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.
20-25 years ago, one of the problem GNUStep had is it was never packaged in the Linux distros. You had to compile everything.
One of the reason might have been GCC refused to include the Objective C extensions or something like that. I vaguely remember there might have been some legal concerns.
Maybe someone can clarify this.
But damn GNUStep was fast, snappy and a much better platform than let's say Gnome at the time. There was simply no comparison.
You could take a GNUStep app like Mail.app and just compile in Apple IDE and run it on Mac OS X (but the opposite wasn't possible).
It was one of the most impressive Free Software project out there at the time.
Debian woody (2002) shipped gnustep. I tried it back then, but as far as I remember, it was weird enough that anybody who didn't have NEXTSTEP experience would bounce right off. The floating menus, the weird scrollbars, etc. There were also no non-trivial applications that I can remember.
People back then were looking for something that would be familiar to Windows/Mac users. GNUStep (at least at the time) was not interested in being that.
Anyone interested in trying NeXTStep, it's included on <https://infinitemac.org/>
I also advise reading through the manuals at https://www.nextop.de/ while they exist, or save local copies.
I have started an ArchiveBot job for this website, so the site and all the pages it links to will be on web.archive.org for future viewing. Should be up in a few days to a week.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
Be aware that these are built on very barebones disk images compiled by a community member many years ago; the NeXT community is working on more tourist-friendly packages that we hope to offer to Mihai soon.
The current best GNUstep distro is WMlive: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/
It's based on Debian Bookworm.
Glad you like it and thanks for the recommendation!
Nonetheless, being the maintainer of this project, i'd like to point out that this is no dedicated GNUstep distro, but a mostly Debian based distribution using a thoroughly preconfigured Window Maker as its primary user interface, and that just happens to have the whole range of available GNUstep applications added on.
As already written elsewhere[3], citing my own words, this is a better characterization of its scope:
»Window Maker is just a highly compatible X11 window manager and is supposed to work as such. There is no interest to specifically integrate it with the provided GNUstep applications, as this is not supposed to be predominantly a GNUstep desktop. The included GNUstep applications are just an addon to give people a practical way to verify what GNUstep has to offer. In fact, wmlive would be perfectly usable without providing any single GNUstep application. The freedom and flexibility provided by an X11 window manager instead of the walled garden of a specific desktop system is much more preferable to many Linux users. NeXT nostalgists might want to look elsewhere. [1][2]«
People who's interest has been sufficiently piqued to download wmlive are advised to better wait until after Debian's bookwom 12.12 point release this saturday. A final bookworm based wmlive release will be uploaded shortly after. This will also be the last and final 32bit i386 variant of wmlive. After that work on an exclusively amd64 trixie based wmlive variant will begin.
[1] https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
[2] https://github.com/onflapp/gs-desktop
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640378
The main issue of GNUStep was that, when KDE appeared, the GNU project used GTK+ as a base for GNOME, instead of GNUStep. This basically killed the momentum behind GNUStep as a base for the official GNU Desktop. It is sad because GNUStep is incredible, the IDEs alone are more advanced than anything in GNOME-space, even today. Oh well...
There's a lot of "oh well" in the tech space. I was watching something on Pick OS yesterday, which I hadn't even heard of, which was a kind of filesystem/database/OS all together that was, if the comments on the video mean anything, quite loved.
But like BeOS (also loved) and other things just never got traction for various reasons.
I used Windowmaker for a lot of years as it was lightweight and I liked the UI, and always wondered "why not this? why ape Windows of all things?" The answer is usually something along the lines of "that's what people know," and I get it, but still.
I guess I miss the times when computers were cool.
The other main issue is that GNUstep is incredibly bug prone and fragile. Case in point, two years ago i installed GNUstep from source and then built a pixelart editor called PikoPixel. The app felt very clunky, like all GNUstep apps do (note that i'm using Window Maker as my main WM so GNUstep gets the best environment it can hope for). Then two years later with some OS updates in between it doesn't work anymore.
Meanwhile i'm still using the same mediaplayer binary i built ~7 years ago on a different computer against a C GUI library.
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.
Actually, GNUstep has always had an Interface Builder:
https://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html
My own take is actually that GNUstep spent too long trying to be an OpenStep successor instead of being a way to run Mac apps on Linux.
It took them ages to even clarify if it was a desktop environment or an SDK (and I am not sure it is even clear now).
There has never been a tonne of love for Objective C either. Pretty much the only reason to use it for most people has been because you had to for access to Apple APIs. Which would be the only reason to use it on Linux too.
It always amazed me that Darwin + GNUstep did not result in a macOS clone. Neither of them really went anywhere.
Have you seen Gershwin?
https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop
>It took them ages to even clarify if it was a desktop environment or an SDK
Yes. In my eyes it’s both. I mean that in a good way, relative to the way Oberon is both an OS and a language or that Smalltalk is both a language and its authoring environment. Or how Bash is an interactive command shell and a language.
Some people might not like that tight coupling, but sometimes it can be really powerful.
I think there was a funding campaign once where a developer offered to re-implement the missing Apple APIs, but since they basically put up a standard salary it didn't reach the funding target.
> It took them ages to even clarify if it was a desktop environment or an SDK (and I am not sure it is even clear now).
Yes they still have no idea what they are trying to do.
> I have some theories as to why
Curious what those might be.
I think might not have been so simple as well "Jobs = Le Bad". There might have been some oldskool unix thinking about linking. (Both commercial and gnu.) And *Step was a dynamic message API, so it "didn't fit their model". Total speculation I have to admit. It also seemed like a commercial dead-end pre-iphone.
> I’ve noticed that most commercial Mac OS X software in the early days were Carbon applications, not Cocoa applications
I think it’s a safe bet there were many more Mac applications than NeXT applications (that’s one of the reasons Carbon was created), so I don’t see how that’s surprising.
It's also an example of how stubborn people can ruin a project. While it's nice to see the old NextStep GUI, it's from the 1990's. They never made any effort to improve. They never made any effort to integrate nicely into the rest of the Linux world. They never made any effort to add new Objective-C features.
Its entirely stagnated.
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