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GNUstep: Open-source, Object-oriented, Cross-platform Development Environment
- mongol 5y agoI remember GNUstep since the 90s. It existed even before Gnome. It had a (for the time) pretty home page, but very little information and very little outward progress. What happened behind the scenes I have no idea about.
- gcasa 5y agoStill going. ;) -- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Maintainer
- mukundesh 5y agoWondering how Steve Jobs would have reacted to GNUstep...
- necovek 5y agoHe wouldn't react at all: GNUstep was already an established project before his death, so he already had an opportunity to react and, unsurprisingly, he didn't care much.
- shp0ngle 5y agoApple didn't really like OpenDarwin or whatever was the name, right. But more on trademark concerns, if I'm not wrong.
- lizknope 5y agoGNUstep started in 1995 back when Jobs was still at NeXT before Apple bought the company. He didn't try to stop it back then.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoIt looks like it's straight out of 1995. Ultra dark gray and ugly aesthetics, despite what some people say, will not attract developers or users. This seems to be a meme, Linux desktops and apps with zero thought given to UX and UI. In some cases it almost seems like the approach of "how can we make this as cluttered, messy, and ugly as possible" to look at.
- selfhoster11 5y ago1995 GUIs have far more usability left in them them modern UIs. Just the fact that MS thought it's acceptable to dumb down the right click menu (!), aka the most prominent symbol of a power user, is telling. We need to step back to 1990s/early 2000s, steal a few modern UI innovations that make sense while retreating, and take a long and hard look at the kind of GUIs we want to see built around ourselves.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoA GUI can follow 1995 principles without being an oppressive grey and ugly icons and either too much or too little spacing.
- selfhoster11 5y agoColour was on offer since at least Widows 98. In fact, desktop themes were a thing, with custom wallpaper, colours, icons - precisely so the computer looks less dreary. If GNUStep was impossible to theme (or if theming was hard to implement there), I'd be surprised. Information density the one thing 1995 interfaces got right for power users. Modern applications fit 10 items per screen, and most don't bother to make this adjustable. My desktop computer or laptop could outcompute a Cray twice over, and yet I'm made to feel like I'm stripped of all that power.
- anthk 5y agoI think modern folks see w9x themes in the same way as we do with the Amiga UI ones.
- shp0ngle 5y agoLast time I looked, GNUStep was really, really, really buggy reimplementation of 2000-era macOS... sorry, Mac OS X back then... toolkit. I say really 3 times, because I really tried to port a MacOS-only terminal app (don't ask) to Linux, and I failed miserably on very basic functions. I guess I should have tried more, make minimal examples and report that, but I never bothered. It's what I would do now, anyway.
- zwaps 5y ago"GNUstep is a free, object-oriented, cross-platform development environment that strives for [...] elegance" Well personally, I gotta say, I dig the 1995 optics of this.
- gcasa 5y agohttps://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12986802/33520300-7954af9a-d7b8-11e7-9eaa-2bf173132cc0.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12986802/33520300-... Yeah, I know, right? ;) </sarcasm> It is fully capable of looking like macosx using any number of themes. Gregory Casamento -- GNUstep Lead
- bluedino 5y ago25 years ago I was excited to learn that the Quake editor (and Doom before that) was written on NeXT. I figured with my rudimentary Linux and C skills I could get it working, but of course it was a little harder than installing everything and running make From JohnC: "This is a NEXTSTEP application, so hardly anyone is going to be able to use the code as is. This is not an OPENSTEP application. It doesn't even use the foundation kit, so porting to gnustep or openstep-solaris/mach/nt would not be trivial." "This application was really not a very good fit for NEXTSTEP. The display postscript model fundamentally doesn't fit very well with what we need here -- if you run in an 8 bit color mode, the line drawing runs at an ok speed, but the texture view goes half the speed it should as it dithers from 24 bit color down to 8 bit. If you run in 24 bit color mode, you get less screen real estate and significantly slower line drawing as a 3 megabyte XY view is flushed. Sigh. If anyone does actually run this on NEXTSTEP be advised that you want a fast machine." "QuakeEd is written for NEXTSTEP 3.3, while GnuStep is an implementation of the OPENSTEP spec. I haven't had time to port it to openstep yet, but it looks like it will take a little effort. NeXT has tools in NS 4.0 to help, but it still isn't automatic."
