9 ms·

Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

251 points by pabs3 1y ago

mongol 1y ago
Isn't GNUStep extremely old? I remember seing a webpage before even KDE existed. But I have never seem a GNUStep desktop. Just the window manager, it was popular for a while
neilv 1y ago
https://github.com/orgs/etoile/repositories https://github.com/orgs/etoile/repositories
TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
Not loading for me. Here's an archive mirror [0]. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.c...
- pabs3 1y ago
  Works fine if you don't use https, possibly your browser tries that first?
- rfl890 1y ago
  Site's HTTP-only. Shows a warning in Firefox
jimbosis 1y ago
Also see this related Cocoa- or GNUstep-based project from some of the same people: http://coreobject.org/ http://coreobject.org/ "Distributed version control + Object persistence"
alephnerd 1y ago
It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around. I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue. Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.
- totallykvothe 1y ago
  What are your gripes with Elementary? I personally use KDE now, but I used to use Elementary a while ago, and it was very polished
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Last I played with Elementary (couple months ago), there was a finickiness and latency issue with icons. Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective. Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      > Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure. It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non-technical people, but is packed with touches that users pick up over time, effectively turning them into power users. Some of the people who get the most out of thier macs aren’t particularly technical but have just been using macs for their photography business or what have you for the past 20 years and know their way around the OS better than many software developers do. Sometimes they’ve even done a fair amount of script writing and such. With Gnome and Pantheon, there’s very little of that. What you see is what you get, and after using it for a week you know everything there is to know about it.
      - actionfromafar 1y ago
        Amen. And a lot of discoverability comes from long term vision and a reluctance to break things. (Yes, I know, Apple breaks some stuff from time to time.) But in Linux land, you can have major UX things change completely from release to release, so that there is no use learning all the intricacies of a user interface, because the rug pull is probably close.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
linguae 1y ago
Étoilé was so promising….the idea of using OpenStep (via GNUstep) infrastructure in ways that went beyond NeXTstep or Mac OS X. It felt like an even deeper embrace of the Smalltalk influences of the OpenStep API to enhance the desktop computing experience. Étoilé wasn’t merely a clone of NeXTstep or Mac OS X; it was its own thing that could’ve been a compelling contender to KDE, GNOME, and even macOS. Unfortunately Étoilé seems to have been inactive for a decade, and even Apple seems to be abandoning its Xerox PARC influences as the old guard retires and passes away (RIP Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, and Bill Atkinson). Ever since Apple struck gold with the iPhone and derivative platforms, Apple hasn’t been the same. I’d like to see the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp machines revisited for the modern era as a model for workstation-class personal computing. Smalltalk and Lisp environments pride themselves on flexibility and malleability (though it’s understandable to rethink some of these things in an era where security is very important), while mainstream personal computing these days feel less like productivity boosters (remember “the bicycle for the mind”) and more like advertising platforms and anti-competitive, rent-seeking moats.
- andai 1y ago
  Modern computing is bloat for the mind.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > Modern computing is bloat for the mind. and for the computer also.
- sorrythanks 1y ago
  I love the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp machines too. Do you know of anything promising in that area? (other than Ink & Switch)
  - lproven 1y ago
    https://newspeaklanguage.org/ https://newspeaklanguage.org/ ...?
  - 1y ago
pjmlp 1y ago
GNUStep is a good example that the bare bones language and compiler being open source it is not enough, when everything else doesn't come along. Saying this as someone that used Afterstep and Windowmaker alongside GNUStep, and did seat a few times on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM. Last time I checked was at the level of OS X Panther, and modern Objective-C still wasn't supported.
- evereverever 1y ago
  Microsoft tried to replicate the iOS libraries and everything with project Islandwood. It was a valiant effort but that moment (iOS 5->6->7) was a major time of upheaval for iOS libraries and they matured and this project was ultimately canceled. https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC
- linguae 1y ago
