5 ms·

I will forever find it the pinnacle of missed opportunities that Linux wound up with it's own ux system, rather than using the systems that came out of NeXT via

I will forever find it the pinnacle of missed opportunities that Linux wound up with it's own ux system, rather than using the systems that came out of NeXT via OpenSTEP/GNUstep

linguae 2y ago
I feel the exact same way. I wish FOSS desktop advocates in the 1990s either rallied behind the development of GNUstep, or I wish that during the time when Qt had a non-FOSS license, the Harmony project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_(toolkit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_(toolkit)) had gotten greater attention as a workaround against Qt's licensing issues. Even standardizing on Win32/Wine might have been a better outcome. Unfortunately we ended up with the Qt/GTK split and everything that resulted from that. Don't get me wrong. KDE, GNOME, and other leading FOSS desktops aren't bad, and it's quite remarkable what they achieved over the past 25+ years. However, I feel we could've ended up with something better, something that would amaze even Mac users. I could imagine a few alternative timelines where the FOSS desktop community rallied behind GNUstep, or perhaps some of the more research-minded people in the community would've gone all the way and came up with some sort of radical GUI inspired by the Smalltalk and Lisp machines of old, as well as some of Apple's 1990s experiments. (Given RMS's affinity for Lisp and his Lisp machine roots, this wouldn't have been too crazy.) I have many thoughts (http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-proposal-for-flexible-composable.html http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-proposal-for-...) about what my ideal desktop environment would be like, but I haven't had the time to work on them. Maybe if I win the lottery....
- anthk 2y ago
  Gnome 1.4 had Sawfish, a window manager expandable with Lisp.
LeFantome 2y ago
I am with you. The NeXT APIs were so good for the time. The real missed opportunity was that macOS essentially uses those same APIs to this day. We could have had an open source apps platform that was source code compatible with macOS!
- anthk 2y ago
  Pikopixel and such work in both OSes.

I will forever find it the pinnacle of missed opportunities that Linux wound up with it's own ux system, rather than using the systems that came out of NeXT via OpenSTEP/GNUstep

linguae 2y ago

I feel the exact same way. I wish FOSS desktop advocates in the 1990s either rallied behind the development of GNUstep, or I wish that during the time when Qt had a non-FOSS license, the Harmony project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_(toolkit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_(toolkit)) had gotten greater attention as a workaround against Qt's licensing issues. Even standardizing on Win32/Wine might have been a better outcome. Unfortunately we ended up with the Qt/GTK split and everything that resulted from that. Don't get me wrong. KDE, GNOME, and other leading FOSS desktops aren't bad, and it's quite remarkable what they achieved over the past 25+ years. However, I feel we could've ended up with something better, something that would amaze even Mac users. I could imagine a few alternative timelines where the FOSS desktop community rallied behind GNUstep, or perhaps some of the more research-minded people in the community would've gone all the way and came up with some sort of radical GUI inspired by the Smalltalk and Lisp machines of old, as well as some of Apple's 1990s experiments. (Given RMS's affinity for Lisp and his Lisp machine roots, this wouldn't have been too crazy.) I have many thoughts (http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-proposal-for-flexible-composable.html http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-proposal-for-...) about what my ideal desktop environment would be like, but I haven't had the time to work on them. Maybe if I win the lottery....

anthk 2y ago
Gnome 1.4 had Sawfish, a window manager expandable with Lisp.

LeFantome 2y ago

I am with you. The NeXT APIs were so good for the time. The real missed opportunity was that macOS essentially uses those same APIs to this day. We could have had an open source apps platform that was source code compatible with macOS!

anthk 2y ago
Pikopixel and such work in both OSes.