5 ms·

If you're interested in porting code, many of the OSX core libraries are available as part of the GNUstep project: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/ https:/

by hapless 10y ago

If you're interested in porting code, many of the OSX core libraries are available as part of the GNUstep project: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/ Most of "cocoa" came from the OPENSTEP specification, and GNUstep offers quite a complete implementation.

roblabla 10y ago
Is there a list of things missing ? A guide on how to contribute ? I'd love to port my favorite OSX apps to linux (ITerm 2, I miss you so much ;_;) but that website makes it almost a point to be as useless as possible. Also, reading through http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/User_Guides http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/User_Guides , why does it talk about FileSystem Layout. Is GNUStep an OS ? I thought it was just a library. The whole thing feels a bit messy :|.
- bandrami 10y ago
  why does it talk about FileSystem Layout. Is GNUStep an OS ? I thought it was just a library. Pretty much the first thing a desktop environment has to do is establish an abstraction layer for filesystems, so that desktop-enabled applications can have a consistent way to talk about files. Both Gnome and KDE have a VFS layer (GVFS and KIO, respectively).
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    I really wish they wouldn't. A good portion of what KIO and GVFS do should be done at a lower level. Instead we get this weird situation where I can "see" a file in KWrite, but I can't see it the shell or in a non-KIO-enabled program.
- babuskov 10y ago
  > ITerm 2, I miss you so much Interesting, when I'm using Mac and I miss KDE's Konsole, which is superior IMHO. Which features are you missing from ITerm2?
  - roblabla 10y ago
    The shell integrations[1] give me this: - Alert when current command finishes running. - Download files with clics - Drag-drop files to upload with scp. - The tmux integration. Being able to use the "native" split instead of tmux splits is cool. All those are important to me because I'm always ssh'd into a personal box, and they just make the whole terminal experience feel like I'm on my local machine. Then there's the Marks feature, which is just friggin great, the fact that it supports a bunch of pretty useful escape codes (and they're even documented[0]), and lots of useful (but minor) features like the Caputred Output[2] that just make the whole experience pleasant. Nowadays I'm just using i3 with urxvt. I'm hoping that one day, I'll have the time to write a tmux integration using i3's IPC, which would bring me 75% where I want. [0]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html [1]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html [2]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-captured-output.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-captured-output.html
    - smarterAvgBear 10y ago
      The tmux integration is awesome. I always have a couple tmux sessions running on few remote hosts. It's kinda odd that the best terminal app is on OSX but not in linux :(. iterm is one reason I am postponing switching to linux from osx for my work laptop.
peatmoss 10y ago
I go back and forth on whether this would truly be useful. 10-15 years ago, having a fully baked, first class, slavishly source compatible implementation of GNUstep with broad adoption throughout Linux land would have likely been a game changer. But now, it seems webified apps are king. The handful of native apps that people use are already satisfactorily implementable on Linux. In fact, a great number of native apps are being implemented on Linux in spite of the GUI bits not being source compatible with OS X or Windows. The major holdouts (MS Office, Adobe CS) likely have more to do with business reasons that factor much more than porting costs. Now, if GNUstep were to become a compelling alternative to XCode for developing iOS apps, I could absolutely see that tide lifting the Linux fleet.
- api 10y ago
  I wrote a blog post once about how the web is the new presentation layer for the desktop, that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that a desktop OS (e.g. a Linux distro) should just fully embrace it by implementing a desktop that runs 100% via web technologies. Local and remote web apps could coexist as first class citizens, etc. I basically argued that HTML+JS+CSS renderers are the new X and that HTTP(S) is the new X11 protocol-- or at least that these parts occupy an analogous position in the stack to what X originally was. (They are technically quite different of course.) The web is the OSS GUI stack with the largest, most diverse, and most active developer community, and with it you get to ride on the coattails of multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook and Google that have significant investments in the web. I got DDOSed and threatened. I got some of the most insane all-caps slobbering and frothing at the mouth feedback I have ever seen in all my years of interacting with any developer community. You'd think I went into a conservative church and gave a talk about evidence for abortion in the Bible or something. The vast majority of this came after the article got posted to Reddit /r/linux. Most comments there amounted to "web sucks and JS coders are weenies and next year will be the year of the Linux desktop as soon as we finish the next rewrite of (insert favorite project)." Intelligent criticism is good but the vast majority of the comments I read responded to none of the core points of my post and amounted to not much more than developer community religious bias. I ended up taking the post down for two reasons: (1) I got sick of getting DDOSed and it wasn't worth it to me to fight just to get an off the cuff opinion out there. I am not deeply invested in this and have better things to do. (2) This convinced me that the "desktop Linux" community is toxic in the extreme and should be avoided. This includes avoiding providing any input whatsoever to that community. Also caused me to become a lot less loyal to Linux in general, since it's a community full of people who respond to any opinion differing from their own with absurd amounts of hate and vitriol.
rbanffy 10y ago
It'd be wonderful to have a linter that could verify if your Xcode project is compatible with GNUStep. That alone would do wonders and encourage people to either cover more APIs in GNUStep or write macOS code that's easier to port over to other platforms.