- unixhero 5y agoAn ultimate Hacker News comment here; John Carmack, Quake/Doom anecdotes, relevant ties to NeXT. Just saying, greatly enjoyed it.
- aklemm 5y agoIs it strictly necessary that it be ugly?
- pelagicAustral 5y agoI think it looks amazing. I wish I could work on an UI like that all the time... Not long ago I was working at an office (non-IT stuff) and they had these very old computers, still running Windows 7, and I remember being able to enable the Win 98 theme, I was so happy about that... at home I was running Windows 10, where you can no longer give your desktop that ancient feel... I'd say Windows 95/98 was peak UI design. This UI feels even better...
- aklemm 5y agoOk, if there are enough people sharing that opinion, then I certainly get it.
- codehalo 5y agoHonestly, it is the singular reason why it failed. They had no intention of evolving with the times.
- apple4ever 5y agoBingo. Had they made a better more modern UI, I think it would gain some traction. But they are entirely resistant to updating anything with the UI.
- mucholove 5y agoSo I use GNUstep and I really like it. It is not an Apple emulator—it is an OPENstep emulator and so it implements the amazing Cocoa API and many mac/iOS frameworks can be used server side with minimal porting. This makes it easy for what I intend to keep as a one person project forever or as long as Apple continues to support Objective-C. You want to know an unpopular opinion?? I love Objective-C and I think it is better—way better than Swift. And—if you have discipline, the preprocessor is excellent. So while many might say GNUstep is buggy, it is working for several of us—and happily so. I do agree that the homepage is terrible and that what should be done is put some installer scripts so you can start using it immediately. An Ubuntu installation following the corresponding script here is foolproof: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build Check it out!!
- anonymouse008 5y ago> You want to know an unpopular opinion?? I love Objective-C and I think it is better—way better than Swift. And—if you have discipline, the preprocessor is excellent. Very curious to the reasoning here. If you can get to the pointer level of Swift, you basically have obj-c without all the unnecessary syntax? In my view, excessive syntax is a crutch to make the language parser's job easier, not making the thought to code job easier. Obj-C seems to suffer from the excessive syntax?
- OnlyMortal 5y agoTo be fair, the syntax has changed since the days of NeXT. Accessing object variables been more C like (dot notation). Personally, I never had any difficulties understanding the old syntax.
- pianoben 5y agoIf anything, the old syntax was pure and consistent with what actually happens - message sending. Dot notation muddies the waters, IMO, but certainly is convenient. Ditto the collection literals.
- pakl 5y agoA few of us maintain scripts for building the latest GNUstep from source under Linux (desktop, PinePhone, and Raspberry Pi) here: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build
- apple4ever 5y agoThank you for this! I was the a maintainer for this years ago, and I'm glad its way better than I had it.
- phkahler 5y agoCan it be used as a GUI for C++ programs? Does it support OpenGL ES?
- gcasa 5y agoYes, it can and yes it does. -- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Maintainer
- naves 5y agoFor a while, GNUSTEP Live CD was the best option to try and test GNUstep. Latest version is even available for Raspberry Pi: http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/ http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/
- manbart 5y agoHow does it compare to Window Maker?
- lproven 5y agoIt doesn't. They're different types of tools. GNUstep commonly runs under and uses Window Maker. Window Maker is a window manager. GNUstep is a large set of libraries and foundation classes, and almost as a byproduct, they happen to implemented most of a desktop environment: a file manager and actual desktop, a dock, plain and rich text editors, a pretty good email client, a chat client, a terminal emulator, image viewer, etc. etc. But like any other xNix desktop, it needs a window manager. KDE uses kwm, GNOME uses mutter, Xfce uses xfwm, LXDE uses OpenBox, etc. GNUstep can use whatever you want, but Window Maker is the recommended choice because it matches the look-and-feel nicely.
