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> At the risk of going off topic, I still don't understand why GNUstep never seemed to have reached critical mass despite all these years of development. As so
by Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> At the risk of going off topic, I still don't understand why GNUstep never seemed to have reached critical mass despite all these years of development.
As someone who was part of the GNUstep scene and contributed a tiny bit of code, I think the reason is obvious: GNOME was getting the big corporate investment, and KDE also had a stable foundation somehow. As you say, the "Linux desktop" very quickly came down to a GNOME/KDE duoply. Plus, GNUstep was written in Objective-C which was outside of a lot of devs' comfort zone at that time. So, GNUstep only managed to attract a few passionate hobbyists but no more.
- sjwright 8y agoI think it was even simpler than that: during the inflection point between GNUstep and Gnome/KDE, the mainstream market was dominated by Windows. It was clear that the open source community saw Windows as the yardstick for a successful Linux desktop. Whereas GNUstep was associated with an utterly failed platform. But subsequent to the NeXT buyout and as MacOS increasingly proved its geek credentials, you can see how the community yardstick has progressively shifted in its direction. Had the serious push for a Linux desktop begun ten years ago and not 25 years ago, GNUstep might well have been the victor.