  I’ve been periodically keeping up with GNUstep’s progress since 2004, when I first learned about it as a high school student brand new to Linux and Mac OS X (I grew up on Windows at home and on classic Macs in elementary school). I even wrote a report for a community college class on the history of Mac OS X. I’ve wanted to see GNUstep succeed, but unfortunately it never got as much attention as the KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK ecosystems. I have some theories as to why, but I think the biggest barrier is those who really wanted OpenStep/Cocoa in the 1990s and 2000s could’ve used readily-available NeXT/Apple software instead of waiting for GNUstep. It’s the same issue ReactOS and Haiku have; they’re competing against Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 and BeOS, respectively. Even FreeDOS, which is architecturally much simpler, took quite a while to reach version 1.0; people could just get MS-DOS 6.22. Of course, the Linux kernel and the GNU ecosystem are counterexamples, though I believe it’s easier to reimplement Unix due to its modular nature than to reimplement entire GUI toolkits, especially if source- and/or binary-level compatibility are required. A GNUstep that was ready around 1998 or 1999 to capture the attention of former NeXT developers and deliver ports of NeXT software to Linux would’ve been the ideal opportunity, though it still would’ve been quite an effort to bring over other things that made the NeXT special, such as Interface Builder. I’ve noticed that most commercial Mac OS X software in the early days were Carbon applications, not Cocoa applications. Many legendary NeXT software products did not make the transition from NeXTstep/OPENSTEP to Mac OS X. They could’ve had a home on Linux or one of the BSDs via GNUstep had GNUstep been ready.
neonate 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.c...
tombert 1y ago
I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it. It bothers me a bit, though. Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, and I think GNUStep could have been that framework if the community had been willing to embrace it.
- qiqitori 1y ago
  But what if that One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All had sucked? :)
  - wolvesechoes 1y ago
    Definitely wouldn't be worse than multiple desktop frameworks that suck.
    - worthless-trash 1y ago
      It definitely would be. Choice is a defining factor in freedom.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Current desktop frameworks are quite good. KDE/Qt are incredibly mature at this point. GTK still has a decent amount of churn.
- LeFantome 1y ago
  The founder of the GNOME project founded Mono to be the “One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All”. It did not work out.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    That was to be expected, there was a lot of resistance against using C# because Microsoft tried to destroy Linux in various ways. Toolkit-wise, the Mono on Linux stack used Gtk+. So given the C#-distrust it was easier for people to use C, Perl, Python, or later Vala.
fithisux 1y ago
GNUStep lost its opportunity to use D to go further and stuck with old ObjC. Very good piece of software though.
- 29athrowaway 1y ago
  Or Swift
- gnoack 1y ago
  Etoile had its own Smalltalk dialect back in the day, Pragmatic Smalltalk. This was a Smalltalk based on the Objective-C runtime, based on an OMeta implementation and a LLVM backend. David Chisnall, who created it at the time, ended up getting involved more in LLVM in the long run, I believe.
  - fithisux 1y ago
    Indeed, still gcc objC has not been updated but D which shares a lot in gcc 15 was upgraded to the latest release. Pragmatic SmalltaLk can still rely on LLVM since there is LDC. No objection against objC but on windows it is not the best. D has 3 compilers with similar or beter ergonomics than ObjC
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Unfortunately D is still trying to find out what is the killer application that would push for industry's adoption. Also D semantics have nothing to do with something that builds out OpenSTEP.
  - fithisux 1y ago
    OpenStep is a Desktop environment. What D has to do with it?
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Not understanding why that is relevant for GNUStep and their use of Objective-C makes all the difference.
chris_armstrong 1y ago
Damn this is a blast from the past - it was such an ambitious project with so many interesting ideas to explore. CoreObject itself was revolutionary in its thinking about distributed document sharing and versioning, let alone some of desktop environment ideas for managing projects. I know Quentin Mathé, kept CoreObject going for a decade longer, but I haven't heard from the rest of those involved for a very long time.
- grahamlee 1y ago
  David Chisnall is now at MS Research and does cool things with CHERI making a computing platform that's memory-safe by default.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
A previous discussion in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537538
fuzzfactor 1y ago
The state of Texas is well-known as the "Lone Star" state, and appropriately enough there is a small town in east Texas known as Etoile, Texas. This is not even that far from the border with Louisiana and some of the unsettled parts of that old French territory. But they can really tell if you are from around those parts or not, since the correct local pronunciation of the word etoile is of course "yeetaw".
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bitwize 1y ago
  That's not far from Nakadish (Natchitoches, Louisiana)!
- rbanffy 1y ago
  > since the correct local pronunciation of the word etoile is of course "yeetaw". Some things lose a lot with translation.
webworker 1y ago
We need all hands on deck to bring this back to life
- rbanffy 1y ago
  A good first step would be a linter that goes over source code for macOS and flags things that are being used that GNUStep doesn't implement. That would inform the most important missing features for it to allow source portability.
- BirAdam 1y ago
  Especially so if this could be built as a FreeBSD/NetBSD system for Apple Silicon...
SillyUsername 1y ago
I miss the days of Sun Solaris' CDE desktop. Afterstep looks too much like Stardock's Window Blinds from around 2000 (see the weird glass effect, font etc), but Etolie seems to nail the aesthetic for me. I hope this comes back, I'd love to use it on an old netbook I have for accessing my servers remotely.
- gnoack 1y ago