- HerrMonnezza 5y agoWindow Maker is an X11 window manager with a NeXTStep look. GNUStep is an attempt at creating a Free/Libre NeXTStep-like environment, including all the apps.
- Lammy 5y ago"The GNUstep project does not provide a window manager; you can use any window manager you want, although we recommend that you use WindowMaker for a better experience." http://gnustep.org/information/aboutGNUstep.html http://gnustep.org/information/aboutGNUstep.html :)
- badsectoracula 5y agoGNUstep is really a framework and closer to something like Gtk+ or Qt. Window Maker is a window manager, it has its own GUI toolkit (WINGs) but it is really only meant for use with Window Maker and perhaps some dockapps (though some dockapps use other toolkits anyway).
- jenifer027 5y agohttps://cricbull.com/cricket-news/who-was-the-first-captain-of-indian-test-team https://cricbull.com/cricket-news/who-was-the-first-captain-...
- pjmlp 5y agoIt was nice endevour to port NeXTSTEP development stack. Nowadays with it being several releases behind macOS tooling, and the whole issue of what from Objective-C v-latest is actually supported, it is more of a curiosity and nostalgic experience.
- apple4ever 5y agoWhich of course it doesn't have to be, but the current developers are very hostile to changing anything about the UI, which of course no one today really wants. Providing the old UI as theme for those who want it is fine, but not updating it to something modern and useful is not. I really wanted to contribute and help out with GNUstep, but that put me off from attempting anything.
- gcasa 5y agoDo I know you? We really are pretty nice. GNUstep can be themed very easily. You are more than welcome to help, ESPECIALLY to make more themes. See the link below... This is GNUstep using the rik theme... Just one of the many ways the project can look: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12986802/33520300-7954af9a-d7b8-11e7-9eaa-2bf173132cc0.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12986802/33520300-... Gregory Casamento GNUstep Maintainer
- Lammy 5y agoI love that FinderSTEP mash-up icon :)
- apple4ever 5y agoI contacted you a bunch of years ago - and actually I was the maintainer of the script/instructions for building on Ubuntu in the 14.04/16.04 era until plaurent took it over. Everybody is very nice, but I believe more than just themes is needed. We need a wholesale UI redesign. A discussion happened a bunch of months ago, and it was clear there was no desire to do that. (And yes I do run the Rik theme :) )
- gcasa 5y ago
- xyproto 5y agoWhat are the advantages over FPC/Lazarus?
- gattilorenz 5y ago- First and foremost, it's not Pascal, but the more elegant Objective-C. - You can in theory compile sources for NeXT/OpenSTEP or early OS X applications with minimal changes[1], while FPC would require you to rewrite them completely. - Different GUI components, inspired/based on the *STEP design. Realistically, I guess you're better off using Lazarus for anything new, nowadays. [1] The original DOOM editor was developed for NeXT machines, and the sources surfaced a few years ago. Here it is running under Ubuntu with Window Maker and GNUStep: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/111229-redoomed-maclinuxbsd-port-of-id-softwares-1993-doom-map-editor-for-nextstep/ https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/111229-redoomed-maclin...
- badsectoracula 5y ago> First and foremost, it's not Pascal, but the more elegant Objective-C. That depends on the beholder and their eye :-P.
- Koshkin 5y agoWell, no doubt the curly braces look… curlier!
- tored 5y agoI like the procedural version of Pascal, with records, procedures and units, however the more modern Pascal that you can find in FreePascal where you have to either inherit or implement a class for any advanced container is cumbersome.
