spelled that way because the original designer of the logo did some group tests and when it's spelled with a capital E, people often mistook it for EXIT instead.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[geoffspear]

Objective C has been around for a lot longer than perl. Please do not use the term "Camel Case" when discussing it.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[esh]

I was always under the impression that "CamelCase" referred to the "humps" in the words that made it look like a camels back. As such it would have no particular relation to perl and its O'Reilly Camel book.

I may be entirely wrong here, so it someone knows the true origin it would be interesting to know.

Re:wHy WaS NeXT nAmED LiKE ThAT aNyHoW?

[jack_csk]

Maybe that's the reason why the Internet Explorer logo is "e" instead of "E". Microsoft just don't want users to think about exit windows when they use Internet Explorer.

Re:Have fun, nerds!

[JessLeah]

Is this some "hyper bowl" thing or somewhaT?

video

[va3atc]

is not divx, its mpeg(1 or 2, haven't finished downloading yet)

Re:video

[marcello_dl]

"file" command says it's a Divx, mplayer says it's an xvid with avi file format, maybe adding .avi to the filename solves problems if there are any.

Re:video

[YankeeInExile]

Isn't divx a codec that might be contained within MPG files?

Re:video

[va3atc]

Sorry folks, when I say the length when the video loaded up in contrast to its size I later bit my tongue :)

Re:video

[nkh]

file says it's an AVI (798x598) DivX 4, not an mpg as the extension shows. Just rename it to .avi if it's not auto-detected.

Re:video

[va3atc]

Saw*...Must...Preview....Post.....

Re:video

[Wordsmith]

It's a codec that might be contained within avi files, or wmv files, or mov files. MPG files are explicitly mpegs.

Now, to make it even more fun. divx is an implimentation of mpeg-4. So even through it's not an mpeg1 or mpeg2 file, in a sense, it's still an mpeg file.

Re:video

[SharpFang]

And to make things even more fun, this file is an .avi containing divx mis-named as .mpg

Re:video

[Xyde]

Yay for the idiots who decided that the file type is related to the name somehow. Imagine if you could change the file size or the creation date by simply renaming the file *rolls eyes*

Hurd?

[Digital Pizza]

Does Hurd have anything to do with this? (Can't get to the article). I don't see how this brings the Hurd closer to "release", any more that it does Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Hurd?

[Pflipp]

Like Hurd was the perceived GNU kernel, GNUstep was the perceived GNU GUI.

Re:Hurd?

[Pflipp]

Hmm... I hoped "perceived" meant something like "envisioned". That's what I meant, anyway.

Re:Hurd?

[TheRaven64]

GNUstep, like HURD, is a GNU project that has been going on for ages (it predates KDE and GNOME), without appearing to get close to completion. Unlike KDE or GNOME, which can incrementally add and deprecate features and APIs (potentially ending up with the same mess of legacy interfaces that plagues Windows), GNUstep is implementing the OPENSTEP API, jointly developed by NeXT and Sun. This meant that it was not particularly usable until it was about 90% done. This happened in the last year or so which, combined with the introduction of OPENSTEP into the mainstream in the form of Cocoa on OS X, lead to an increase in interest in GNUstep.

The relevance to HURD is tenuous, but I recall Roard mentioning recently that he had seen a demo of a GNUstep desktop running on top of HURD, giving a 100% GNU desktop. Perhaps this is what he was referring to. It doesn't bring HURD any close to release, but when HURD is ready (Real Soon Now(TM)), it is likely that there will be a GNUstep desktop waiting for it. If only the GCC developers would commit Objective-C++ to the main tree and let is have a WebKit-based browser...

Re:Hurd?

[Digital Pizza]

Yeah, I guess get the association, but I doubt this is going to do anything to move Hurd further along; this is already running (apparently) well enough on Linux. I'm not holding my breath for it the Hurd.

Re:Hurd?

[Master Bait]

If only the GCC developers would commit Objective-C++ to the main tree and let is have a WebKit-based browser...

Ironic state of things, considering that the very first web browser was written for OpenStep in Objective C.

Re:Hurd?

[mrchaotica]

The relevance to HURD is tenuous, but I recall Roard mentioning recently that he had seen a demo of a GNUstep desktop running on top of HURD, giving a 100% GNU desktop.

So they must not have been using X, since that's not GNU. In that case, what backend were they using?

Re:Hurd?

[quinto2000]

The irony is that the Objective-C / OpenStep application framework is now the second-class citizen when it comes to the Internet, even though it was where the first web browser was written.

Re:Hurd?

[drinkypoo]

It's not a GNU project, but Cairo is a GPL 2d image compositing library which can interface to glitz (also GPL I believe?) in order to render via OpenGL. There is a form of MesaGL which works without X... You could possibly build a non-X GNU desktop this way, though again there would still be non-GNU components. At least it would be 100% GPL.

Re:Hurd?

[zootm]

Hurd's architecture is a great deal more modern than that of Linux. It's just never been properly finished. Real Soon Now.

As for the OpenStep/GNUSTEP thing, I assume simply because it's an open standard that was decided to be part of the "GNU System". It's also, as someone pointed out, a frozen standard - it's not going to change like KDE/GNOME could.

Re:Hurd?

[roard]

Well, HURD was supposed to be the Kernel of the GNU OS, and GNUstep in the beginning was supposed to be the GUI of the GNU OS. As recently Hurd progressed with the first results of the L4 port, it was a reference to that..

Re:Hurd?

[roard]

Sure, Objective-C is the root of all evil and slow a system to death. That's why, as we have all seen with the recent (!) steve job video, a workstation with a 68030 (how much slower than our current hardware ?) was undoubtely unbearably slow...

Re:Hurd?

[Unknown Lamer]

Proper software strikes a balance between disciplines. Imperative, object oriented, functional, they all have their uses. It is a mistake to go all the way in one direction.

Which is naturally why we should all be using Common Lisp because it can do all of that with ease.

/me ducks

Re:Hurd?

[zsau]

Not at all. Objective C++ and Objective C are two different languages. ObjC is a version of C with minimal additions to make it a great object-oriented programming language. ObjC++ is ObjC combined with C++ in the same source code.

Standard GCC can compile ObjC just fine. But because most major gui free webbrowsers (Mozilla and Konq at least) are written in C++, the only ways to write an OpenStep webbrowser are with ObjC++ or by rewriting the entire engine.

Re:Hurd?

[drinkypoo]

I assume they are heading towards an entirely GNU-software system. They're probably not in a hurry to replace X because there is no real consensus, or even a particularly amazing idea, as to what its replacement should look like. By most accounts, it should look a lot like X, and if that's the case, why screw around with a good thing? Or, at least, a working thing based on open standards.

Re:Hurd?

[squiggleslash]

The pre-linking that occurs while OS X is "optimizing the system" is to do with regular C symbols, not dynamic Objective C objects. Objective C, being dynamic, really doesn't need "pre-linking".

This is why the "Optimization" occurs regardless of the app being installed.

Re:Hurd?

[Cthefuture]

Not really. The pre-linking can certainly help regular C applications but its real purpose is to speed up all the dynamic code that Objective-C and poorly written C++ are using. No one had used prelinking much until OS X and KDE came round.

Plain C and C++ with templates are your good friends when properly wielded.

Re:Hurd?

[Cthefuture]

LISP is a very powerful and useful but the syntax sucks.

Sure, people will say using the right editor and being used to the syntax help, but seriously, if it were that easy and great then everyone would be using LISP. The plain fact is that relatively few people use LISP these days. I would say this is due to the syntax more than anything else (performance being second although it's pretty good these days).

It's the same problem O'Caml faces. O'Caml is pretty powerful and can be fast but the syntax sucks. Plain SML is much better than the basterdized crap that O'Caml uses. Despite the fact that you can change its syntax, no one ever does because it then becomes non-standard.

Re:Hurd?

[Unknown Lamer]

The Power of Lisp lies in that messy syntax is the problem. Without it the macro system wouldn't be possible.

The syntax is actually really easy to use, even without a text editor to balance parenthesis for you. The problem is that it isn't easy to use at first, especially if you have prior programming knowledge with one of the many Algol-like languages. It also takes a bit of knowledge of functional programming because it is often easier to do things functionally than imperatively (especially when you have a compiler that ensures tail call optimization).

Of course, there is room for many different programming languages and there are enough users of Lisp to keep it alive and that's all that really matters. The rest of the world can suffer with C and C++ :)

SML is cool, I know a guy who did some work on the SML/NJ compiler (I think it was SML/NJ, it might have been another one but it was at CMU that he did it). I prefer Lisp even though I probably should prefer SML :)

Re:Hurd?

[jcr]

Guess again.

Prebinding (not pre-linking, as you're mistakenly referring to it) is compeletly orthgonal to the use or non-use of dynamic method dispatching.

Prebinding is all about speeding up application launch times, by doing certain symbol mapping work up front. This is about resolving external references in your code, such as functions and global data provided by the system frameworks.

The prebinding operation after performing a system update on OS X is time consuming, because the update_prebinding script checks all the apps on your system to see if they were affected by changes to the frameworks. The redo_prebinding operation on any particular executable doesn't take very long, and it's time saved on every subsequent launch of that program.

-jcr

Re:Hurd?

[mrchaotica]

OpenStep isn't really a "frozen standard" any more, because the single widely-used implementation (OS X) continues to evolve. The one big problem with GNUStep is that they don't care enough about replicating Apple's changes. : (

Re:Hurd?

[roard]

OpenStep isn't really a "frozen standard" any more, because the single widely-used implementation (OS X) continues to evolve.

The fact that Apple adds things to Cocoa (not that much by the way) doesn't suddenly transform OpenStep as a moving target. Cocoa is a moving target, not OpenStep. And guess what ? GNUstep already implements OpenStep (minus some rather unused classes).

The one big problem with GNUStep is that they don't care enough about replicating Apple's changes. : (

And how did you actually figured that ?
GNUstep primary goal was to implement OpenStep, yes. But Apple's changes are also added. Saying that "we don't care enough about replicating Apple's changes" is just plain wrong. If the changes are sound and, moreover, if somebody actually provides some code, I can guarantee you that it will be integrated. As always, it's a matter of coding. If you want to help, just start to code.. it's a free software project you know.

Re:Hurd?

[mrchaotica]

Well, all I was saying is that GNUStep puts OpenStep compatibility as a higher priority than Cocoa compatibility.

The only problem with that, though, is that the only explicitly correct implementation of OpenStep that's still around is... GNUStep itself. The only good reason to aim for the standard is to interoperate with other implementations of it, right? So what's GNUStep trying to interoperate with? Ten year old NeXT cubes? Abandonware Yellow Box?

Or should they maybe make their highest priority interoperation with the only other implementation that matters -- Cocoa -- even if it doesn't quite match the "standard?"

I'm not trying to complain, really; I'm actually really excited about how GNUStep seems almost ready to start taking off (what with the .9.4 version number and the forthcoming .nib compatibility and the theming engine and all). I was just opining that it might take off faster if the priority was practicality instead of being "Correct" (à la HURD).

Re:Hurd?

[druske]

Another response already addressed prebinding, so I'll just add this...

Plain old C links just fine with Objective-C, so optimize that 5% of code that's causing 95% of your performance bottleneck in C, if you like. Meantime the features of Objective-C and Cocoa/GNUStep have (hopefully!) made you more productive, either getting you to market quicker or giving you the time and tools to add more bells and whistles.

There are also ways to optimize Objective-C code to do stuff like taking the call overhead out of loops.

All tools have their tradeoffs, and choosing the right tool and optimization strategy is part of the game. If raw performance were the sole criteria for choosing a development tool, we'd all be using assembly language. ;)

Re:Hurd?

[lisaparratt]

What, you mean other than Silicon Graphics machines, which have been "requickstarting" (the SGI name for it) normal C applications after install for years upon years?

Re:Hurd?

[grahamlee]

Actually it was written in for NEXTSTEP in Objective-C not OpenStep - I have it running (and the original httpd) on a NeXTCube on my desk. On NEXTSTEP 3.3 which predates OpenStep by a good couple of years.

Re:Hurd?

[zootm]

On the other hand, though, if they continue to try integrating Apple's changes, they may reach the quandary of never being finished, which screws up the practicality angle. Seperate "core" and "Apple extended" branches seems almost necessary here, for consistency. But then, that could be going too far in itself.

Re:Hurd?

[D2Deek]

That's one of the reasons OS X has to sit there for ages "optimizing" your system after you install anything. It is running the pre-linker on everything. Otherwise your system runs like shit, like the first original OS X release which didn't do any pre-linking. Something they would not have to do if they did not use so much run-time crap. This issue is caused by a combination of Objective-C, poor use of C++, and poor design.

No, it's ALL about their choice of base platform. The Mach-O dynamic linker and binary format is unbearably primitive, and ridiculously slow in handling fixups -- it has dick to do with the language.

Forget what you've heard about how great it is...Mach sucks.

Re:Hurd?

[mrchaotica]

Eh, it wouldn't be any worse than the Mono project...

GNUstep works on hurd

[Anonymous Coward]

with a really small patch to libobjc,
available in a gcc/libobjc bug report.

GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS X

[1010011010]

Microkernel, unix-like userspace, Nextstep-based application development?

Right here.

Re:Have fun, nerds!

[JessLeah]

Off topic? It was an ON-TOPIC response to a troll. It was also meant as humorous. As in, us geeks don't even know how to say "Super Bowl". Ha ha, very funny.

Why are the mods here obsessed with downmodding things?

This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linux

[jkheit]

This UI and development environment seems so much better than the standard KDE/GNOME stuff, I've always wondered why this was not championed as a default desktop environment for Linux. There is also some OS X compatibility there as well as far as getting a single code base to compile for both environments. That, the unified display postscript, the great development environment, etc. seem to make it a natural and *sane* front end to the otherwise fragmented UI world of Linux.

With the relative compatibility to the OS X/OPENSTEP libraries and code re-use, there could be a real network effect by making this a default environment for Linux and other Unixes.

yeah but does it..

[glenkim]

does it run GNU Hurd L4?

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[lederhosen]

nah, Mac OS X is not i microkernel design.

It uses MACH as a HAL, not for message passing.
And it got a fucked up filesystem hiarchy.

Nice Demo

[TheMediaWrangler]

Makes me want to play with GNUstep. Only 2 lines of code for this simple app. The rest was built with the GUI, cool.

