Re: GNUstep on Hackernews

[Sergii Stoian]

Hi Liam,

On 13 Dec 2021, at 15:35, Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:

This discussion contains some useful points. There may be stuff here
that should be addressed right on the homepage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537172

Étoilé is there too. I wonder if this is because I mentioned both in my article?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537538

As I have said more than once before, IMHO, the GNUstep project
*really* _NEEDS_ a version of a mainstream distro based on the desktop
environment, as a showcase.

NEXTspace hasn't released any binaries or an ISO yet as far as I know.
It needs that. Ordinary Linux users are not going to compile their
own.

For the sake of truth - NextSpace has 3 binary releases (RPMs). Please look carefully here https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace/releases.

Last 0.90 release support 3 bistro: CenOS 7, CentOS 8 and Fedora 31. Also it includes install script and installation process pretty much simple even for non-technical person like you.

New release will include changes I’ve made which can provide some opportunity to GNUstep applications: I’ve rewritten most part of window manager (WINGs) to Apple’s CoreFoundation, replace blocking event loop with non-blocking with help of GCD and CoreFoundation. Plus I’ve add Notification Center bridge between NSNotificationCenter (Objective-C, GNUstep) and CFNotificationCenter (C, CoreFoundation) to Workspace Manager. It’s just working proof-of-concept but I can implement communication channel between window manager and GNUstep applications. Someone need to write communication protocol and conversion of allow types between Foundation and CoreFoundation (I think, strings and collections would be enough for the start).

The HelloSystem evaluated it and discarded it, and the GNUstep project
missed a _huge_ opportunity there. That made me very sad.

https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

Hello is getting some attention. I managed to get a recent build to
boot on hardware on one of my machines recently for the first time (I
tried 0.5 & 0.6 with no success except in a VM) and while it's still
very basic, it is there, it works, you can use it, and people are
trying it.

Some time ago I’ve started NextSpace development on FreeBSD. I’ve consciously switched to Linux for 2 reasons: most commercial applications are written for Linux (RHEL and Ubuntu) and FreeBSD lacks such powerful system-level utilities like UDisks (for automatic removable media management).

Sergii