- badsectoracula 5y agoThe language had support for dynamic arrays for ages and the intrinsic functions like insert, etc have been extended to work with them in latest version (i'm not 100% sure if this is available in the latest relase, but it is available in the trunk). So for simple stuff that should work. But yeah the containers that FPC provides are indeed cumbersome and i blame Delphi for that and FPC's insistence on copying all those bad features (ok, i understand the need to remain compatible so people can switch to FPC, but they can always provide better tools too - perhaps they're burned from when they implemented generics first and then Delphi implemented theirs in an incompatible way and now they have to support both). On the other hand, you can make your own and i have mine which can use any old data structure, be it primitives, records or classes.
- KronisLV 5y agoTypo in the banner: http://gnustep.org/information/banner.pdf http://gnustep.org/information/banner.pdf > GNUstep uses the same langauge and API as Cocoa on Mac OS X. That small nitpick aside, that seems like and interesting project! I don't think i have seen many (if any) other attempts at creating a set of portable tools like that, entire workspaces that can work over a variety of OSes, unless i'm reading this wrong. Sure, we have portable editors and so on, but this seems like a step well above that.
- mhoad 5y agoI’d say that Flutter[1] probably meets that same definition today of cross platform development and tooling in a much slicker way. [1] https://flutter.dev/ https://flutter.dev/
- KronisLV 5y agoI'm afraid that i can't agree there, because of how it was implemented. Flutter is plain hostile from certain standpoints: in the browser, it does use canvas for rendering and therefore denies any ability to learn about how a particular site was developed (how many of today's devs have benefited from "Inspect Element"?). Not only that, but it also breaks much of browser functionality, such as right clicking, selecting text, using plugins that manipulate the DOM, user styles, and historically even screen readers (though they're getting better at that last bit recently). Just have a look here: https://gallery.flutter.dev https://gallery.flutter.dev Open the Reply app, open a message, try copying the contents. Try seeing how the block with the sender information has been formatted. Pretend that Taxes folder is spam instead (e.g. an ad, or a flashing element that could cause you seizures), try blocking it with uBlock Origin or a similar plugin. I agree that technically it fits the criteria that you're describing, but it fails on certain platforms (the web) in my eyes due to all of the shortcomings and how badly it implements this platform support. Use it for native apps? Sure, i guess...
- pjmlp 5y agoFire dances of celebration where thrown around the lands with the demise of Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight, Java Applets and all others that followed the same cursed path, yet the powers of be down at the druid dungeons came up with WebGL/WebAssembly, thus the natural order was eventually restored and everything old was new again.
- grouphugs 5y agowhenever i hear the word GNU i think: racist, pedophile, nazi
- sadfev 5y agoIt’s dead and has been for a decade
- selfhoster11 5y agoSoftware dies with its last user or curious historian. Open step is quite far from that.
- gcasa 5y agoNot dead at all. I have been working with a number of companies to help them use it. Surprising definition of dead. ;) Join us, be part of the solution! GC -- GNUstep Lead
- mpweiher 5y agoThat turns out not to be the case. It is in both active development and use.
- lproven 5y agoThere is slow but active development. Occasionally new releases appear. There is a new, active distro under development. I don't think this fits the definition of "dead". Not very lively, but not dead.
- gcasa 5y agoThen join us. Help us get it the last mile. Don't just say "it looks like it's dead".. be part of the solution. :) You are more than welcome to join! -- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Maintainer
- shrubble 5y agoThe most recent development (updated a month ago) is 'NEXTSPACE' which is designed to sit on top of a minimal CentOS 7 install. See: github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace I have used it in a VM under Windows and it was pretty nice. It felt very NeXT-ish. Of course you could install and run regular X windows programs as well.
- pulse7 5y agoWho remembers the Smalltalk browser?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoAs an Apple dev since ‘86, I’ve used (in order of appearance): MPW THINK Pascal THINK C CodeWarrior Xcode I never warmed to other IDEs (like AppCode), but find IDEs to be more productive (for me) than CLI tools. Yeah, I know some fairly awesome CLI people, but that has never been the case for me. I write in native Swift, so it’s really important that what I use be right on the “cutting edge.” Right now, that’s Xcode. Xcode is a bug farm. It’s also frikkin’ huge. I have to sometimes force-restart when the code parser goes walkabout. But it does give me what I need. I’d certainly be open to viable alternatives, but nothing has come up that has enticed me.