  CDE was open sourced a while back: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
  - lproven 1y ago
    CDE is included as one of the options in Sparky Linux: https://sparkylinux.org/cde-common-desktop-environment/ https://sparkylinux.org/cde-common-desktop-environment/ For me, it's a bit broken, though; I can't get the terminal to launch, and without that, you can't do much. I wrote a comparison of CDE and modern recreation NotSoCDE: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_desktops/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d... A chap I know led the campaign to open-source it and I wrote about it at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/
  - xvilka 1y ago
    First, they should move to GitHub or GitLab (or Codeberg) to attract more contributors and make the process of development easier. Maybe it could also be ported to support Wayland and Unicode properly, and remove some legacy code to ease up the maintenance.
alkonaut 1y ago
Technically, how does the "every UI action is a commit on a DVCS graph" work? Would every application that is a native étoilé app use this api to construct its UX and document formats? And every app that is not would _not_ have this? That feels like an ambitious but perhaps misdirected invention of a new paradigm because you'd basically have a native text editor and two other utilities which use it, and then the other five dozen apps would not?
- gyomu 1y ago
  Yeah, strong Xanadu vibes: cool philosophical idea in principle, in practice comes with heavy technical requirements + wouldn't be that useful to 90% of users 90% of the time.
nspattak 1y ago
can someone please explain to me why is this a HN front page material? this seems to be a long abandoned project
- frou_dh 1y ago
  It's an interesting road not taken, where there could have been much more commonality in application development between Linux and OS X. Seems it also had more lofty goals than just making GNUstep mainstream.
lproven 1y ago
Relevant -- there are 2 other desktop environments built on GNUstep that are in more active maintainance. NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace <- Ukrainian so not much development in a while; mainly targets CentOS GSDE: https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html <- More recent, native to Debian but runs on other things.
- chrsw 1y ago
  Thanks for this. So, if I were to run GNUStep as my desktop, what would I be missing from KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc?
  - lproven 1y ago
    Hmmm. Interesting question. Obviously enough there are not a great many native GNUstep apps. It's Linux, though, so there are a million alternatives, but they won't share GNUstep's look, feel, keystrokes, etc. It comes with a file manager, both plain text and rich text editors, image viewers, a chat client, a pretty good email app, a terminal emulator (possibly a choice of them too), and GSDE also provides a web browser, although it's a wrapper around Chromium. It works pretty well. There are lots of programming tools available too, including Gorm, which broadly replicates NeXT's Interface Builder. Pic from one of my own machines here: https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/07/05/deb_11_gsde.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/07/05/deb_11_gsde.jpg I wrote about it (and Lomiri): https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_desktops/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_deskto... I think it's beautiful, myself, but then I consider NeXTstep to be the high-water mark in desktop GUI design thus far. I find GNUstep's choice of accelerator keys weird and frustrating, though. I do not run it as my daily driver, but I am thinking about it. The installation takes a while but it's a `git clone` followed by a few scripts. It's not actually difficult. It took me a few hours but that's because my VM kept crashing.
    - lproven 1y ago
      I forgot to mention... GNUstep's recommended window manager is Window Maker, which is still alive and in active maintenance with new versions coming out. There are lots of little Window Maker applets out there to choose from, so you can accessorize your GSDE (or NEXTSPACE) setup with wm-applets and docklets for volume, sound output, mic control, power management, and all those little fripperies that other desktops come with or can do. A slight limitation is that GNUstep has its own dock and suggests disabling the Window Maker dock, but you can go the other way round and disable the dock provided by GNUstep Workspace and use the WM dock instead. Also, it is worth mentioning that there is a new entrant in the "GNUstep based desktop environment" race: Gershwin. https://github.com/gershwin-desktop https://github.com/gershwin-desktop Currently only available in GhostBSD though.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
lelanthran 1y ago
I think if you're going to use words with ambiguous pronunciations as your product name you should at least let the reader know what it rhymes with. That being said, this looks like it could turn into a really cool project.
guestbest 1y ago
They had a really good blog with the intricacies for objc, but when swift came out in 2014/5. It all stopped. It’s good to hear that they moved on to to other things, though.
bogwog 1y ago
Man, I love GNUStep. I haven't done anything serious with it, but I did play around with it for a while and enjoyed every second. I event went all-in on WindowMaker for a couple of months lol. It really opened my eyes to how awesome Objective-C is as a language, and almost made me want to become an iOS/Mac developer. Etoile is dead afaik, but there are some people making another GNUStep-based DE called Gershwin (https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop) for GhostBSD.
noobermin 1y ago
I remember trying to get this to work in 2008 or 2009 or something and still failing. I'm amazed the website is still up.