by hapless 10y ago

roblabla 10y ago

Is there a list of things missing ? A guide on how to contribute ? I'd love to port my favorite OSX apps to linux (ITerm 2, I miss you so much ;_;) but that website makes it almost a point to be as useless as possible. Also, reading through http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/User_Guides http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/User_Guides , why does it talk about FileSystem Layout. Is GNUStep an OS ? I thought it was just a library. The whole thing feels a bit messy :|.

bandrami 10y ago
why does it talk about FileSystem Layout. Is GNUStep an OS ? I thought it was just a library. Pretty much the first thing a desktop environment has to do is establish an abstraction layer for filesystems, so that desktop-enabled applications can have a consistent way to talk about files. Both Gnome and KDE have a VFS layer (GVFS and KIO, respectively).
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  I really wish they wouldn't. A good portion of what KIO and GVFS do should be done at a lower level. Instead we get this weird situation where I can "see" a file in KWrite, but I can't see it the shell or in a non-KIO-enabled program.
babuskov 10y ago
> ITerm 2, I miss you so much Interesting, when I'm using Mac and I miss KDE's Konsole, which is superior IMHO. Which features are you missing from ITerm2?
- roblabla 10y ago
  The shell integrations[1] give me this: - Alert when current command finishes running. - Download files with clics - Drag-drop files to upload with scp. - The tmux integration. Being able to use the "native" split instead of tmux splits is cool. All those are important to me because I'm always ssh'd into a personal box, and they just make the whole terminal experience feel like I'm on my local machine. Then there's the Marks feature, which is just friggin great, the fact that it supports a bunch of pretty useful escape codes (and they're even documented[0]), and lots of useful (but minor) features like the Caputred Output[2] that just make the whole experience pleasant. Nowadays I'm just using i3 with urxvt. I'm hoping that one day, I'll have the time to write a tmux integration using i3's IPC, which would bring me 75% where I want. [0]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html [1]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html [2]: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-captured-output.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-captured-output.html
  - smarterAvgBear 10y ago
    The tmux integration is awesome. I always have a couple tmux sessions running on few remote hosts. It's kinda odd that the best terminal app is on OSX but not in linux :(. iterm is one reason I am postponing switching to linux from osx for my work laptop.

peatmoss 10y ago

I go back and forth on whether this would truly be useful. 10-15 years ago, having a fully baked, first class, slavishly source compatible implementation of GNUstep with broad adoption throughout Linux land would have likely been a game changer. But now, it seems webified apps are king. The handful of native apps that people use are already satisfactorily implementable on Linux. In fact, a great number of native apps are being implemented on Linux in spite of the GUI bits not being source compatible with OS X or Windows. The major holdouts (MS Office, Adobe CS) likely have more to do with business reasons that factor much more than porting costs. Now, if GNUstep were to become a compelling alternative to XCode for developing iOS apps, I could absolutely see that tide lifting the Linux fleet.

api 10y ago
I wrote a blog post once about how the web is the new presentation layer for the desktop, that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that a desktop OS (e.g. a Linux distro) should just fully embrace it by implementing a desktop that runs 100% via web technologies. Local and remote web apps could coexist as first class citizens, etc. I basically argued that HTML+JS+CSS renderers are the new X and that HTTP(S) is the new X11 protocol-- or at least that these parts occupy an analogous position in the stack to what X originally was. (They are technically quite different of course.) The web is the OSS GUI stack with the largest, most diverse, and most active developer community, and with it you get to ride on the coattails of multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook and Google that have significant investments in the web. I got DDOSed and threatened. I got some of the most insane all-caps slobbering and frothing at the mouth feedback I have ever seen in all my years of interacting with any developer community. You'd think I went into a conservative church and gave a talk about evidence for abortion in the Bible or something. The vast majority of this came after the article got posted to Reddit /r/linux. Most comments there amounted to "web sucks and JS coders are weenies and next year will be the year of the Linux desktop as soon as we finish the next rewrite of (insert favorite project)." Intelligent criticism is good but the vast majority of the comments I read responded to none of the core points of my post and amounted to not much more than developer community religious bias. I ended up taking the post down for two reasons: (1) I got sick of getting DDOSed and it wasn't worth it to me to fight just to get an off the cuff opinion out there. I am not deeply invested in this and have better things to do. (2) This convinced me that the "desktop Linux" community is toxic in the extreme and should be avoided. This includes avoiding providing any input whatsoever to that community. Also caused me to become a lot less loyal to Linux in general, since it's a community full of people who respond to any opinion differing from their own with absurd amounts of hate and vitriol.

rbanffy 10y ago

It'd be wonderful to have a linter that could verify if your Xcode project is compatible with GNUStep. That alone would do wonders and encourage people to either cover more APIs in GNUStep or write macOS code that's easier to port over to other platforms.