Re:Nice Demo

[TheRaven64]

Actually, that's not the cool thing. The cools thing is that the simple app with two lines of code implements the Model-Controller-View pattern. This means that this development approach is 100% scalable to large projects. Oh, and the fact that the output from GORM is a set of serialised objects, so you can instantiate them from the code with the same ease that you would create an object from within your code (particularly useful in document based applications where you'd want to create a large number of identical document views connected to different models).

Re:Nice Demo

[karniv0re]

I'm not all too familiar with this. Is the code portable? For all the GUI creation, does it just include a bunch of libraries and code for you? It seems cool, but what are its limitations?

Re:Nice Demo

[BorgCopyeditor]

If developing for GNUSTEP is anything like developing for Cocoa, that would be great. But why, oh, why must everything OSS have a supposedly cute, but actually ugly, name like GORM? Or Postgre? It's not clever and it sounds like vomit.

Re:Nice Demo

[TheKidWho]

Yes it is portable. Ie, I could take the source code they used to make the app in the demo, and compile it under OS X and it would work. Or I could compile it under a version of GNUStep for windows, and it would work fine.

Re:Nice Demo

[TheRaven64]

GNUstep is a set of libraries that run on almost anything (Windows, most flavours of *NIX including OS X, Solaris and *BSD. Oh, and Linux). The files created by GORM are just a description of how to instantiate a set of objects, and connections between them. They will work on any platform GNUstep works on. Currently, they are not compatible with OS X, unless you install GNUstep on OS X (and then you won't get the native look). Any GNUstep code that doesn't use GNUstep-specific extensions (i.e. anything that starts with GS instead of NS) will work on OS X natively (you may need to include different headers, but that's about it), but you will have to re-do anything you did in GORM in Interface Builder. A port of GORM to OS X to eliminate this restriction is underway, but not ready yet.

Re:Nice Demo

[TheRaven64]

GORM (Graphical Object Relationship Modeller) is arguably a better name than Interface Builder, since it is a tool for graphically modelling relationships between objects, which happens to be used primarily for building interfaces.

Re:Nice Demo

[alangmead]

What it does isn't so much write out a bunch of code and include a bunch of libraries, but rather what it does is make a live graph objects and then serialize them on save. Starting a nextstep,openstep, cocoa, or gnustep application reconstitutes the serialized object stream from the nib file.

Re:Nice Demo

[jericho4.0]

Developing for GNUSTEP is quite a bit like developing for Cocoa, and getting more so all the time.

OS X was the best thing to happen to GNUSTEP, as it gave them a target to work towards.

ISO download sites

[tarzeau]

Thanks Department of Physics, ETHZ, GNUSTEP-i386-0.9.4.iso
Thanks inode.at and Robe GNUSTEP-i386-0.9.4.iso
Thanks Lyle E. Dodge, GNUSTEP-i386-0.9.4.iso
Thanks Philipp, GNUSTEP-i386-0.9.4.iso
Thanks Daniel Aubry, GNUSTEP-i386-0.9.4.iso
Thanks Peter Samuelson, GNUSTEP-i386-0.9.4.iso

Re:ISO download sites

[forkazoo]

Anybody make a torrent yet? I don't have a stable enough connection to host the tracker myself, but given that these mirrors are presumably being slashdotted, I'd like to use a torrent if available.

Re:ISO download sites

[forkazoo]

Okay, so I went to the download sites, and they have torrents there, in addition to the straight ISO download. Never Mind!

Re:ISO download sites

[dave sanderman]

actually, the only torrents there appear to be for the 0.5 version, not the 0.9.4 version. you were right the first time.

Is this a full os?

[Tilmitt]

I'm a bit confused, is this a full os or does it run over linux/windows/whatever?

Re:Is this a full os?

[lederhosen]

It runs on Linux and most of the other unixes.

In this case it is on a GNU/Linux live cd

Re:Is this a full os?

[Art Tatum]

ANd it works half-way on Windows. The base (non-gui) classes work perfectly. The gui classes are tempermental, but work.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[FLAGGR]

Um, your being sarcastic, right? Incase your not...

-The OSX core IS open source, along with alot of other parts Are you forgeting that OSX is based off BSD/Mach?
-Although OSX is very cool (I've got a mac mini, love it to death) it actually does have a few viruses, contrasted to the none on linux.
-There aren't any lawsuits over who owns the linux code. It's owned by the people who wrote it, which is easy to find out, and otherwise it doesn't matter because it's GPL'd.

If you were serious, please check your facts next time. If you were joking, then sorry for ruining the joke. :)

Darwin

[Digital Pizza]

I wonder how feasible it would be to put GNUstep on top of Darwin/X11? Has anybody tried this?

Re:Darwin

[Nimrangul]

No, perhaps you could try googling when curious.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[Anonymous Coward]

It WAS championed as the default for GNU, like 10 years ago. Except it took forever go get usable, has like three serious developers and very few applications, and therefore is almost entirely useless to the end user. As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep. Thought not.

If you want an evironment where The Voice Of God comes down and tells everyone stop their C/C++ crap and go write Objective C programs, use OS X. It's never going to happen with Linux.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[lederhosen]

The library part of OSX, that GNUStep implements, is
*not* *in any way* open source.

Made with ibuild

[eburner]

I just wanted to note that this was created based on morphix using a tool called ibuild that eases creation of Linux LiveCDs.

Re:Have fun, nerds!

[Leo McGarry]

It was also meant as humorous.

A for effort, but D- for execution. It wasn't funny, first because it just wasn't funny, and second because it's God's own cliché: "Hey, I'll pretend not to know about some massively significant event in order simultaneously to perpetuate and to mock the stereotype that people like me are unaware of their surroundings." It was old when one antediluvian nerd said to another antediluvian nerd, "What's this I hear about rain?"

Developlment IDE

[jd142]

Wow, I really appreciate the Borland/Delphi/Kylix/C++ Builder/JBuilder IDE now. Even the VB ide was easier to build a gui app in.

Re:Developlment IDE

[Fortun L'Escrot]

gets me thinking about where Enlightenment is going. now the question is how long does it take to develop say an office suite on GNUSTEP vs KDE or GNOME or Windows XP? in manmonths of course.

Re:Developlment IDE

[Nik13]

I've developped for most of my life on dos/windows (older stuff before; atari 1040stfm, trs-80's, ...). I've also programmed a lot for other platforms (microcontrollers (PIC Chips, Atmels, and a motorola), in karel for a GM robot, PLCs, ...) but it was always inside windows. I have no idea what kind of IDE I'd use to do any of that in Linux.

Re:Developlment IDE

[Junta]

Do you want that in real man months, or mythical man months?

Re:Developlment IDE

[Fortun L'Escrot]

both so i can also look at a ratio :)

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[FLAGGR]

No shit? Their implementing a standard. That's the point.

Interesting how this post appears....

[linguae]

I was just looking at OpenStep/GNUstep/Cocoa stuff before browsing Slashdot today, and I came here to search for old GNUstep articles. Interesting....

Anyways, GNUstep sounds like a very interesting platform. I have always been fond of NEXTSTEP and Mac OS X, and I have been curious about Objective-C and Cocoa. GNUstep gives me an opportunity to learn Objective-C and the OpenStep specification, before I switch to Mac OS X. I seem very impressed by the development environment, and as soon as I build up my C programming skills and learn Objective-C, I'll be developing programs, too.

I only wish, though, that GNUstep was a bit more popular among developers. GNUstep seems to lack programs such as web browsers, word processors, and spreadsheets. Porting applications such as Firefox, Abiword, and Gnumeric, for example, would be difficult because those applications are written in C++, not in C. (GNUstep still doesn't support Objective-C++, because of some difficulties that Apple and GCC has with Apple's Objective-C++ implementation). Even so, I feel that GNUstep has the potential to become a very powerful and influential platform for developers. If it can build its developer base and developers start building applications that are just as good, or better, than what NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP offered, just imagine the possibilities....

Re:Interesting how this post appears....

[kanweg]

If you like languages other than Objective-C, you can go the Cocoa way: You can mix it with other languages such as C, C++ and what not.

If you're not too much into programming: The same interface as visible in the Flash demo, can be used to code with AppleScript!

Bert

Re:Interesting how this post appears....

[BorgCopyeditor]

I seem very impressed by the development environment

I seem to agree. :-)

Re:Interesting how this post appears....

[losinggeneration]

It's interesting I was looking at OpenStep/GNUstep stuff about 8 weeks ago for quite sometime before all these articles started coming out =P

Re:Interesting how this post appears....

[HeghmoH]

C and C++ are unique in the world of Cocoa as being extremely popular languages that don't have a bridge to Objective-C. Most popular languages out there are dynamic enough that writing a bridge isn't too hard, so you can access Cocoa or GNUSTEP from Python, Perl, Lisp, etc., but C and C++ aren't. Of course it doesn't matter for C, because it's a proper subset of Objective-C and you can just write a bit of glue code.

C++, however, is not a proper subset of Objective-C and you can't mix the two. That means that you have to drop down to the least common denominator, C, and write a bunch of glue between the two which makes for a royal pain in doing any integration.

Apple solves this with Objective-C++, which lets you mix the two, but for now it's an Apple-only language.

Re:Man screw that

[TheRaven64]

Yes. Most of AppKit works. The things that don't are largely bells and whistles which are nice but not essential (and even they are being added slowly). The real problem is that you can't use the same interface definition files on both GNUstep and Cocoa at the moment. Work is currently underway on two fronts to fix that:

1. Adding the ability for GORM to parse XML .nib files from Interface builder.
2. Compiling GORM on OS X linked against Cocoa rather than GNUstep and using it to create Cocoa .nib files directly.

At least one of these should be possible in the next few months.

The Windows port more or less works (transparency in images is broken. Everything else seems to work). Additionally there is a bundle (not yet in the release) which creates Windows-style menu bars instead of GNUstep ones for use on platforms like Windows, KDE and GNOME which are designed by people with no clue about Fitts' Law.

Additionally, Cameleon, the theme engine developed by the article submitter is nearing completion (it's been ready in the next week since the middle of January), and it will eventually be tied in with native theme engines for other desktop environments (including Windows) to give a completely native look for GNUstep apps.

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[RevAaron]

And it got a fucked up filesystem hiarchy.

Are you saying it's fucked up compared to *STEP or Linux? Solaris? HP-UX? Xenix? AIX? Hell, A/UX?

Don't get me wrong, I love NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. Ran em both for a long time. I'd rather be using them than OS X. But if the complaint is that OS X's fs hierarchy is screwed up compared to *STEP... Seems a bit much. I mean, how much harder is /Applications than /NextApps?

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Leo McGarry]

Although OSX is very cool (I've got a mac mini, love it to death) it actually does have a few viruses

Um? Like which ones, for instance? (The answer is, there are none.)

There aren't any lawsuits over who owns the linux code.

Okay, that's just not so. Linux is positively buried in litigation.

otherwise it doesn't matter because it's GPL'd

It does matter, because if the people who released the code actually stole the code, then it should be obvious that they have no right to try to saddle the code with a proprietary license. Or to do anything else with it, for that matter.

You might not like the fact that Linux is under litigation, or you might expect the litigation to end in a settlement or be dismissed, but that doesn't change the fact that Linux is in the courts right now.

Re:Really like NextStep?

[TheRaven64]

It's a full implementation of the OPENSTEP specification and a partial implementation of Apple's extensions from Cocoa, along with Project Center and Interface Builder applications. It is usually used with the WindowMaker WM to give a 100% NeXTish desktop.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[RevAaron]

Umm... OS X and Linux both are about the same number of viruses and worms. To say that Linux has none is as wrong as some Apple fan-boy saying that OS X hasnone. While it's not some comprehensive list, I don't believe I have a burden to provide one; but there was that bliss virus/trojan, and others. That was simply one of the first hits provided by Google. Finding more is left as an exercise for the reader.

Too much!

[fm6]

This is proof that the LiveCD fad is out of hand. GNUStep's distinguishing feature is an API. How is distributing a LiveCD going to persuade developers to code to that API?

I'm waiting for the MP/M LiveCD!

Re:Too much!

[fdawg]

I agree. I dont see what the point of this cd is. When I was downloading it, I was under the impression that it was running some other GNU kernel and this was an implementation of a 100% GNU system. After reading the comments here, I noticed that is just a linux cd with windowmaker.

A little pointless unless im missing something.

Re:Too much!

[drinkypoo]

getting users to use gnustep will get more developers to write for it. getting more developers to write for it will get more users to use it. boosting either boosts the other.

Re:Too much!

[fm6]

Users don't "use" GNUStep. They use software that happens to be written to the GNUStep API. Suppose (it's unlikely, but suppose) that some GNUStep program on this CD generates a lot of buzz. It doesn't tell programmers to create more GNUStep programs. It tells them to create more programs like the one that generated the buzz. They don't have to use GNUStep to do that.

In order for GNUStep to get more developers, it has to convince them that the API will make their jobs easier. The API has been around for 20 years (counting its NextStep and OpenStep incarnations) but has never caught on. (At least, not at any company not run by Steve Jobs.) A few popular GNUStep apps isn't going to change that.

Re:Too much!

[fm6]

You're right, having a program run off a CD is a good way to let people experiment with it. But that's not what a LiveCD is. It's a complete bootable system on a CD. Before you can run the demo, you have to boot into a completely new environtment, where you don't have access to all your tools and customizations. That strikes me as exactly the wrong way to demo software.

Re:Too much!

[owlstead]

Cause I don't wanna mess up my test computer running solaris for instance. My main PC is running linux, but I would not want to mess that up either. Messing my computer up is very unlikely thing to happen, say one in a hundreth. But hey, there are many applications out there. Not that I am going to test drive this, if only because of a lack of time.

Re:Too much!

[borgheron]

There are companies which still use OPENSTEP, from way back. There are also companies which write applications for Cocoa. It's not a matter of it catching on, as it already has "caught on".

Also, often times, it's not the API or the App, it's the company selling it. NeXT did a poor job in marketing what they had. It's a documented fact that Steve Jobs (although the man is a visionary) made several poor business decisions.

Go pick up a copy of "The Second Coming Of Steve Jobs". It gives a great amount of detail around the potential deals with MS, IBM and Dell which were botched so badly. Any one of these deals, or all of them would have changed the face of computing today.

Later, GJC

yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[samhalliday]

really, it looks terrible.

it is a good framework, and brilliantly implemented in OS X... but this GNU look is really awful! they need artists... LOTS of artists.

i could barely even follow the demo as the IDE and general look of the thing was so confusing and horrible that i wasn't able to even see where the obvious buttons were to press.

they may be doing wonders with implementing the whole framework... but it needs polish.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

"GNUstep is fully themable.. you can let it look like you want, even such eye-candy stuff like win xp or sth like that."