251 points by pabs3 1y ago

Isn't GNUStep extremely old? I remember seing a webpage before even KDE existed. But I have never seem a GNUStep desktop. Just the window manager, it was popular for a while

neilv 1y ago

https://github.com/orgs/etoile/repositories https://github.com/orgs/etoile/repositories

TheAceOfHearts 1y ago

Not loading for me. Here's an archive mirror [0]. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.c...

pabs3 1y ago
Works fine if you don't use https, possibly your browser tries that first?
rfl890 1y ago
Site's HTTP-only. Shows a warning in Firefox

jimbosis 1y ago

Also see this related Cocoa- or GNUstep-based project from some of the same people: http://coreobject.org/ http://coreobject.org/ "Distributed version control + Object persistence"

alephnerd 1y ago

It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around. I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue. Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.

totallykvothe 1y ago
What are your gripes with Elementary? I personally use KDE now, but I used to use Elementary a while ago, and it was very polished
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Last I played with Elementary (couple months ago), there was a finickiness and latency issue with icons. Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective. Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    > Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure. It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non-technical people, but is packed with touches that users pick up over time, effectively turning them into power users. Some of the people who get the most out of thier macs aren’t particularly technical but have just been using macs for their photography business or what have you for the past 20 years and know their way around the OS better than many software developers do. Sometimes they’ve even done a fair amount of script writing and such. With Gnome and Pantheon, there’s very little of that. What you see is what you get, and after using it for a week you know everything there is to know about it.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      Amen. And a lot of discoverability comes from long term vision and a reluctance to break things. (Yes, I know, Apple breaks some stuff from time to time.) But in Linux land, you can have major UX things change completely from release to release, so that there is no use learning all the intricacies of a user interface, because the rug pull is probably close.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