- ternaryoperator 5y ago> Xcode is a bug farm. It’s also frikkin’ huge. I have to sometimes force-restart when the code parser goes walkabout. Have a look at JetBrains CLion with the Swift plugin. It has served me well.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago> Have a look at JetBrains CLion with the Swift plugin. It has served me well. Thanks.
- oefrha 5y agoThe last time I evaluated a small, supposedly cross-platform framework which uses GNUstep for macOS, I quickly realized there’s no obvious or even documented way to install the development libraries on macOS: there’s no Homebrew formula, a broken MacPorts port that was last updated ages ago (I’m not sure if it includes the development libraries or just a desktop suite), and some ancient, partial instructions on the wiki. I guess the only way to install it is to grab the source and try to get it to build, but everything about it screams “don’t use”.
- soraminazuki 5y agoWINE doesn't seem to be packaged in Scoop, MSYS2, or Chocolatey. Yet none of that would be a dealbreaker when using WINE. A quick search reveals that GNUStep is packaged in Debian, Fedora, NixOS, OpenSUSE, Arch, Gentoo, Void, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and more [1]. I think that should be enough to cover most platforms that people would actually want to use GNUStep on. [1]: https://repology.org/project/gnustep-base/versions https://repology.org/project/gnustep-base/versions
- bogwog 5y agoGNUstep is not WINE for Mac/NEXTstep (Darling is tho: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/) Why would you want to use GNUstep on Mac? Because it lets you write native software using Foundation/Cocoa/etc that you can actually port to other platforms.
- soraminazuki 5y agoThe analogy still holds because people wouldn't use GNUStep on macOS for the same reason people wouldn't use WINE on Windows. That GNUStep doesn't run macOS binaries makes no difference here.
- bogwog 5y agoThey would use it though, that’s my point. A developer that wants to create a portable Cocoa-based GUI, or a Foundation-based Objective-C CLI can use GNUstep to do so. If they just use Apple’s frameworks directly, they’ll have a hard time porting it anywhere.
- einpoklum 5y agoI remember seeing GNUstep on Linux distributions 20 years ago, along with early KDE and other options. I appreciated the aesthetics of it at the time, but - can someone explain its benefits today, and why one would prefer using it? Actually, I'm not even clear what I would replace with GNUstep, exactly.
- rbanffy 5y agoI imagine you can compile some programs designed to run under macOS to run on it, with a NeXTSTEP look and feel. Apart from that, it's mostly for historical interest.
- touggourt 5y agoGNUStep is not a desktop. Try NextSpace (see above) if you want a GNUStep based desktop. NextSpace is a clone of NextStep desktop. Like its ancestor, NextSpace is fast, light and very consistent. I like the vertical menus that I can move were I need them, the dock in the file manager, the file manager itself, … It is an advanced desktop that hide the difficulties: you don't need to learn, it is logical. It is like macOS, without targeting beginners. I am a long time KDE user, I know how it works, it is my desktop of choice. But there is still some glitches, and it is a different user experience than NextSpace.
- major505 5y agoSo, is like windowmaker?I kind feel like when I was in college in the early 2000`s and used Windowmaker as my main window manager.
- badsectoracula 5y agoGNUstep is a framework (and some applications that use that framework), it is closer to Gtk+ and Qt than to KDE or GNOME. Most importantly it does not provide any window manager and instead rely on an existing one (you can use it with KWin/KDE, Mutter/Gnome, XFWM/XFCE or any other window manager). Window Maker is a window manager with a NeXTSTEP/OpenStep style, though it has nothing to do with GNUstep aside from looking very similar and thus being a good choice for when using GNUstep programs with the classic NeXTSTEP/OpenStep theme.
- lproven 5y agoI tried to answer this above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544763