2 ms·
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
by 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 agoGnome 1.4 had Sawfish, a window manager expandable with Lisp.