linguae 1y ago

Étoilé was so promising….the idea of using OpenStep (via GNUstep) infrastructure in ways that went beyond NeXTstep or Mac OS X. It felt like an even deeper embrace of the Smalltalk influences of the OpenStep API to enhance the desktop computing experience. Étoilé wasn’t merely a clone of NeXTstep or Mac OS X; it was its own thing that could’ve been a compelling contender to KDE, GNOME, and even macOS. Unfortunately Étoilé seems to have been inactive for a decade, and even Apple seems to be abandoning its Xerox PARC influences as the old guard retires and passes away (RIP Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, and Bill Atkinson). Ever since Apple struck gold with the iPhone and derivative platforms, Apple hasn’t been the same. I’d like to see the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp machines revisited for the modern era as a model for workstation-class personal computing. Smalltalk and Lisp environments pride themselves on flexibility and malleability (though it’s understandable to rethink some of these things in an era where security is very important), while mainstream personal computing these days feel less like productivity boosters (remember “the bicycle for the mind”) and more like advertising platforms and anti-competitive, rent-seeking moats.

andai 1y ago
Modern computing is bloat for the mind.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > Modern computing is bloat for the mind. and for the computer also.
sorrythanks 1y ago
I love the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp machines too. Do you know of anything promising in that area? (other than Ink & Switch)
- lproven 1y ago
  https://newspeaklanguage.org/ https://newspeaklanguage.org/ ...?
- 1y ago

pjmlp 1y ago

GNUStep is a good example that the bare bones language and compiler being open source it is not enough, when everything else doesn't come along. Saying this as someone that used Afterstep and Windowmaker alongside GNUStep, and did seat a few times on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM. Last time I checked was at the level of OS X Panther, and modern Objective-C still wasn't supported.

evereverever 1y ago
Microsoft tried to replicate the iOS libraries and everything with project Islandwood. It was a valiant effort but that moment (iOS 5->6->7) was a major time of upheaval for iOS libraries and they matured and this project was ultimately canceled. https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC
linguae 1y ago
I’ve been periodically keeping up with GNUstep’s progress since 2004, when I first learned about it as a high school student brand new to Linux and Mac OS X (I grew up on Windows at home and on classic Macs in elementary school). I even wrote a report for a community college class on the history of Mac OS X. I’ve wanted to see GNUstep succeed, but unfortunately it never got as much attention as the KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK ecosystems. I have some theories as to why, but I think the biggest barrier is those who really wanted OpenStep/Cocoa in the 1990s and 2000s could’ve used readily-available NeXT/Apple software instead of waiting for GNUstep. It’s the same issue ReactOS and Haiku have; they’re competing against Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 and BeOS, respectively. Even FreeDOS, which is architecturally much simpler, took quite a while to reach version 1.0; people could just get MS-DOS 6.22. Of course, the Linux kernel and the GNU ecosystem are counterexamples, though I believe it’s easier to reimplement Unix due to its modular nature than to reimplement entire GUI toolkits, especially if source- and/or binary-level compatibility are required. A GNUstep that was ready around 1998 or 1999 to capture the attention of former NeXT developers and deliver ports of NeXT software to Linux would’ve been the ideal opportunity, though it still would’ve been quite an effort to bring over other things that made the NeXT special, such as Interface Builder. I’ve noticed that most commercial Mac OS X software in the early days were Carbon applications, not Cocoa applications. Many legendary NeXT software products did not make the transition from NeXTstep/OPENSTEP to Mac OS X. They could’ve had a home on Linux or one of the BSDs via GNUstep had GNUstep been ready.

neonate 1y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.c...

tombert 1y ago

I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it. It bothers me a bit, though. Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, and I think GNUStep could have been that framework if the community had been willing to embrace it.

qiqitori 1y ago
But what if that One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All had sucked? :)
- wolvesechoes 1y ago
  Definitely wouldn't be worse than multiple desktop frameworks that suck.
  - worthless-trash 1y ago
    It definitely would be. Choice is a defining factor in freedom.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Current desktop frameworks are quite good. KDE/Qt are incredibly mature at this point. GTK still has a decent amount of churn.
LeFantome 1y ago
The founder of the GNOME project founded Mono to be the “One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All”. It did not work out.
- microtonal 1y ago
  That was to be expected, there was a lot of resistance against using C# because Microsoft tried to destroy Linux in various ways. Toolkit-wise, the Mono on Linux stack used Gtk+. So given the C#-distrust it was easier for people to use C, Perl, Python, or later Vala.

fithisux 1y ago

GNUStep lost its opportunity to use D to go further and stuck with old ObjC. Very good piece of software though.