Q: Why does Linux UI technology just plain suck?

A: See people who say inane crap like the parent.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Coryoth]

To be honest, yes. You can see the issue most clearly by comparing this and this. One is GNUMail compiled under GNUstep, the other is the very same GNUMail compiled under MacOS X.

To my eye, for reasons I can't fully explain, at first glance the GNUstep version looks more cluttered and complicated even though some inspection will show all the same UI elements in the same places with the same icons. It's the colors, and the sizing and style of the widgets, and just the general feel given off by the look as a whole.

Jedidiah.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[drinkypoo]

It's the color scheme. Seriously. Remove all those reds and yellows and lighten up the grey a bit and all the "clutter" will be gone. Personally, I far prefer the simple, polished look to the gel toothpaste goo look of Aqua, but that's just opinion.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Jonathan]

I don't get this "it's ugly" attitude. Practically everyone I know who uses Linux uses Windowmaker as their WM, so I would imagine that most people *like* the NeXT look and feel. Heck, if I could get a decent theme engine working on OS X, I'd dump Aqua in a second to get back to the clean NeXT look.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[linguae]

I agree, too. Judging by the screenshots, the Mac OS X port looks very attractive and, to my knowledge, follows the Apple Human Interface Guidelines completely. Heck, it looks just as good as the Mail.app bundled with Mac OS X. The GNUstep version, on the other hand, doesn't look as attractive. Assuming that GNUstep applications follow the design of NEXTSTEP applications, it needs some work. The toolbar should look like buttons, not like an Internet Explorer 3.0-esque design. I also don't really like the arrangement of some of the widgets.

This is an example of the NEXTSTEP Mail.app program. You can see that the GNUMail.app application got many parts right, but its interface still needs some cleaning up to do.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Coryoth]

The color scheme is a large part of it. It's also the fonts, the the size of the widgets - all the buttons and list dividers etc. all look kind of chunky and stand out, adding to the "clutter" look. By contrast in the MacOS X screenshot the obvious UI elements are the messages themselves. It doesn't need to be all gel looking like MacOS X, but even a theme more akin to GTK Industrial or KDE Plastik along with better fonts would go a long way to making the application look much nicer and more inviting.

Jedidiah.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[C. E. Sum]

Do you hang out with the exNeXT crowd?? I know there are people like that (I work for/with severa of them), but I would hardly call it common among Linux users.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[erikdalen]

funny, I think it's the opposite. the osx one looks like a light grey blur. but I suppose it has to do with opinion.
so why not check out this page for gnustep "skins":
http://www.roard.com/camaelon/

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Jonathan]

Do you hang out with the exNeXT crowd?? I know there are people like that (I work for/with severa of them), but I would hardly call it common among Linux users.

More like the "crowd that always wanted NeXT" but couldn't afford it. And that crowd is sufficiently large -- Windowmaker is one of the most popular window managers by any standard.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Coryoth]

I've seen that page. There is one skin that doesn't address some of the fundamental issues that make GNUstep applications to ugly and clunky looking. Adding gradients does not a good GUI make. Consider the Industrial theme for GTK - very popular, and a very nice theme, but it is also fairly flat and simple.

The big issues I tend to have with GNUstep GUIs are

(1) The big chunky controls. In comparison to the font size all the GNUstep controls are huge boxy things adding to the cluttered look.

(2) List selector widgets: You know the ones, the NeXT file manager used them. They need horizontal scrollbars usually. As far as GUIs go that's not a very efficient or pretty way to manage things. NeXT had some very good ideas. That wasn't one of them. The world has moved on.

(3) Floating menus: MacOS puts the app menus across the top of the screen to "obey Fitt's law", most everyone else has them at the top of the application. GNUstep kindly has them as bizarre free floating objects. Once again, not one of NeXT's better ideas. Can't we move on from slavishly copying NeXT?

(4) Empty scroll troughs: Nice big (due to those huge widget controls) areas of the screen that have no obvious function until you get enough items for the scrollbar to appear. Either put a full size scrollbar in there, or have the scroll widgets appear when required. Again, slavishly copying NeXT even on their "not so good" ideas.

There's a reason no one else took up these particular ideas from NeXT, not even MacOS X which is essentially the next generation NeXT. The reason is that they aren't very good - at the time (early 90s) they looked promising, but we've had GUIs for a long time now, and ideas of what works and what doesn't have come a long way. For some reason GNUstep slavishly follows NeXT even in their foolish early 90s mistakes.

Jedidiah.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[kitzilla]

A *lot* of polish. I'd really like to see this environment up and running, but it's Windows 3.11 butt-ugly. Hard to imagine a large number of users getting past the appearance.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[roard]

The thing is, the NeXT machine used to have gamma corrected display. And so, in real use, it wasn't as dark as it can appear on screenshots. Alas, GNUstep gui, by default, use the same colors value -- and so, if your display is not correctly calibrated, it will appear too gray, too dark.

You can change the colors with the Preferences.app though, if you're not fond of the default gray !

The other possibility is to wait for Camaelon 2, a pixmap theme engine I'm working on. It works at the moment, and if you really want it now you can drop me a mail, but I'd like to clean up the code and add a few things. I intend to release it before the Fosdem (so, before the end of this month). Some screenshots like this one or that one show what can be done.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[ignavus]

Perhaps, just perhaps, they have concentrated on getting the fundamentals right, rather than the Aqua-like eye-candy.

Give them time. It's version 0.something. Not even 1.0.

Gnome and KDE looked pretty awful at version 1.0. Still do, in my opinion. (Ah, WindowMaker, how I love thee).

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Master Bait]

The color scheme was user-assignable, and the Nextstep picture was NOT any default color scheme.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[roard]

The thing is, lots of gnustep dev like 1) the floating menus 2) the list selector widgets (personally that's one of my favorite widgets -- and by the way they still exist on Cocoa, and are used..) 3) the "empty" scrollbars is NOT a bad idea. Again, it's the case on Cocoa as well.

So your "not even MacOSX" comment is way off base. The only thing OSX does NOT is the floating menu, and a lot of people regret them.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[mibus]

"WildMenus" sets up a OSX-style menubar.

It's kinda weird (in the version I have, anyway, haven't checked if it's the latest) since menus won't close once you click off of them - you have to click the empty area in the menubar, right of the actual menus.

It also disappears when there's no foregrounded GNUStep program, which is kinda weird.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I have to admit that the OSX version is pretty. But I'd rather use the GNUstep version because it is easier to see. Might be that my eyesight isn't as good as it was 20 years ago...but the GNUstep version is *easy* to see, whereas the OSX version is easy to look at.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Lproven]

You have *got* to be *kidding!*

NeXTStep always was, and remains, *the* single most refined, elegant and attractive computer user interface there has *ever* been and nothing else in the world comes close apart from its own descendant, OS X - and Aqua has an excess of eyecandy and textures and needless crap, just because they could. If I could disable it all and go back to the NeXT interface, I would, in a second. For my Windows boxes, one of the first things I do on installation is define a custom colourscheme of NeXT's muted greys and get rid of all the shaded title bars and other needless crap that just pollutes the GUI.

Windows XP's Luna is lairy and Teletubbies-like but not actually garish. SuSE's default KDE theme is so loud it almost makes my eyes bleed and the same goes for most Linux GUIs. Only Redhat's Bluecurve is *remotely* professional-looking and it's too fussy with its irritating and distracting textures and stripe effects. [Shudders in delicate disgust]

Most of the themes I've ever seen for xNix GUIs look like they were designed by colourblind teenage heavy metal freaks. I have yet to see /any/ theme for the NeXT-like window managers (WindowMaker, AfterStep, Blackbox, Fluxbox etc.) which is anything less than tragic. They look like a beautiful piece of architecture which has been "tagged" by some mindless cretin with a spraycan.

Please $DEITY may GNUstep never lose its NeXTish elegance in favour of the tasteless crud that pervades the rest of the desktop world.

Save us from GUIs designed by the sort of kid who'd buy a Porsche and paint it in orange and green flames with a few skulls and chrome highlights. Or the sort of person who thinks that a PC is somehow improved by putting a window in the side, filling it with dayglo neon plastic and a few striplights. I mean, /really./ Some of us out here have /passed/ puberty now, you know?

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[be-fan]

I think it's just your particular crowd. Because nearly all online polls I've seen have GNOME and KDE combined having the majority of the market, with WindowMaker having something like 10% or so. I've seen this both on a OSNews and a DebianPlanet poll.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Coryoth]

The thing is, lots of gnustep dev like 1) the floating menus 2) the list selector widgets (personally that's one of my favorite widgets -- and by the way they still exist on Cocoa, and are used..) 3) the "empty" scrollbars is NOT a bad idea.

And more power to them, because if they like it, that's great. Just do't expect me to think its wonderful and be scrambling to move to their desktop system. I'm sure all the GNUstep devs like the GUI the way it is - if they disliked it that much, they'd be programming something else. But that is exactly the reason the GUI looks and acts as it does: most of the coders are, I suspect, people who love and are nostalgic for the NeXT system. In the meantime the rest of the world has moved on. I think it's fantastic that they've managed to create the system they have. They just shouldn't be too surprised if there aren't a lot of people who share their passion for 90s NeXT GUI technology.

Jedidiah.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Lproven]

What am I referring to? OK, here's some examples.

Shaded liquid effects on buttons. Yes, very nice, but what about when the OS can't decide on when something's a default button or not. E.g. in the Installer when loading a service pack. Look at the Continue button. Plain grey - not default - but the blue-tinged edge-shadow of a default button. Ugly *and* unhelpful.

Pinstripes. Fading away now in 10.3 but still there in the menu bar.

Moving the close control over next to max/min just 'cos it looks prettier. No indicators inside them of what each does until you go near, because they could. Great if you're colour-blind, say, or have poor motor skills.

Magnification in the Dock. Genie/Shrink effects to/from the Dock. Fading of messages in Mail.app when you move the selection bar. Drop shadows behind windows /but/ this has meant the removal of window edges.

The brushed-steel effect, used everywhere indiscriminately now in 10.3. Once Apple claimed it was for "media" apps; not any more.

It's all very pretty, but it's just eye candy. It doesn't /add/ anything, it doesn't /do/ anything useful.

And no, I'm not a NeXT freak. I've never even /used/ a real NeXTStep machine. I just know good design when I see it.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Brandybuck]

The look very closely follows the original NEXTstep look. It looks ugly now, but at the time it was the best look out there. What could you do with only an eight bit color palette? Contemporary styles in the computing world were at the time were Motif, Win30, and classic Mac, which came nowhere close to NEXT in the looks department.

I've got a NEXT style for KDE called NEWstep which you may want to use when you feel in the retro mood.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Art Tatum]

List selector widgets: You know the ones, the NeXT file manager used them. They need horizontal scrollbars usually. As far as GUIs go that's not a very efficient or pretty way to manage things. NeXT had some very good ideas. That wasn't one of them. The world has moved on.

Um, Mac OS X still has these, if you're talking about what I think you're talking about

Floating menus: MacOS puts the app menus across the top of the screen to "obey Fitt's law", most everyone else has them at the top of the application. GNUstep kindly has them as bizarre free floating objects. Once again, not one of NeXT's better ideas. Can't we move on from slavishly copying NeXT?

It's only bad if you use them as floating menus. Back in the old days, NeXT users had them hidden by default and just popped them up with the mouse. This is actually *easier* than the Mac menubar approach. Granted, that's not obvious at first, but that's the best way to do it. The menu is always where your mouse pointer is--no need to move *at all*.

It should be noted, however, that all look and feel can be changed rather easily. Due to the dynamic nature of Objective-C and OpenStep--and the -gui/-back split in GNUstep--completely changing the look and feel just requires creating a bundle to do it. Somebody seems to be working on a theme engine already.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Art Tatum]

But Gnome and KDE are development and desktop environments (like GNUstep). WindowMaker is just a window manager; I've seen plenty of screenshots of people running Gnome and KDE applications/desktops along with WindowMaker as a window manager.

Personally, I like it because it's light, fast, and doesn't have overwrought gothic window borders with pictures of demons for buttons. :-)

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[Gropo]

Oh wow, look here... A theme for OS X that relives the sub-50%-grey-field-square-edged-hell days of NeXTStep.

Have a party. Sorry, I think the active dialog button still throbs in some way... I might be wrong.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[samhalliday]

BtW, check your website, "welcome" isn't spelled right.

i know... its supposed to be that way. hence the link to the scottish comedy "Still Game" which bases an entire episode on one of the characters buying a "Weclome" doormat.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[John Harrison]

This is a problem with many Free software projects. The emphasis is on making it usable for developers, not pretty for your grandma. Firefox seems to be an example of how a product can become very popular by actually worrying about such things.

I attended a talk by RMS once. When he opened it up for questions, I asked why the gnu.org webpage looked like 1994 and said that great content with no style wouldn't appeal to the masses. He said that he didn't care about people like that and those that "got it" don't care about outward appearances. He got cheers from the crowd.

I can tell you who I think "gets it" and who doesn't.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[CharlesF]

If you compare some of the OS X and GNUstep screenshots, you can see that GNUstep's interface, while looking ugly and outdated, still gets the job done just as well, and that they're really not too far behind as far as UIs go.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[CharlesF]

...Okay, this is the last time I'm posting to slashdot at 5 in the morning. Someone's already linked to the same screenshots, and even did a better job explaining it. Sorry, slashdot.

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[flashinglights]

I had to look up a word here:

Windows XP's Luna is lairy and Teletubbies-like but not actually garish.

Lairy? WTF is "lairy"?! Google told me, though:

Lairy
adjective UK SLANG
behaving in a loud, excited manner, especially when you are enjoying yourself or drinking alcohol:

- The bar was full of lairy, pint-swilling lads in football shirts.

(http://www.freesearch.co.uk/dictionary/lairy)

Re:yeah... but it looks like its from the 80s

[flashinglights]

Moving the close control over next to max/min just 'cos it looks prettier.

This is the same place the close control was in Mac OS 9, so this decision may have been affected by a desire to confuse existing Mac users as little as possible.

As regards button positioning, I used Macs almost exclusively for my first 5 or 6 years of computer use, and even today I can revert to top-left position for "close" in a heartbeat because it is hard-wired. So I think this is a legacy of the Classic MacOS. You are probably hard-wired for top-left close buttons. ;)

Furthermore, the NeXT interface was designed to put everything commonly used on top-left where possible: menus, scrollbars on left(!), minimize button. With the Apple menu and the menu bar at the top left of the screen, this design decision still holds weight in OS X methinks.