29athrowaway 1y ago
Or Swift
gnoack 1y ago
Etoile had its own Smalltalk dialect back in the day, Pragmatic Smalltalk. This was a Smalltalk based on the Objective-C runtime, based on an OMeta implementation and a LLVM backend. David Chisnall, who created it at the time, ended up getting involved more in LLVM in the long run, I believe.
- fithisux 1y ago
  Indeed, still gcc objC has not been updated but D which shares a lot in gcc 15 was upgraded to the latest release. Pragmatic SmalltaLk can still rely on LLVM since there is LDC. No objection against objC but on windows it is not the best. D has 3 compilers with similar or beter ergonomics than ObjC
pjmlp 1y ago
Unfortunately D is still trying to find out what is the killer application that would push for industry's adoption. Also D semantics have nothing to do with something that builds out OpenSTEP.
- fithisux 1y ago
  OpenStep is a Desktop environment. What D has to do with it?
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Not understanding why that is relevant for GNUStep and their use of Objective-C makes all the difference.

chris_armstrong 1y ago

Damn this is a blast from the past - it was such an ambitious project with so many interesting ideas to explore. CoreObject itself was revolutionary in its thinking about distributed document sharing and versioning, let alone some of desktop environment ideas for managing projects. I know Quentin Mathé, kept CoreObject going for a decade longer, but I haven't heard from the rest of those involved for a very long time.

grahamlee 1y ago
David Chisnall is now at MS Research and does cool things with CHERI making a computing platform that's memory-safe by default.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

A previous discussion in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537538

fuzzfactor 1y ago

The state of Texas is well-known as the "Lone Star" state, and appropriately enough there is a small town in east Texas known as Etoile, Texas. This is not even that far from the border with Louisiana and some of the unsettled parts of that old French territory. But they can really tell if you are from around those parts or not, since the correct local pronunciation of the word etoile is of course "yeetaw".

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 1y ago
That's not far from Nakadish (Natchitoches, Louisiana)!
rbanffy 1y ago
> since the correct local pronunciation of the word etoile is of course "yeetaw". Some things lose a lot with translation.

webworker 1y ago

We need all hands on deck to bring this back to life

rbanffy 1y ago
A good first step would be a linter that goes over source code for macOS and flags things that are being used that GNUStep doesn't implement. That would inform the most important missing features for it to allow source portability.
BirAdam 1y ago
Especially so if this could be built as a FreeBSD/NetBSD system for Apple Silicon...

SillyUsername 1y ago

I miss the days of Sun Solaris' CDE desktop. Afterstep looks too much like Stardock's Window Blinds from around 2000 (see the weird glass effect, font etc), but Etolie seems to nail the aesthetic for me. I hope this comes back, I'd love to use it on an old netbook I have for accessing my servers remotely.

gnoack 1y ago
CDE was open sourced a while back: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
- lproven 1y ago
  CDE is included as one of the options in Sparky Linux: https://sparkylinux.org/cde-common-desktop-environment/ https://sparkylinux.org/cde-common-desktop-environment/ For me, it's a bit broken, though; I can't get the terminal to launch, and without that, you can't do much. I wrote a comparison of CDE and modern recreation NotSoCDE: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_desktops/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d... A chap I know led the campaign to open-source it and I wrote about it at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/
- xvilka 1y ago
  First, they should move to GitHub or GitLab (or Codeberg) to attract more contributors and make the process of development easier. Maybe it could also be ported to support Wayland and Unicode properly, and remove some legacy code to ease up the maintenance.

alkonaut 1y ago

Technically, how does the "every UI action is a commit on a DVCS graph" work? Would every application that is a native étoilé app use this api to construct its UX and document formats? And every app that is not would _not_ have this? That feels like an ambitious but perhaps misdirected invention of a new paradigm because you'd basically have a native text editor and two other utilities which use it, and then the other five dozen apps would not?

gyomu 1y ago
Yeah, strong Xanadu vibes: cool philosophical idea in principle, in practice comes with heavy technical requirements + wouldn't be that useful to 90% of users 90% of the time.

nspattak 1y ago

can someone please explain to me why is this a HN front page material? this seems to be a long abandoned project

frou_dh 1y ago
It's an interesting road not taken, where there could have been much more commonality in application development between Linux and OS X. Seems it also had more lofty goals than just making GNUstep mainstream.

lproven 1y ago

Relevant -- there are 2 other desktop environments built on GNUstep that are in more active maintainance. NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace <- Ukrainian so not much development in a while; mainly targets CentOS GSDE: https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html <- More recent, native to Debian but runs on other things.

chrsw 1y ago
Thanks for this. So, if I were to run GNUStep as my desktop, what would I be missing from KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc?
- lproven 1y ago
  Hmmm. Interesting question. Obviously enough there are not a great many native GNUstep apps. It's Linux, though, so there are a million alternatives, but they won't share GNUstep's look, feel, keystrokes, etc. It comes with a file manager, both plain text and rich text editors, image viewers, a chat client, a pretty good email app, a terminal emulator (possibly a choice of them too), and GSDE also provides a web browser, although it's a wrapper around Chromium. It works pretty well. There are lots of programming tools available too, including Gorm, which broadly replicates NeXT's Interface Builder. Pic from one of my own machines here: https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/07/05/deb_11_gsde.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/07/05/deb_11_gsde.jpg I wrote about it (and Lomiri): https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_desktops/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_deskto... I think it's beautiful, myself, but then I consider NeXTstep to be the high-water mark in desktop GUI design thus far. I find GNUstep's choice of accelerator keys weird and frustrating, though. I do not run it as my daily driver, but I am thinking about it. The installation takes a while but it's a `git clone` followed by a few scripts. It's not actually difficult. It took me a few hours but that's because my VM kept crashing.
  - lproven 1y ago
    I forgot to mention... GNUstep's recommended window manager is Window Maker, which is still alive and in active maintenance with new versions coming out. There are lots of little Window Maker applets out there to choose from, so you can accessorize your GSDE (or NEXTSPACE) setup with wm-applets and docklets for volume, sound output, mic control, power management, and all those little fripperies that other desktops come with or can do. A slight limitation is that GNUstep has its own dock and suggests disabling the Window Maker dock, but you can go the other way round and disable the dock provided by GNUstep Workspace and use the WM dock instead. Also, it is worth mentioning that there is a new entrant in the "GNUstep based desktop environment" race: Gershwin. https://github.com/gershwin-desktop https://github.com/gershwin-desktop Currently only available in GhostBSD though.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

lelanthran 1y ago

I think if you're going to use words with ambiguous pronunciations as your product name you should at least let the reader know what it rhymes with. That being said, this looks like it could turn into a really cool project.

guestbest 1y ago

They had a really good blog with the intricacies for objc, but when swift came out in 2014/5. It all stopped. It’s good to hear that they moved on to to other things, though.

bogwog 1y ago

Man, I love GNUStep. I haven't done anything serious with it, but I did play around with it for a while and enjoyed every second. I event went all-in on WindowMaker for a couple of months lol. It really opened my eyes to how awesome Objective-C is as a language, and almost made me want to become an iOS/Mac developer. Etoile is dead afaik, but there are some people making another GNUStep-based DE called Gershwin (https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop) for GhostBSD.

noobermin 1y ago

I remember trying to get this to work in 2008 or 2009 or something and still failing. I'm amazed the website is still up.