No indicators inside them of what each does until you go near, because they could. Great if you're colour-blind, say, or have poor motor skills.

Very, very true and this has been pointed time and time again (also red and green are a common colorblindness, so the Aqua window buttons are bad for accessibility on multiple counts). However I think the buttons look much cleaner without the symbols, less distracting. This must have been Apple's dilemma as well.

One STeP Beyond

[Doc Ruby]

That demo is pretty nifty. But still too much typing: not just to bind the object interfaces to each other, but also in the controller coding. Is there any way to draw flowchart-style graphical indicators between object interface GUI representations? And any way to drag/drop primitives like the "*" and "=" operators into scopes of objects, much like drag/dropping the GUI textfields into their group? Finally, does it run on Linux ;)?

Re:One STeP Beyond

[Doc Ruby]

FWIW, I still want to type raw source code into the files under the GUI. Really, I want the GUI to produce raw source code files, so I can still use all my lexical parsing techniques, tools and existing files. And exchange them with my GUI-challenged associates :).

Re:One STeP Beyond

[BlueGecko]

Is there any way to draw flowchart-style graphical indicators between object interface GUI representations?

That's what you do on OS X, but NeXT (and now Apple) have a patent on that implementation. GNUstep tries to circumvent it by using the small "s" and "t" circles (for "source" and "target") that you see in the video.

And any way to drag/drop primitives like the "*" and "=" operators into scopes of objects, much like drag/dropping the GUI textfields into their group?

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. When the mouse creates connections between the controller and the view, it sets up bindings that ensure that the text view is equivalent to a variable in the controller. If you want a specific instance variable (ivar) to be updated based on the contents of a text field, you can do that on Cocoa, and will probably be able to do it at some point on GNUstep as well, but that's not currently available (so far as I know). If you mean you want the actual calculation to be creatable by a GUI, I would argue that there are too few instances when such formulae would be reasonable to make that worthwhile. It's really only one line of code as-is, anyway.

Finally, does it run on Linux ;)?

I think you're joking, but yes. GNUstep fills the same role as Gtk+GNOME or Qt+KDE, and runs on just about any POSIX system. FoundationKit (the non-GUI pieces) run very well on Windows and are usable for production, while AppKit (the graphical pieces) are quite solid on most Unices and getting there on Windows.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[BlueGecko]

If you really want to, you can program the GUI entirely from source code. You can see an example of how to do that in the old GNUstep tutorials that date from before Gorm (in particular, take a look at Your First Steps in GNUstep GUI Programming Part 1 and Part 2). That said, I have no idea why you'd want to do this. Gorm's interfaces are just XML files, and are therefore still fully modifyable from text. If you want something more human-readable, take a look at Renaissance.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[Doc Ruby]

I find it incredible that Apple could have a patent on generating code from a user drawing a line between two mapped interfaces - doesn't Visio (among many other flowcharters) do it like that? But not necessarily surprising.

Drag/dropping code primitives would look just like the demonstrated GUI drag/dropping GUI widgets into a container window. I'd create a new "controller" object, by dragging a the baseclass from a palette and dropping it - creating a controller window as its representation in the IDE GUI. I'd name its properties, just like naming/labeling the GUI window. Then I'd drag, say, a float from a palette, dropping it into the controller window, and name it "product"; the same for "xFactor" and "yFactor". Then I'd drag a "*" operator from the palette into the controller window, mapping its "factor" inputs to the factor variables, then its "product" output to the product variable - preferably by dragging between their icons (with/out rubberband flowlines, as patents allow :). I'd actually prefer to do without the variable instances altogether, just dragging the "*" primitive to the controller representation, and mapping its in-/outputs to the GUI objects I'd already instanced. I'd probably "group" the controller objects into a "main" scope, if that weren't the default behavior. This description took about 20 times as long to write as my desired IDE GUI behavior would take to execute, which would be itself probably 1/4 the time of the demonstrated interface. This example isn't compelling, because "z = x * y" is familiar enough to be iconic, even in text. But any more complex procedure quickly becomes easier to communicate and debug (especially down the road, new team, etc).

As for my "Linux" joke, I think I really just mean "does it run on GNOME?", because I want to use the IDE without changing window managers. Or maybe run GNUstep in a GNOME window, it it can generate GTK+ code.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[Slayback]

Looks like you're looking for something like LabVIEW
. I've done some pretty powerful stuff with it, including interacting with physical hardware (Like LEGO Mindstorms!), but I find it a PITA to do so much work with a mouse. I'd rather just code it. You may think it's a good idea, but when you end up with screens of interconnects and flowcharts that look like something straight out of a consultant's head, you may change your tune.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[Doc Ruby]

I remember when NatSemi put out LabVIEW (1990? yikes!), and it looked like this new wave of Windows (MS Win3.0, etc) would bring a single paradigm for meetings, directing partners, programming and designing/debugging hardware. But it still isn't here. I personally hate using a "mouse", and prefer to use a 2" trackball. But I'd rather a "dumb" stylus (or finger/nail). The key to managing schematics is scope management - zooming on scope containers, and consistent labeling, as well as maximum reuse of components, to prevent special cases from propagating schemas beyond comprehensibility. I'm a very fast typist, with sharp verbal acuity. But geometric logic, innate topological sense, and "picture speaks a thousand words", especially when writing SW to manage multimedia objects and streams, are powerful wetware skills to harness with flowcharts.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[This is outrageous!]

As for my "Linux" joke, I think I really just mean "does it run on GNOME?", because I want to use the IDE without changing window managers. Or maybe run GNUstep in a GNOME window,

Of course you can. Gnustep is not a desktop environment, nor does one come with it. Screenshots of Gnustep apps are most done under windowmaker, but even that is not a Gnustep app.

it it can generate GTK+ code.

Not sure what you mean. Have the Gnustep IDE/interface builder (gorm?) code to Gnome APIs rather than Gnustep's? Then no. The API is the point of Gnustep.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[Compenguin]

I think the parent means have the widgets rendered with gtk much like the way the qt theme engine for gtk renders gtk programs with qt widgets

Re:One STeP Beyond

[pohl]

I find it incredible that Apple could have a patent on generating code from a user drawing a line between two mapped interfaces - doesn't Visio (among many other flowcharters) do it like that?

I don't know about the patent in question, but I do know that the development environment does not generate code like you are suggesting. Instead it created live object instances and serialized them to a file, where the program would unmarshall them during initialization. This was quite innovative back in the day when the best the competitors could muster was code generation. Even today people think of it as code generation...see? :-)

Re:One STeP Beyond

[jcr]

still too much typing: not just to bind the object interfaces to each other, but also in the controller coding.

We did something about that in 10.3. Check out Cocoa Bindings in the Apple developer docs.

-jcr

Re:One STeP Beyond

[Doc Ruby]

I suppose it's too much of a leap to hope for a GNUStep for Gtk+, mapped to the different API/model... this stuff is cool.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[SteeldrivingJon]

I find it incredible that Apple could have a patent on generating code from a user drawing a line between two mapped interfaces - doesn't Visio (among many other flowcharters) do it like that?

It wouldn't be a patent on just drawing a line.

It'd be a patent on drawing a line to establish a functional communications channel between two object instances.

Or something like that.

Because that's what IB does. It establishes the connection between a UI object, its target, and the Objective-C message sent to the target. These live objects are then freeze-dried, or put into suspended animation, with this information intact. Source code isn't generated.

It's not just "drawing a line".

Another possible aspect of the patent would be the way they implement the line. The line may connect objects in different windows, so can't just be drawn in a window like in Visio. If I'm not mistaken, the line is implemented with very thin windows.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[John Newman]

We did something about that in 10.3. Check out Cocoa Bindings in the Apple developer docs.

If you're the guy responsible for Cocoa bindings, I got one thing to say to you...

Thank you.

Re:One STeP Beyond

[jcr]

No, not I.

There's quite a few people responsible for Cocoa Bindings, and I can't claim to be one of them. I just use and appreciate bindings, like any other Cocoa developer.

-jcr

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[FLAGGR]

Um? Like which ones, for instance?
Opener, to name one. ASTrojan to name abother. Why is there OSX antivirus software? (Which I'll admit is useless, because viruses aren't a real threat on OSX, even if they exist)

Okay, that's just not so. Linux is positively buried in litigation.
Is that so? What "litigation" are you refering to? The SCO trials? If you are refering to the SCO vs The World trials, then I'd get of slashdot pretty fast. SCO has been ordered to prove their claims, and as of yet has not. Just a company burning up what little money they have left out of spite. Linux is not in the courts right now. Not at all.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[RevAaron]

GNUmail.app is one app that runs on both OS X and GNUstep. I've seen a small handful of others. However, there are some hurdles in porting an OS X app to GNUstep- if you use any Quartz compositing, it just won't work, for one. Or if you use any Carbon convenience functions, or any number of other non-OpenStep APIs that exist within OS X.

But you are quite right in the last part. No way will your average Linux h4ck3r drop C/C++ and go to ObjC. A shame, as ObjC is a lot nicer, but it just won't happen.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[TheKidWho]

By compatibility with OS X, they mean that a GNUStep app can easily be compiled in OS X. I think that is what they mean at least.

There ARE no viruses.

[GFLPraxis]

Opener, to name one. ASTrojan to name abother. Why is there OSX antivirus software? (Which I'll admit is useless, because viruses aren't a real threat on OSX, even if they exist)

Trojan /= Virus. Look it up.

There are two trojans and NO VIRUSES. Opener does NOT self replicate, nor does it use any vulnerabilities (you have to deliberately execute it and then type in your password for it to install itself). Therefore it is NOT a virus.

And there are many OS 9 viruses, and Word Macro viruses (not a threat to OS X, but a thread to your Word documents), which explains the OS X antivirus software.

But the fact remains, there are no viruses. There is only two trojans, both of which require you to install them yourself.

Re:There ARE no viruses.

[Senjaz]

To add to that, there weren't really all that many classic Mac OS viruses either. About 30 or so, plus variants in the whole life of the Mac.

The most recent one that I remember was the autostart worm which hooked into Quicktime's autostart feature. That was easily defeated by toggling a check box.

The most harmful virus ever released for the Mac randomly changed the names, and type/creator codes for your files making them practically useless.

The most ammusing wasn't really a virus at all, but an extension that caused any floppy disc inserted into the mac to be immediately and automatically ejected to the sound of aaaachooo.

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[lederhosen]

Comparing to unix...

Its not much harder though.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[tolan-b]

Actually SCO is after IBM for breach of contract, all the stuff about copyright breach and putting stuff into Linux has been dropped. That is, SCO claim IBM put stuff in Linux that they shouldn't have, but the stuff they alledgedly put in was still owned by IBM, the question is whether IBM was breaching its contract with SCO by putting that code in, not whether that code can legally be in Linux.

Looks neat, but...

[david.given]

The demo's very impressive; I particularly like the connections feature for setting up relationships between different objects. I wish Glade had that.

I do, however, have two minor criticisms.

Firstly, please, please update the look-and-feel. If you want to be taken seriously, don't look like a reject from the 80s. Given GNUsteps modularity, this should be easy enough to do. So, do it. (Tip: application icons should always have labels, because since they're supposed to be unique you can pretty much guarantee they're going to be unfamiliar to someone.)

Secondly, I didn't see any support for layout management in Gorm --- that application was constructed by just placing absolute-sized objects at absolute positions in a window. Please tell me this isn't how you design all applications... because that way leads to inflexible, unscalable, uncustomisable applications, and there's no excuse for that any more. Fixed layouts mean you can't let the user change fonts, because different fonts are different shapes (you can't just scale linearly). Fixed layouts mean wasted screen estate (remember the old Mac file browser dialogues that would float a tiny, eight-line scrollable list in the middle of a 21" monitor?). Fixed layouts are just wrong.

Re:Looks neat, but...

[Nimrangul]

"...don't look like a reject from the 80s." Not to burst your bubble on that, but it looks like one of the best systems of the early 90s, not the worst of the 80s.

Re:Looks neat, but...

[NowHabitor]

It's not because you don't use a layout manager, that it is a fixed layout. You can easily set that what attribute of a gui element can grow or shrink. (the width, the height, the x coordinate, the y coordinate,..) I really prefer it over the traditional layout managers personally. Allot easier and flexible.

Re:Looks neat, but...

[roard]

Firstly, please, please update the look-and-feel

Like I said in a previous comment, I'm working on Camaelon 2, a pixmap theme engine that lets you have pretty things.. it should be officially released before the end of this month (it already works, I just want to clean up things).

I didn't see any support for layout management in Gorm

Well, I didn't show that part, but that works exactly in Gorm like on InterfaceBuilder on OSX (and imho it's a better model most of the time than the springs). So of course you can have resizable widgets. In addition, GNUstep implements a couple of widgets implemeting the spring resizing model (that's used by Renaissance by the way, an XML framework for describing UI for GNUstep...), so if you *really* want the spring model, you can use it.

Re:Looks neat, but...

[david.given]

Like I said in a previous comment, I'm working on Camaelon 2, a pixmap theme engine that lets you have pretty things.. it should be officially released before the end of this month (it already works, I just want to clean up things).

Cool; will it become the default?

(Incidentally, would it be particularly hard to implement all the low-level GNUstep widgets by peering them off GTK or Qt widgets instead? Seeing as they've already done the work, it would make sense to take the shortcut...)

Well, I didn't show that part, but that works exactly in Gorm like on InterfaceBuilder on OSX

Well, I haven't used InterfaceBuilder, so I'll take your word for it.

I'll download it all and have a play...

Re:Looks neat, but...

[D2Deek]

(Incidentally, would it be particularly hard to implement all the low-level GNUstep widgets by peering them off GTK or Qt widgets instead? Seeing as they've already done the work, it would make sense to take the shortcut...)

It wouldn't be difficult, it would be impossible. :)

The OpenStep imaging model uses the window as a canvas that you paint on. This means that when you see a button on a window, there is "probably" a NSButton object that drew that button on the window. It's not like Motif or GTK+, where each widget is a child window only concerned with drawing stuff on itself; instead, when a GUI control needs to draw for some reason, it takes the rectangle it has within the window and makes calls to the drawing functions.

Because of this, "views" as they are called, can be rotated, rescaled, have custom looks, etc. It also means you can have irregularly-shaped controls, and the controls themselves will really BE irregular in shape instead of a rectangle that just looks different. You get it basically "for free" because of how the display system works.

What a theme like Camaelon does is change how the GUI controls draw themselves. It works because Objective-C lets you replace code in, or add features to, classes you didn't write -- even if you don't have the source code!

Re:Really like NextStep?

[Leo McGarry]

A little from column A and a little from column B.

Imagine it's 1997 again. Mac OS X is still little more than a dream, but NEXTSTEP has past its prime. If the GNUSTEP of today were transported back to the world of 1997, it would be awfully impressive.

Alas, it's not 1997 any more, and while GNUSTEP gets an A for effort, it has no practical application. It's strictly a hobbyist thing.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[bgarland]

Those aren't viruses. They're malicious shell- and AppleScripts. And from what I've read, they are more of a "proof of concept" than anything else. At least, I haven't seen any verifiable evidence that more than like, three people, have been "infected" by these things.

Surely they are not in the same ballpark as all the Windows viruses that circulated in 2004 and wiped out thousands of computers, anyhow.

Re:And yet there's STILL no distro that

[drinkypoo]

You have it ass-backwards. This is due to inefficiency of closed driver source and/or hardware interfaces. Every ACPI implementation is different enough to where if you don't account for the differences you lock up machines, confuse interrupt controllers, et cetera.

Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[pschmied]

The appearance is only skin deep. Creating a theme that looks "good"? That's easy, get some graphic designers together with a usability safety inspector.

Writing a complete framework with rich, well thought-out object libraries? Now that is a feat. GNUStep is a lurker project that is getting close to hitting critical mass. They've got the hard stuff done that others are still swinging at but not quite hitting.

No, the GNUStep people have been much more concerned with laying sewer lines, roadways, electrical grids, water, gas, etc. When they get around to picking the color for their street signs, it'll be good.

Some work is already going into theming.

Now that GNUStep is getting really close to being complete, I hope they look at Cairo as a base for doing something similar to Quartz.

-Peter

Re:Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[TheRaven64]

Now that GNUStep is getting really close to being complete, I hope they look at Cairo as a base for doing something similar to Quartz.

The GNUstep GUI components are in two models, a front, which talks to the program, and a back, which talks to the windowing system. Under X11, there is an xlib backend (which looks hideous) and a libart backend which looks a whole lot nicer. Additionally, work us underway to produce an OpenGL backend, which will almost certainly be faster than using OpenGL via a layer of indirection like Cairo.

Re:Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[antiMStroll]

Back when I used Windowmaker creating great looking themes was easy, finding a way to work with the desktop clutter wasn't. Is there a way to configure this thing so it doesn't chew up so much screen real estate with 64x64 box icons? (Enjoying pekwm for now.)

Re:Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[Unknown Lamer]

You can set the size of icons in WPrefs in the Icon Preferences panel, in the lower right hand corner in the box "Icon Size."

You can go from 24x24 to 96x96 but anything other than 64x64 makes dockapps look weird.

Re:Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[emil.ede]

The appearance is only skin deep. Creating a theme that looks "good"? That's easy, get some graphic designers together with a usability safety inspector.

If creating a nice appearance is so easy how come most OS:es (imho all OS:es but the ones from Apple) look so horrible?

Re:Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Slashdot is not a site for graphic designers. If it were, perhaps the sentence would read:

Writing a framework with object libraries? That's easy, get some programmers together with a team leader.
Creating a cohesive visual style that not only looks good, but is also functional, consistent and intuitive? Now that is a feat.

Now watch while I don't end a mild observation with a sweeping generalisation!

Re:Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[himi]

Window Maker really needs a dockapp library that handles scaling of the dockapp window . . . I imagine it wouldn't be all /that/ complex, but hey, you'd still have to get people to use it . . .

himi (current maintainer of wmacpi)

Re:Seeing the trees, but missing the forest...

[Unknown Lamer]

I was going to mention something about how WM should scale dockapps automatically but ... then I realized that it would be basically impossible under X unless everything drew to an offscreen buffer handled by wmaker and then scaled that. Or used a dockapp lib that provided widgets and stuff that auto-scaled ...

One day, far away :)

Re:The Reaons Are Obvious

[TheKidWho]

I dunno about being slow and shitty.... I am currently learning Objective-C and I find it more elegant then C++.

Plus, combined with InterfaceBuidler/GORM you can do some very very interesting stuff with it.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[jkheit]

"If you want an evironment where The Voice Of God comes down and tells everyone stop their C/C++ crap and go write Objective C programs, use OS X. It's never going to happen with Linux." This comes off a lot like, "who cares if it's better, we're all used to something worse and we plan on sticking with it." Which is very much the same argument made by Windows advocates against Linux.

Re:And yet there's STILL no distro that

[damiam]

No OS does all those things, so you should be complaining about the inefficiencies of all software development, not just open source.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[Nik13]

After seeing this screenshot I have to disagree. I'm very comfy around windows/KDE interfaces (Haven't played as much with Gnome but it looks ok), but this looks like quite a mess to me. Hopefully the screenshot isn't very representative of what your desktop usually looks like. Quite a mess if you ask me.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[bnenning]

As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep.

There's many more than one.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[m50d]

I have to disagree with you on the UI. It looks really ugly. Like, motif-level ugly. I'm sure it's all just themes, but open one of those apps and open a default kde app along side it and tell me the user is going to choose that one. If they want this to be a serious choice for end users, they're going to have to stick some sheen on it.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[The Infamous Grimace]

Linux is not in the courts right now. Not at all.

You sure 'bout that?

And as far as viruses, if you think that something that requires active user input and a password to run, then all UNIX-type systems are vulnerable thusly:
sudo rm -rf /
Save that with executable permission and send it to your Linux-using buddies, see what happens when they run it. But it ain't a virus.

(tig)

Gee, who'd have figured another distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another fork in the road? Why is it that UNIX/Linux development forks so GODDAMN many times? Why is it that no one is satisfied with working on the original and staying within that distro's limits? Nope... instead we've got some zipperhead who thinks, "Hey, Steve Jobs never did it right, the last crew couldn't do it, I KNOW I can do it!" And instead of something successful, we've got 2 marginally different distros, neither of which is going to win more market share than the other. So what have you accomplished?
Keep it up, we'll have nothing left but crumbs! We'll have hundreds of distributions, and 1 or 2 users running each flavor. Open source will be terribly important cuz you'll NEVER get a working piece of software without spending a decade writing it yourself, or recompile, troubleshoot, recompile, troubleshoot, repeat, repeat, etc on someone's port for GNUStep, GNUSTEP, OpenStep, or NeXT.
This is getting out of hand.

Hellooo?

[melted]

http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/

This is developed (apparently) by folks from Intel. It's just that nobody can't be bothered to include it into the kernel.

ACPI spec is publicly available, but nobody can be bothered to fully implement it.

Finally, nice examples of UI are available even within OSS community, yet every distro out there ships with UI that was, it seems, put together by a teenager.

Re:Hellooo?

[drinkypoo]

From the linked page: "This project was created by Intel to enable support for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG Network Connection miniPCI adapters. This project (IPW2200) is intended to be a community effort as much as is possible given some working constraints (mainly, no HW documentation is available)." I think that pretty much sums it up.

Re:Hellooo?

[be-fan]

The ACPI spec that's available is not the ACPI spec that's implemented. The Windows ACPI implementation is broken, because it has to run on real hardware, most of whose ACPI implementations are broken. That's the problem Linux has to deal with. That's why ACPI is taking so long, in comparison to stuff like USB, Firewire, or Infiniband, which Linux often supported before Windows did.

Re:Hellooo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet, Microsoft doesn't patch Windows 2000 every time a new laptop comes out, but it always works. There's obviously something big that the Linux guys are missing, and once that's discovered ACPI will "just work" on Linux.

Plus even if ACPI support was perfect, the rest of the software support for suspend/resume probably needs work.

Re:Hellooo?

[natrius]

Yet, Microsoft doesn't patch Windows 2000 every time a new laptop comes out, but it always works.

Laptop manufacturers make sure their computers work with Windows 2000, not vice versa. Their viability depends on it, but Microsoft's doesn't. When someone buys a laptop and the shipped version of Windows doesn't play well with the hardware, they'll blame it on the laptop, not Windows.

Re:Hellooo?

[samekt]

There are tons of laptops with broken acpi implementations and Windows patches every single one of them. Go and have a look at the leaked w2k code.

By the way, I wonder why MSFT appears in my dmesg.

samekt@open-42:~> dmesg | grep ACPI: | head -n 4
ACPI: RSDP (v000 COMPAQ ) @ 0x000f7380
ACPI: RSDT (v001 COMPAQ CPQ0022 0x08030420 CPQ 0x00000001) @ 0x17ff0c84
ACPI: FADT (v002 COMPAQ CPQ0022 0x00000002 CPQ 0x00000001) @ 0x17ff0c00
ACPI: DSDT (v001 COMPAQ EVON400C 0x00010000 MSFT 0x0100000d) @ 0x00000000

Re:Hellooo?

[MarkRose]

Many hardware ACPI implementations behave differently depending on the operating system being run. However, most only bother to support Microsoft operating systems, so Linux has to fake itself as Windows to enable ACPI.

Re:Hellooo?

[be-fan]

Microsoft waits for full releases to support new busses, and they have a much slower release cycle than Linux. For example, Linux supported USB 2.0 (EHCI controllers) natively several months before Microsoft added support to Windows XP in service pack 1. More recently, the latest Linux version just added support for Infiniband, while Windows still doesn't have native support (vendors like Mellanox have to ship their own drivers for it). I think Linux might have supported 1394 or 1394b before Windows too.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Leo McGarry]

Why is there OSX antivirus software?

Because there were Classic Mac viruses, and somebody thought it would be a good idea to port Classic Mac anti-virus software to Mac OS X. So now we have Virex and some Norton/Symantec/Whatever product. Nobody uses either one.

Linux is not in the courts right now. Not at all.

What does the sand look like from underneath? I only get to see the top of it from up here.

Re:Have fun, nerds!

[Leo McGarry]

Okay, now that was funny. I loves me some rich, juicy irony. All is forgiven. You can crack lame jokes all you want, as long as you follow 'em up with great ones.

Re:The Reaons Are Obvious

[jericho4.0]

Objective-C is far more appealing to a C programmer than any other language I've ever seen. It only takes an afternoon to learn, if you know C and OOP concepts already, and is fantasticly flexible.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[mrchaotica]

By "compatibility with OS X" what they really mean is binary compatibility. In theory, you ought to be able to take an app running on OS X and run it on GNUStep unmodified, and without recompiling -- at least on GNUStep/PPC. You should also be able to compile your program into a "fat" binary, which means that it would contain both PPC and x86 (and/or whatever other architecture) code, and the app would be able to run unmodified even on GNUStep/x86.

It's actually kind of like Java or .NET, except that everything is genuine native code, without a p-code abstraction layer. Neat, huh?

The implication of this is that if GNUStep was complete, and if Apple recompiled Safari (for example) as a PPC/x86 fat binary, you'd be able to copy Safari.app from your Mac to your GNUStep PC, and it would run! In fact, I wish Apple were a little more interested in this since it would provide a relatively cheap and painless way of making a Linux version of iTunes* as well as spark a LOT more interest in making native Mac programs, since they'd be cross-platform programs too.

*iTunes is a Carbon (Mac OS 9 compatibility API) program currently; they'd need to port it to Cocoa first

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[cortana]

The best thing is how, if you change your Gnustep theme, colours, fonts, etc, Window Maker won't match it. Despite being the Gnustep window manager, Window Maker doesn't seem to share any of the UI code or functionality. Grrrrr!

Re:boring demonstration

[ImpTech]

I wasn't that impressed by the demo either. Maybe I'm not "with it" enough to see the beauty in all this point-and-click programming, but I think I could have written the same demo app in Java/Swing in about half the time. And I'm by no means an expert Java programmer.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[drinkypoo]

If you really think the NeXT look is as ugly as Motif, it's clear that you were never forced to actually use a Motif environment, or fvwm as your wm and Xaw-widget apps. Trust me, you're hallucinating.

Agreed

[Lysol]

I've always like NeXT and Windowmaker much better than Gnome and definitely better than KDE (sorry K-guys, it's waaaaay too much like Windows).

In fact, even Gnome is too much like Windows; even tho it does incorporate some OS X like features as well. But it also seems too fragile and it seems to be going more along the lines of C# dev, which I'm definitely not partial to (it's a mistake guys!).

Obviously, I feel that NeXT/OpenStep got a lot of things goin in the right direction. Turning away from the copy-all-Windows-features mindset seems to be the more logical choice. Will Gnome and KDE still exist? Absolutely. But Windowmaker - regardless of its sometimes slow development pace - is much more of a joy to use than whatever the current default Gnome window mananger is.

I spent many years developing in a Windowmaker environment and they were quite productive. That time changed the way I looked at using my desktop and even though I've switched to OS X, I can still tweak it to work like Windowmaker. So I'll have to second it as the official desktop env for Linux, hands down.

Re:Agreed

[jrcamp]

In fact, even Gnome is too much like Windows; even tho it does incorporate some OS X like features as well. But it also seems too fragile and it seems to be going more along the lines of C# dev, which I'm definitely not partial to (it's a mistake guys!).

WTF? Name one piece of C# software in GNOME. Bzzzt, time's up. There's not one and probably won't be for a very, very long time, if ever.

There is software written for GNOME that uses Mono but GNOME itself is pure C.

Stop the FUD.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[Lysol]

Tho they have slowed, the themes over at wm.themes.org are fine. What's the use in some title bar that looks like an alien (besides the k00ln3$$ factor - which lasts about 5 mins)? I don't think a desktop needs all that extra crap and font sizes and the like can all be adjusted if things look like they take up too much space.

I dunno, KDE makes me wanna barf, so I guess I'll choose the one w/out the sheen.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Orpheus Liar]

Viruses? While theoretical vulnerabilities have been pointed out (and quickly fixed by Apple), I've yet to see and actual in the wild virus for OS X. Do you have any examples? Thanks...

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[0racle]

Use WindowMaker before you bash it. It really is a nice environment. The colours need a little work though. If I wasn't using SuperKaramba, I would probably use WindowMaker as my window manager in KDE.

Actually

[commodoresloat]

when Duke Nukem Forever is released, it will only run on Hurd.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux intellectual property is not currently being litigated.

The SCO case is currently against IBM, and only IBM, for contract violation.

While SCO has attempted to spread FUD about Linux, no case disputing Linux intellectual property is currently in litigation.

The only way you could possibly think otherwise is if you read Slashdot headlines but never RTFA.

You are a fanboy.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[justin12345]

Not to be a prick but I believe you are wrong on all 3 points.

OS X is not open source. Darwin is open source and based on BSD. OS X is the windowing system that sits on top of Darwin (like X sits on BSD) and is not in the least bit open source. I realize that this is what you mean, but its incorrect to say OS X = Open Source. Darwin is open source and can be compiled to run on an x86 processor. OS X is not and can not be.

The are no viruses for OS X, at least to my knowledge. I remember someone once identified a possible weakness that you could get a Trojan through (though as I remember it required a lot of user idiocy to work). Apple quietly patched it a short time later.

Linux is clearly having the very legal troubles you are saying it isn't. SCO claims to own part of the code Linux is built on. I'm not really an expert on Linux, but this has been all over the news recently.

... hopefully I'm not wrong on all three points too.

I don't think it's intel who makes the chipset

[melted]

for these cards. And that other manufacturer may not be forthcoming with the hardware docs for an open source product. I think it's unfair to blame intel in this case.

Re:I don't think it's intel who makes the chipset

[drinkypoo]

I've never seen an intel anything that wasn't stuffed full of intel chips. Intel is known to have several of their own wifi solutions these days... but you might be right. Even so, the point is that someone is keeping the specs closed, and that is the primary problem.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[narrowhouse]

Linux is under litigation. Can you name a major OS that has not been in a legal battle over some sort of IP dispute? At least most Linux distributors have not been convicted of serious violation of federal laws.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Otter]

OS X is the windowing system that sits on top of Darwin (like X sits on BSD) and is not in the least bit open source.

That's Quartz, not OS X. "OS X" refers to the whole Darwin/Quartz/Aqua/applications bundle.

Booting from CD

[BrookHarty]

Anyone else having an issue booting the cd? I dont see an issue with the CD, going to try a boot floppy, really wierd.

Re:Booting from CD

[voisine]

Works fine when I select GNUstep | ACPI from the grub menu. Why is there no web browser on the live cd? Think maybe I'll take a look at getting the OSX Firefox port to compile under GNUstep.

Re:Booting from CD

[eGabriel]

I am... the iso never boots; it just turns over to my hard drive. Other CD ROMS boot. I have tried writing the iso from both Windows and Mac.

No idea what's going on. It's on an Athlon 64 system on a Neo2 Platinum mobo.

Why section this Apple?

[tm2b]

Given that most of the people running this stuff are not going to be Apple owners, it doesn't make a lot of sense that this is on the Apple server.

I understand the heritage angle, but it really fits better in developers or IT... people interested just in Apple stuff aren't going to care much about this.

Re:Why section this Apple?

[bnenning]

it doesn't make a lot of sense that this is on the Apple server.

Sure it does. GNUstep provides an easy way for Mac developers to port their apps to other platforms.

Re:Why section this Apple?

[myov]

Easy. Next bought Apple.

Re:Why section this Apple?

[TomHandy]

Just in case anyone is going to argue this (i.e. "Duh, Apple bought NeXT.")... The above poster is right. For all intents and purposes, even though Apple did acquire NeXT, the reality was essentially that NeXT BECAME Apple. All of the NeXT people essentially took over the old Apple people.

Re:Why section this Apple?

[myov]

It was a reverse takeover (Apple buys NeXT. In reality, NeXT assumes control)

The new company (which could easily have been Apple-NeXT) has more in common with NeXT than it does with the old Apple.
MacOS X (NEXTSTEP 5), WebObjects, Steve & the rest of management, Cubes (anyone else think NeXTcube when it came out?), lack of floppy drives (another NeXTism)

How much Apple stuff remains? Some of the identity, 1 Infinite Loop, and some hardware. Apple's long time font (Apple Garamond) has been replaced. Filemaker is all that's left of Claris (IIRC, they tried but failed to sell it). AppleWorks is about the only carbonized app left and it's on the way out (iTunes and Remote Desktop both existed in 9, but have been rewritten. Everything else is post-X)

Re:Why section this Apple?

[myov]

Oops. Forgot a few apps (Final Cut & iMovie).
A number of other apps have been bought from others.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[justin12345]

Quartz is the app that writes the Postscript that draws the screen. At least I think thats true, I really could be mistaken on this one. Quarts came out in 10.2 so I'm pretty sure its not what you suggest. I know it has a lot to do with the windowing system, but I don't think it would be the equivalent of X.

I still stand by my statement that it is inappropriate to call OS X open source as only Darwin is open source.

Re:The Reaons Are Obvious

[conteXXt]

Parent poster excepted (I imagine)

What I want to know is

[commodoresloat]

will it run on my car?

Re:What I want to know is

[sketerpot]

Yes, it will. You just need to get some good, sturdy rope and tie a laptop to your car, preferably adding some duct tape to make sure it stays in place. Running it in your car is even easier!

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quarts came out in 10.2 so I'm pretty sure its not what you suggest.

I'm being pedantic, but : Quartz is the basically the whole windowing system, and has existed since NeXTStep (with a different name), Quartz Exteme is just a marketing name for a particular type of hardware accelleration of Quartz functions. (And *NO*, Windows does not have an equivalent feature -- GDI is not the same thing -- Longhorn's Unified Compositing Engine *IS*)

(if i can educate ONE person with this...)

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

You are wrong. There is at least one worm (though possibly a proof of concept) for Mac OS X, and there is at least one virus or worm discovered in the wild for Linux (in addition to the various proofs of concept). Search through my past Slashdot postings for a list, or site-search an anti-virus vendor's web site.

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[dr.badass]

Microkernel, unix-like userspace, Nextstep-based application development?


Now of only someone will start an open source project to imitate the things about Mac OS X that are worth imitating.

That isn't to say that the above aren't good things, but it's a little sad that open source projects always seem to be either skeletons (like GNUStep), or skins (all of the Aqua-clone themes and skins out there), without ever getting to the meat (the things that make computers truly useful).

WINGZ !!!

[justanyone]

I've been a consultant at 3 big financial firms (in the Chicago area) that (are using || have used) Wingz, which is a spreadsheet package that runs/ran under OpenStep. This wouldn't be a problem except the makers of Wings left the marketplace long ago and the file format cannot be read by anyone!

I've tried calling, researching, everything. No one has a file converter that will read files in Wingz and write out anything useable, like CSV, Excel, tab-delimited, or whatever. We had copies of Wingz, and it would save to .WKZ format, but there's no way to automate that from a (non-openstep-equipped) Windows or Unix box.

If anyone knows of a way to convert these files to an established file format, even if we loose the formulae and only keep the cell values, that's fine.

I've peeked into the binary with a hex editor, and it's not obvious what the format is, but maybe I just needed some more experimenting time. Does anyone know a converter for Wingz?

Thanks--
-- Kevin

Re:WINGZ !!!

[delirium of disorder]

This should help you out.
http://ceu.fi.udc.es/SAL/G/4/WINGZ.html

Re:WINGZ !!!

[jcr]

IIRC, one of those financial outfits in Chicago ended up with the WingZ source code. I think it was First Chicago, but it could have been SBC/O'Connor

-jcr

Re:WINGZ !!!

[borgheron]

Any possibility of getting them to donate that code so it could be ported?

Re:WINGZ !!!

[jcr]

Sorry, I don't know who to contact at First Chicago about that.

-jcr

It's not just art

[Julian Morrison]

The whole GUI library - the shapes of widgets, the color scheme, the window layout with its floating menu - is very NeXT, and very very dated. Compare a modern app like firefox, on a modern desktop like KDE. Everything is there when you need it, but wastes minimum space when not. And it's not stylistically intrusive.

I hate to say this, because NeXT was a style god when it came out, but the state of the art has moved on since.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[squiggleslash]

That's not true. NextStep used Display Postscript. DPS was removed from the operating system at around the Rhapsody stage of the OS and replaced with Quartz, which is a more traditional compositing engine. Nothing like Quartz existed in NextStep, and nothing like Display Postscript exists in OS X.

Quartz is modelled on, but not the same as, PDF (it isn't "Display PDF and I've been corrected by Apple employees when saying it is.)

Damnit...

[Aldric]

Why do most open source programmers always seem to have the tendency to go with oppressive dark UI colours? It's not cool and it's not pretty. It's along the lines of someone creating their first webpage, complete with black background and white text.

Re:Damnit...

[TheRaven64]

Actually, the NeXT/GNUstep look is quite light when you look at it on a monitor with a correctly calibrated gamma (as is the Slashdot IT section, by the way). The problem is that a lot of people don't bother to correctly calibrate their monitors.

Re:Damnit...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why do most open source programmers always seem to have the tendency to go with oppressive dark UI colours? It's not cool and it's not pretty. It's along the lines of someone creating their first webpage, complete with black background and white text.

Maybe it is because they are more concerned with functionality than form. Black text on white backgrounds are popular because they are more similar to print, which is familiar. White text on a black background is actually easier on the eyes and easier to read, but is less familiar. When dealing with a glowing screen, white text on a black background makes a big difference, especially if you are going to be reading it for a long time.

Cool, styles for web pages and designs are fashion more than engineering. Cool comes and goes and usually is defined as whatever is not what was cool last year, or the year before. Now don't get me wrong, their are real problems with open source UI designs, Windows UI design, and Mac OS UI design. And the colors on some default UI's are not very artistic. Just don't confuse functionality and style. light gray (or pink, light blue, or light yellow) text on a black background is the ideal for usability on a monitor from an engineering perspective.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[drinkypoo]

I'd rather use NeXT's widgets in 1bpp than Motif's in 24 bits, and you can quote me on that. (Especially since motif in 1bpp is indistinguishable from Windows 3.1.)

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[The Infamous Grimace]

Quarts came out in 10.2

No, Quartz Extreme, which makes use of GPU acceleration, arrived with 10.2. Quartz replaced QuickDraw as the graphics API for the Mac OS. Aqua is the name of the actual windowing system. Here's a bit o' info on it.

(tig)

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[tetabiate]

Too late! The KDE and Gnome projects are three releases ahead. Last year I installed GNUStep on SuSE 9.1, it is usable but compared to KDE 3.3.2 it seemed like going back to the stone age. These days we are accustomed to self-contained applications, I mean, having navigation menus and pannels in the main window. GNUStep menus are not so difficult to use but it becomes a mess when several windows contend for the same screen region. I have used NeXTSTEP in the past and think GNUStep is wonderful but it needs a major revision in order to be a GUI as easy to use as KDE or Windows.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[aristotle-dude]

But the core is open source (darwin) as is the BSD userland and Cocoa is an implementation of the "open standard" called OpenStep developed by NeXT and Sun and the former is now part of Apple. Check out GNUMail which is available for both OSX and GNUStep.

Where is the GNU implementation of the win32/GDI+ api?

Sounds neat.

[Svenne]

Too bad it doesn't work.

It starts off by telling me that it's found every SCSI adapter on the planet in my computer, except the one actually I have, of course.

Moving on, it also finds my FireWire adapter, which is great, considering I don't have one.

After that, the hotplug-o-meter fills up and then it just stays full. I've waited for about 10 minutes now, it doesn't get any further.

Oh well, guess my 4 year old computer is too new for Morphix.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[mabinogi]

That's IBM in court over a contract issue.

That's not Linux in the courts.

Re:Man screw that

[erikdalen]

getting Obj-C++ support into GCC would also take away a big hassle when porting Cocoa apps.

yes, please go there

[jeif1k]

If you seriously believe that NeXTStep and Mach are the way of the future, please do us all a favor and go buy a Macintosh (OS X doesn't really have a microkernel anymore, but who cares; it sounds good).

For the rest of us, fortunately, there are Gnome and KDE.

Re:boring demonstration

[pHDNgell]

I wasn't that impressed by the demo either. Maybe I'm not "with it" enough to see the beauty in all this point-and-click programming, but I think I could have written the same demo app in Java/Swing in about half the time. And I'm by no means an expert Java programmer.

You could not have. Pointing out your lack of experience doesn't help your argument. Spend a few minutes developing for GNUSTEP/NeXTSTEP/MacOS X or whatever, and see what it actually does and how to use it, and you'll realize why people who are ``with it'' get excited about this kind of stuff. What I've found is that I will spend extra time getting my UI to be perfect (IB lets you not only define your UI in shape, actions, resizing, etc..., but also try it out to see how it acts when its resized, or how the buttons click, etc...).

MacOS X is definitely the direction to follow in software development. Native apps built in xcode with ZeroLink and even dynamic code replacement (i.e. smalltalk-style bug fixing from the debugger without restarting your app). So, no time spent linking, but you can use an arbitrarily large and automatically discovered compile farm while developing rich MVC apps quickly and easily.

Also, see what happens when more palettes are completed. If they had the WebKit palette, for example, they could've done a demo where they created a full-featured web browser in the same time (you can do this on MacOS X with *no* code). In the video that was going around of a NS 3.3 demo in 1992 by Steve Jobs, he created a pretty decent graphical employee database application in just a couple of minutes that would allow you to look up departments (with pictures), and look through the list of employees within that department (with pictures of the employees). Again, with no code.

The openstep objects are great to work with, though. I just ported an app from python to objective C just so I could use the URL loading kit from cocoa. That is a particular thing missing from gnustep that I'd like to get ported over (although, it may be part of the webkit that Apple was working in open source).

I've worked in quite a few GUI kits (raw X11, Motif, tk, awt, swing, morphic, nextstep, probably more I can't think of), and I can assure you the objective C MVC kit wins hands-down so far.

Anyway, give it a shot before you say it's pointless. It's very impressive and has huge potential.

no, it shouldn't

[jeif1k]

I've always wondered why this was not championed as a default desktop environment for Linux.

Because people apparently didn't like hacking GUIs in Postscript and Objective C 20 years ago. And they sure as hell aren't going to like it now that they have things like Cairo, SVG, and C# available to them.

That, the unified display postscript, the great development environment, etc. seem to make it a natural and *sane* front end to the otherwise fragmented UI world of Linux.

The variety of desktops available for Linux is actually a great thing. Even if it weren't, you aren't going to fix it by adding another desktop into the mix, one with almost no users and no applications.

With the relative compatibility to the OS X/OPENSTEP libraries and code re-use, there could be a real network effect by making this a default environment for Linux and other Unixes.

How do you propose to "make it"? People choose the desktop they like, and that happens to be either Gnome or KDE.

Re:no, it shouldn't

[sp0rk173]

People choose the desktop they like, and that happens to be either Gnome or KDE.

Granted, the majority of open source desktops run Gnome or KDE, but the preference is not either/or. It's all inclusive. Why? Because there is no single solution for everyone, especially in the open source world where most people are arrogant individualists and are proud of it. The point of this release preview is NOT the gui. The gui is superficial and will probably change/modernize as the project hits 1.0 and beyond. The point of this release was to preview the underpinnings that have taken so long to get into a truely usable state. I was astonished at how gorm works almost exactly like the NeXT DE did in the video of Jobs evangelizing his OS that was posted not too long ago here on slashdot. I am also astonished that you can take a GNUstep app like GNUmail.app, compile it on an OS X box with a simple click, and have it run without any modifications, with a cocoa look-and-feel. No GTK-to-Cocoa porting bullshit. THAT is the point of GNUstep. Personally I think that's pretty damn cool. While a GTK app will run well on *BSD/Linux/Solaris and run buggy on Windows, a well-written GNUstep app will run stably, without modification, on OS X and GNUstep...doubling (if not more - there are probably more OS X users than GNUstep users) the userbase for GNUstep apps.

While I do not think there should be a forced de-facto open source desktop, I do think GNUstep is a damn neat project and should be respected, not shit upon by fanboys of a particular opensoure DE.

Re:no, it shouldn't

[jbolden]

Its a great project. There are really two issues:

1) Your position is that GNUStep offers a way to develop Linux and Cocoa apps at the same time

2) A position that GNUStep is a full GUI and is ready to replace GNOME or KDE.

Disagreeing with (2) is not disagreeing with (1).

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[DarkVader]

Actually, Quartz didn't exist before Mac OS X. It was written to replace the NeXT Display Postscript drawing engine.

Re:Come on!

[TheRaven64]

Well, I'd rather go with the GNUstep vision of duplicating and improving on OS X, than the KDE/GNOME vision of duplicating Windows...

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[The Infamous Grimace]

My bad.

(tig)

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[Anomalous Cowturd]

"If you want an evironment where The Voice Of God comes down and tells everyone stop their C/C++ crap and go write Objective C programs, use OS X. It's never going to happen with Linux."

This comes off a lot like, "who cares if it's better, we're all used to something worse and we plan on sticking with it." Which is very much the same argument made by Windows advocates against Linux.

And this does not sum up the attitude of a lot of Linux users? What if it was stated like this:

"Who cares if it's better, we're all used to the same tools we had 30 years ago and we plan on sticking with them."

[[Non-troll disclaimer:]]
Yes, this is a broad generalization. No, it doesn't describe every Linux/Unix user. Yes, there is still a lot of truth in it.

The OP has it right. It's impossible to enforce a development environment or methodology (or pretty much any standard) unless either you control the platform (like Apple does), or there's already a de facto standard in place (C programming, for instance).

Try Camaeleon

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this:

http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_theme4 4.png

or that:

http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_theme4 3.png
http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_theme4 2.png
http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_theme4 1.png
and so on

Re:Try Camaeleon

[Lproven]

I almost want to sob into my keyboard.

You know what they remind me of? Someone taking a masterpiece painting - the Mona Lisa, say - and drawing a beard and moustache and glasses on it in marker pen.

They are as ugly as the hind end of a dog with a hat on it. The first few minimal ones just make the clean GNUstep app look amateurish and childish with misaligned text in the buttons and garish coloured arrows to indicate the default button; the ones that attempt to imitate Aqua are actively ugly.

Leave well alone. Please. It's fine as it is. You will learn to appreciate the many virtues of simplicity in time. Adding in shading and pattern fills just because you can is a dreadful idea.

Re:Try Camaeleon

[roard]

I almost want to sob into my keyboard.

:-)

Sorry...

They are as ugly as the hind end of a dog with a hat on it. The first few minimal ones just make the clean GNUstep app look amateurish and childish with misaligned text in the buttons and garish coloured arrows to indicate the default button; the ones that attempt to imitate Aqua are actively ugly.

Well, none of them are intended to be full-featured themes. Mostly, they are just snapshot of different tests and modifications. If you want a theme engine, you *need* to test things ;-) -- but I surely won't advocate taking one of the ugly themes here as a good UI example. I quite like the general idea of this one for example, but it's obvious it needs works. On the other hand, when you say that the OSX themes looks bad, take a look at that one -- that's really close to OSX (well, minus wmaker titlebar, of course). Anyway, there are things to correct, and they don't look perfect (like for example, the misaligned text). But mostly it was to test different features and modifications... so yes, it was because I could :-)

Don't forget it's just a theme engine -- GNUstep will still have the NeXT look by default. And you know what ? personally I tend to prefer the NeXT UI (that's partly why I didn't work as much as I should have done on Camaelon). But as you can read it on slashdot, people won't use GNUstep without a "modern" look (it's perhaps sad, but that's the reality). On a pragmatic way, having a theme engine will, regardless of slashdot users, be useful for cross platform (on Windows, etc).

Re:Try Camaeleon

[Lproven]

I'm sorry too. I don't meant to be rude about anybody's work.

And yes, certainly, you are right - people *do* demand this, and yes, that minimal rounded-corners theme isn't too bad, and the Aqua-like one does look, from a static image, much like the real thing. I'd need to see it "live" to see if it has the authentic animated fluidity of Apple's original.

But my point was two-fold.

1. Aqua looks cool but it doesn't /add/ anything to the usability of OS X. It's just eye candy. OS X's GUI is actually less capable and less flexible in many areas than NeXT, as is much of the OS.

Anyone who dismisses a GUI because it doesn't have pretty themes is a damned fool and should be ignored.

2. Most modern GUI themes are actually pretty ugly. In fact, I, like many people - but we're not vocal teenagers - generally *hate* themes and skins. Several of my one-time favourite Windows applications, like Trillian and WinAmp and even the Mozilla suite, are blighted by their skins. No matter how good the skin, it is *not* the original OS interface, and common UIs are one of *the* most important aspects of the GUI. Having every program look different makes the whole system much harder to use.

For example, in the Trillian chat client, even if you load a skin that *looks* like Windows Luna, windows' title bars do not change colour to indicate which is active, and if you change the OS colour scheme, themed windows do not change to match.

Summary: DOWN WITH SKINS AND THEMES! They are a nuisance and a hindrance and a pain. They're only a toy for children.

One thing tho:

[Nailer]

It looks like ass. It may be a thousand times more sensible than Gnome or KDE, but being the facile person I am, I equate black text on dark grey background to mean old school Unix 'Window Manager + crappy menu to launch programs' environment.

Re:One thing tho:

[sketerpot]

First, if you think GNUstep widgets look like ass then you haven't seen enough ass. Second, the Camaelon project provides the ability to make the widgets look nicer. Take a look at the pictures.

Re:One thing tho:

[Nailer]

Saw the link, but it still looks like Windows 95.

Re:One thing tho:

[Art Tatum]

Once Camaelon 2 is released (sometime next month, according to the author), you can make it look like anything you want it to look like. You can even have a Mac-like menu bar, if you choose. It's visible in some of those screenshots.

And the retro-NeXT "looks like Windows 95" because Microsoft licensed a widget set from NeXT when designing Windows 95.

Re:One thing tho:

[Nailer]

Cool. But my point remain: someone needs to create a good looking theme.

Re:One thing tho:

[Art Tatum]

Oh, absolutely. And that's very hard. I just wanted to make sure everyone realized that there were more screenshots since the author of the package (Nicolas Roard) hasn't been updating the index.html in a long time, even though he's been doing consistent work on the project.

But if those guys can find really good UI designers, well...look out! :-)

WindowMaker is friendly

[itomato]

You don't have to use the full KDE environment to use SuperKaramba.

WindowMaker works great with SuperKaramba. You can even turn off the dock and/or clip altogether and use Kicker and Konqueror instead.

[shameless_plug] There are a few attractive themes for WindowMaker that either don't date back to 1999, or look like it. Like mine![/shameless_plug]

Re:WindowMaker is friendly

[0racle]

SuperKarambas transparencies are only supported with kwin.

Think NEXTSTEP 3.3

[itomato]

Though it's not entirely true anymore, the goal of GNUStep is to emulate the look/feel of NeXTSTEP 3.X.

There's Camaelon, which lends some themability to GNUStep, but the interoperability isn't there.

Grab your can o' Simoniz!

Get down to this:

[itomato]

Camaelon.

AFAIK, you have to patch the GNUStep source, which makes it an impractical pain in the ass for a lot of people, but it's there anyway.

There's no support for traditional pixmap swapping like in so many other environments, but there might be one fine day.

The fonts are user-configurable, BTW.

Re:Get down to this:

[roard]

Er, NO, you SHOULD NOT USE IT.

Partly because Camaelon needed to patch gnustep, and that's not the case since a long time. So don't try to apply the patches :-)

Camaelon 2 will provides a full pixmap theme engine, look up in http://www.roard.com/screenshots/ for latest themes sshot ...

should be released before the end of the month.

Re:Get down to this:

[TheKidWho]

Wow.. some of those later themes, 30-40 look really really nice.

Re:Get down to this:

[Lproven]

[Moans] No, no, no, NO!

Taking the lovely clean simple uncluttered unfussy lines of the classic original and grafting on round buttons and gradient shades and fountain fills... it's /horrible./ It ends up looking like a tart's handbag, even nastier than OS X 10.0!

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[displaced80]

For unix-space apps, OS X has an almost standard heirarchy.

bins in /bin.
system bins in /sbin
non-distro apps (at least that's what I use it for) in /usr/local/ (=/opt/ if you like)
config, etc. in /etc

(the only glaringly odd one from a Unix perspective is that /home/ has become /Users/)

Having thought about that little list, OS X isn't that inconsistent when compared to the several different layouts common across other Unixes.

As for the Nextish heirarchy, it's pretty clean really. Nice scoping: /Applications (apps for all users)
~/Applications (apps for this user only) /Library (system-wide resources, settings, data)
~/Library (as above, but for this user) /System (the system. break stuff in here and don't expect it to work right after)

Basically it, isn't it?

Some good, some not so good

[dysprosia]

I've been coding for and using OPENSTEP before, so it was interesting to see the Flash demo of GNUSTEP in action. Some of it looks good... things appear to work the same as it did in the OPENSTEP days, but just from that demo, I identified a couple of little niggles here:

(S) and (T) for making connections. Interface Builder under OPENSTEP actually drew a line from where you started the drag to the object, which avoids the multiple problems of internationalization (which OPENSTEP exceled at) and having to decode what exactly (S) and (T) stood for

having vim pop up from the GNUSTEP Project Builder - this is somewhat minor, and I'm hoping it's a customization, but it's a shame that GNUSTEP had to resort to the command line for editing. Now vi is an excellent editor ;) but OPENSTEP had the benefit of very rarely ever resorting to the command line for everything - a big plus for usability. However, if this is a customization, that would be nice

Gorm is an unintuitive name for an interface editor.
That being said, GNUSTEP looks interesting enough for me to try at some point.

Re:Some good, some not so good

[borgheron]

# Gorm is an unintuitive name for an interface editor.

I not really sure that "Glade" is a much better name. At least Gorm stands for (G)raphical (O)bject (R)elationship (M)odeller. :)

GJC

Re:Some good, some not so good

[roard]

Vim in Terminal.app is effectively a customization -- you can set your editor in ProjectCenter, and you can possibly use the integrated editor. But, the integrated editor is a bit poor in features, and above all I'm too used to vim :-)

Re:Some good, some not so good

[dysprosia]

That's good to know :)

Re:Some good, some not so good

[Art Tatum]

Interface Builder under OPENSTEP actually drew a line from where you started the drag to the object,

Unfortunately, I believe Apple/NeXT has a patent on that. And there are also patents on the fancy Pantone color system that Apple uses. Perhaps we need a "Don't blame me -- I voted for RMS!" bumper sticker...

Think of it as a hassle-free test-drive.

[itomato]

Getting GNUstep up and running - the environment, and the Applications, can be a real pain in the ass unless you're using a Debian derivative.

This gets the entire kit and kaboodle into the hands of people. The Development stuff is there, user apps are there, games are there, utilities are there..

This Live CD is the first (well, now the third) place where you can see it all happening without having to download and compile everything just to see how NeXT-like/Apple-like it is, or how good it is on as it's own critter.

It's a sort of showcase, and the most complete GNUStep implementation out there.

Nice demo - two points come to mind

[Anomalous Cowturd]

First point:

The Interface Builder demo is pretty slick. I remember being really impressed with IB back when the NeXT first came out (Steve Jobs came to my school and did a demo, and gave us two full systems). I like the business of connecting up the source and target controls with a minimum of (user-entered) glue code.

Of course, the problem with UI generators is that the demo *always* uses something semi-trivial like a calculator or image viewer or something like that. Whoever's selling it says "See, you can create an app in 10 minutes", but once you need to actually make it do something a little more complex or low-level, you inevitably wind up having to do more work trying to get around the limitations. I've seen a lot of sophisticated apps written in ObjectiveC/IB, so I imagine this isn't too much of a problem here. It looks like you really need to change your mindset a lot to code and develop this way, though.

Second point:

I noticed that every time the sample app was run, there was a message to the effect that only a single screen was supported. I'm looking for a live CD to try out on an old 1 Ghz Dell box with a Matrox G450 dual-head video card. Does this message mean that dual monitors are not supported by this distro, or is it an IB thing, or something else altogether?

I kinda like the NeXT/Open/GnuStep environment, especially as compared to the Gnome/KDE weight and glitziness. I've been looking to try a Linux desktop for a while now, but I don't have time to dick around with X configuration and extensions to make it happen. Are there any live distros (based on Debian, perhaps) that do dual monitors out of the box?

(Yes, I know I should be googling, I'm just asking. People seem to like giving suggestions...)

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[kesuki]

While the pedantic nature of saying that trojans aren't a 'virus' shows both an ingorance of both the english language, and the concept of 'classes' While some trojans by definition are a type of virus, not all viruses are trojans.

It's like flatland.

[Anonymous Coward]

There really are no forks - no boundaries. Everything is one big soup - the illusion of form appears when a project from one dimension intersects with any other.

GNUStep is GNUstep is GNUstep, whether on Windows, OS X, Linux, or the friggin HURD.. You don't have problems compiling against someone's build of GTK/GTK2.

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[zsau]

Well yeah, but then we may as well abandon Gnome and KDE too: There's a perfectly good and usable GUI out there called Microsoft Windows.

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[Dwonis]

My god, have you ever actually *used* Microsoft Windows? I'd hardly call it "good and usable".

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[808140]

While you may be right, I feel obligated to point out that your "vendor shipments" data is pretty much completely useless when one is discussing a Free OS like Linux or the BSDs, because, put simply, there is no simple indicator for the amount of instances deployed.

With Mac OS X, simply looking at how many units Apple shipped will tell you how many people are adopting Mac OS X. It's quite an accurate indicator and it can be trusted.

With Linux, there are many commercial distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, etc) as well a number of wildly popular free ones (Debian, Slackware). You can buy servers with these pre-installed, but I would be surprised if most Linux deployments were obtained this way. As there are no restrictions on redistribution of GPL'd code (unless changes have been made, obviously, in which case those changes must be made available), how many instances of say, Red Hat Linux sold will tell you nothing whatever about how many systems actually run the OS.

Even with Windows, it's difficult to say; Windows comes pre-installed on most systems whether you want it or not. While I wouldn't expect that a startlingly large percentage of Windows machines have their OS replaced immediately after being bought, it is undeniable that a number of them do (my laptop, for example, came with Windows XP, but now runs Debian). Again, I'm not saying we're a huge percentage -- but we are a percentage.

Really, Mac OS X is pretty much the only OS on the market today whose deployment can be accurately measured with unit shipments (although I don't doubt that there are some people out there that would buy PPC hardware and run Linux or *BSD -- I would, no offense to OS X).

So basically, Apple being the world's largest vendor of UNIX means only that Apple sells more UNIX than any other company -- which means nothing with respect to Linux, and IIRC, at least currently, there are more Linux boxes than there are Mac OS X boxes, by a long shot (although I wouldn't be surprised, given Apple's rising popularity, if this were to change in the near future).

Anyway, I'm not disparaging the Macintosh, or your facts, just pointing out that your argument is pretty much non sequitur in this context. If you were comparing Apple to say, Sun, you'd be much more on the mark.

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[zsau]

TBH, not for more than running Firefox at work to browse the internet during my break. But it's usable enough, isn't it, that my point still stans? and hasn't it been historically more usable than Linux desktops?

Relevance to old-school webobjects types?

[The OPTiCIAN]

I'm not *that* familiar with gnustep, but used to be a webobjects developer. I know a group of WO developers felt disenfranchised when Apple abandoned objective C in WO (and webscript! webscript! :) ). Would there be many obstacles remaining to people in that situation using this as an upgrade over those old environments? Certainly this might be very helpful to people with legacy projects out there who hate the old interface (which looks much like gnustep but is a lot more quirky in nasty ways - broken tab orderings, random segfaults, that sort of thing). Off the top of my head I'd guess the major pieces would be (1) an EOModeller and the model itself and (2) the interface builder. Are there any free implementations of these systems? Not a huge deal to me - I have a mac and write java, but it's still interesting to know the options that are around..

Re:Relevance to old-school webobjects types?

[roard]

There is two free implementations of WebObjects -- one done by the GNUstep project, GNUstepWeb, and another that's done by OpenGroupware.org (they use it as their base for SOPE), called NGObjWeb.. both implements WebObjects 4.5 (ie, the version before java) and are used commercially.

Both works quite well, but they lack a scripting language (although the OGo guys works on a WebScript-like language, and the GNUstepWeb guys works on integrating StepTalk).

About EOF, the GNUstep project have an implementation named GDL2 (GNUstep Database 2) which implements EOF 4.5 -- but sadly we are missing an EOModeller (even if somebody is working on one). Here an article from Ludovic Marcotte about GDL2.

Re:Relevance to old-school webobjects types?

[The OPTiCIAN]

Thanks. BTW, Webobjects 4.5 wasn't before java - it supported both. I believe webobjects had a java option back as far as version 3; version 4 definitely did.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[jcr]

GNUStep was started at a time when all of us in the old NeXT crowd thought it would be the only way to preserve some of the environment we loved, as NeXT turned its full attention to WebObjects, and Sun's version of OpenStep started to teeter under the weight of bad decisions imposed by the X-windows people there who didn't understand what they were botching.

Once Amelio made the decision to buy NeXT to bail Apple out of the Copland disaster, nearly everyone lost interest in GNUStep, since we expected most of what we wanted to show up in Apple products sooner or later.

Between Bindings and CoreData, Cocoa apps are suddenly getting even smaller in terms of source code, and when I combine that with the other capabilities of OS X and the Mac platform, (like the Acceleration framework, Cocoa Scripting, WebKit, etc, etc.), I've got a better development environment than I've ever seen before.

I think the GNUStep guys have done heroic work, recreating so much of NeXTSTEP with basically no funding and very little help from the Linux crowd, but I've got more power today in Cocoa than we ever had in NeXTSTEP. Should I ever have need to use a Linux host, I hope it will have GNUStep on it so that I don't have to tolerate a windows knock-off UI, but that circumstance looks very remote.

-jcr

Yeah....

[oO Peeping Tom Oo]

Those non-OSX native controls will fit right in :p

Re:boring demonstration

[pHDNgell]

Why wouldn't you just use PyObjC?

I wrote the original utility as a python commandline app. I mocked up a really nice GUI for it and prototyped the whole thing in pyobjc to see how it worked and make sure I liked the UI. It worked OK, but the core was designed as a commandline utility and didn't fit well into a MVC application (it'd take over the event loop while synchronizing, which could take several minutes).

Since the primary purpose of the application is to download a bunch of stuff in order to synchronize a local tree with data from a web site, and the python http client is synchronous, I wouldn't've got a lot out of doing it in python with the cocoa web download toolkit.

Besides, objective C isn't that bad to work in. Kinda feels like smalltalk.

pyobjc is some cool, stuff, though. I have a couple of apps I use that I wrote in it.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[connorbd]

Actually Quartz is a new beast -- Apple created it for obscure legal reasons having something to do with PostScript licensing, which was something they didn't have to deal with going to PDF as their imaging model. And Quartz isn't the entire windowing system either -- it's more like QuickDraw or Xt, a basic toolkit for rendering graphics and logging screen input. There's a separate window manager (more or less Aqua, but that's only barely true), and then two separate implementations of the Aqua widget sets that are part of Cocoa (the successor to OpenStep) and Carbon (the OS X reimplementation of the original Mac API, sort of).

Uniting

[LoveTheIRS]

I really hope this environment becomes very stable. Then I hope that while maintaining this environment at the requirements of only 200MHZ, then they create a more processor expensive icons/theme to represent modern GUI functionality/eyecandy. Then...I hope that mozilla makes a OPENSTEP port. It'll be a very close derivative to the Apple version. Then I hope eclipse follows...Then...the sun java follows with a swing port onto GNUstep. Pretty much all those programs that I use that currently use GTK on linux. Gaim...will of course be a hopeless case (GTK is engrained in that sucker like none other). This technology looks like it could be very stable. The kind of work I'd expect from the GNU project. I can't wait for the completed GNU project...(though I could probably care least about the kernel...boo to Hurd, unless it can handle linux drivers). I hope the unix desktops can finally unite under a common desktop, that way I can stop running two different gui libraries on my computer. But, this is probably all relatively unrealistic for the next decade. :(

Re:Doesn't fit in with Apple's Grand Widget Scheme

[mrchaotica]

As far as iTunes goes - keep on wishin. iTunes is an interface for Apple's proprietary stuff, and a key to their business model. The day they become friendly about their file formats and publish an API for dealing with ITMS is the day the port will start. Unless this has already happened, and it will be proven that I'm talking out my ass!

But wouldn't porting iTunes to Linux help Apple? Half of Slashdot seems to be clamoring for it, after all (with the other half complaining about the DRM)! Even making a Linux version simply by statically linking it to the GNUStep libs and distributing only a binary would be a whole lot better than no Linux version at all.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[peawee03]

It's not GNU, but ReactOS is open source Windows (namely, NT4, with bits of NT5 thrown in as they get to it. There's a screenshot of it running Quake II, so it can't be that off.

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[peawee03]

Not to flame or bash, but RH 6.2 running ancient KDE is hardly a decent representation of current Linux capabilities. I'm currently stuck with Windows for my USB sound card (TASCAM US-122) and Autodesk software, but I'm switching back as soon as the Tascam works with ALSA better than it does now and when Autodesk stuff will run under any one of the wine family.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[D2Deek]

By "compatibility with OS X" what they really mean is binary compatibility. In theory, you ought to be able to take an app running on OS X and run it on GNUStep unmodified, and without recompiling -- at least on GNUStep/PPC.

You're smoking crack on that one.

In order to do that, all of the GNUstep classes would have to have exactly the same in-memory layout, encoding methods, and so on, as their Cocoa counterparts. It's complete nonsense to ever expect that OS X binaries will work using the GNUstep libraries.

In addition, Linux systems use a different Objective-C runtime library (GNU's, which was created because NeXT refused to release the code to theirs "back in the day"), with completely different low-level functions.

No, it's about source code portability.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[jbolden]

You might not like the fact that Linux is under litigation, or you might expect the litigation to end in a settlement or be dismissed, but that doesn't change the fact that Linux is in the courts right now.

Except its not a fact.

1) Linux is not in court
2) There is no litigation regarding Linux code (the only remaining charges are all contract breaches).
3) The existence of litigation doesn't prove much of anything. I can sue you for the wrongful death of my grandfather and it would go to court.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[jbolden]

Around '96 it was. WindowMaker was far away the most popular window manager. Then a kid came up with the idea of creating a GUI not just a window manager based on a really interesting set of C++ widgets which some European company had made free (as in beer) for non-commercial use.....

9 years later however Windowmaker isn't really that much more advanced while this GUI for Linux thing worked out pretty well. The GNUStep team dropped the ball. Had they released in '97 what they have today and released in '98 something along the lines of what they will release 8 years from now then they would still be running the show. Windowmaker is still my favorite window manager but a good window manager and a nice interface builder do not a GUI make.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[Sri Lumpa]

Almost.

The article you link is about IBM having to give more AIX/Dynix code for SCO to rummage through but they still haven't found anything in the code for the released versions of said software that IBM already sent them.

As for the other SCO litigations, the Novel one is about Unix, the DC one was about certification of compliance with their Unix license, the Autozone one is about alleged use of SCO libraries on Linux (but given that they don't come with the typical Linux distribution and that it is just SCO's belief that Autozone must be using SCO's library to have been able to migrate so fast it is only tangentially about Linux).

The only 3 parts were Linux is directly in court are:

1. IBM's eighth counterclaim. That is that SCO infringed IBM's copyright on the IBM owned portions of the Linux kernel.

2. IBM's claim for declaratory judgement of non-infringement on its Linux activity. It's to stop SCO saying that IBM infringes SCO's copyright with its Linux activity (they will have to prove it to defeat it and continue saying so).

3. The Redhat suit which is similar for Redhat to what point 2. is for IBM. This is currently stayed.

So while Linux is in the court it is in attack position rather than defence.

Of course it is only a matter of time before there is a software patent lawsuit against Linux but it hasn't happened yet.

Re:Plus it isn't open source.

[The Infamous Grimace]

Thanks for the clarification.

(tig)

Re:GNU's not Unix - but it is, apparently, Mac OS

[RevAaron]

What's "comparing to unix"? I mean, what Unices have you used? There certainly isn't a consistent standard. Sure, you can have some when you're working within nothing but SysV- or BSD-derived systems only, but even then they can differ quite a bit. For the basics, the kinds of things that most Unices share, as displaced80 points out it's all the same.

Flash is till easier

[m3talsling3r]

It's still easier to make a program like this in Flash; you can use ruby for a command line version. Why do you think so many are flocking to Flash now. MX 2004 Pro can do amazing things with very little work! And the next version is going to be better.

That's why I hold out hope for native flash compiling solutions like Flirt.

But it's not enough to have Flash being able to be run natively, we also need a free Flash IDE. That's where good OOP scripting languages like Ruby and Flash extensions like Ming/Ruby come in handy. With the mix of the two you can make an open source Flash IDE, using Flash as the interface elements (an interface made in flash that sends the variables on) that could send out all the info through Ruby, which would then compile the .swf for you and viola'! a Flash IDE made from Flash to compile Flash.

Now all we need is people to help Ming and all the sub project, Ming/php, Ming/Ruby, Ming/perl, et cetera, to keep up with the file format specs released by Macromedia.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[Art Tatum]

Heh, WindowMaker isn't the official GNUstep window manager. It's the "official" GNUstep window manager. :-)

It's actually a totally separate project, with code written in straight C. I think the only sense in which it's the GNUstep window manager is that it emulates the basic NeXT desktop paradigm and there are a few tweaks to work better with GNUstep applications.

Re:Really like NextStep?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Alas, it's not 1997 any more, and while GNUSTEP gets an A for effort, it has no practical application. It's strictly a hobbyist thing.

I disagree. GNUSTEP has its place. That place right now is in the hands of OS X development shops looking to expand into Linux. There are a few hardcore development houses that work strictly on OS X and do things the OS X way. This gives them an additional market with little porting costs (with some inconvenience to the end user, hey Linux user's should be used to that). There are enough UNIX guys on OS X right now that this could actually take off. Time will tell.

Re:Really like NextStep?

[Leo McGarry]

That place right now is in the hands of OS X development shops looking to expand into Linux.

Trust me: there are no such places. That's like saying that it's great for surgeons who want to expand into leechery.

Only the most trivial Mac program could even be ported to Linux, GNUSTEP or no GNUSTEP. There are too many core system services that only exist on the Mac: Quartz, CFNetwork, NSNetService, QuickTime, font services ...the list just goes on and on. Any program more complex than "Hello, World" would require a massive amount of work to down-port it to Linux, or to any other 20th-century operating system. You know, DOS 3.3, UNICOS, whatever.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[m50d]

I've used fvwm95 and various Xaw apps on a 386 running slackware 4. Really, I know what ugly is, and that was uglier than win3.1, but the look of windowmaker gives it a run for its money. No, it's not quite as ugly as Motif, but it's in the same division.

Of course, GEM can knock them all into a cocked hat.

Re:This Should Be THE Desktop Environment for Linu

[m50d]

Thing is you can theme KDE to look like windowmaker in a few seconds, just change the window decorations to KStep and the colours to what you want. But that's true of everything. Real hackers will probably not be happy with any theme you can give them, but that's not a problem as they'll figure out how to change it very quickly. So what DEs should do, and I think KDE does this very well, is have a default theme that's glitzy for the non-technical users, since that's what they will want.