Re: Consider GtkCore as UI

[bruce]

Gregory, respectfully, I’ve been trying gnustep for the last decade, waiting for it to be ready, and getting frustrated. During that time I’ve had 5 different computers, and used about 10 linux distros, and the place I find gnustep working tolerably is on freebsd-xfce. Not too many artifacts, themes are working, but it still doesn’t integrate to the desktop - that’s a design issue , and I’m not asking you to change that, just consider an alternative.

The artifact problems I refer to have been there all along, and I’ve talked on several forums to other users that run into them too. If no one on the project has ever noticed these issues, I don’t know what to say.

I bring up the archaic menu and there are 2 camps - one says use WindowMaker, and the other longs for something more modern - so i’m suggesting that you can kill 2 birds with one stone by using CoreGTK.framework

On Sat, Dec 16, 2023 at 6:14 PM Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Bruce,

On Sat, Dec 16, 2023 at 10:34 AM bruce <darkoverlordofdata@gmail.com> wrote:

I love gnustep objective-c and Foundation. But the UI is pretty ugly. Theming fixes it cosmetically, but it doesn’t fix the real issues. The menu and main icon don’t really fit on any modern desktop. And the GUI itself is buggy, and leaves artifacts strewn all over the window. 

I am not sure what you mean by this.   Instead of making general statements like the above filing bug reports on github (https://github.com/gnustep) would be more useful as they would provide more context to the actual issues you are referring to and also help us address the problem you seem to be seeing.   I have been lead for many years and use GNUstep every day, including with LARGE customers...

Please see https://eggplant.io (Keysight) they have 1000s of clients and their product is using GNUstep's master branch.

Additionally, there are some very attractive themes for GNUstep... namely...

And...

As well as the Windows theme... (on windows of course)...

 

So tbh, I’ve been investigating GtkSharp, since dotnet8.0 is now available on linux, and is in ‘beta’ on freebsd. While investigating that, I discovered gtkcore, a gtk binding for gnustep. It has some minor issues, but not the magnitude of the issues with cocoa, and gtk is well known territory.

There is a GtkTheme for GNUstep...

https://github.com/gnustep/plugins-themes-Gtk/

Gtk is not my favorite toolkit, I would prefer a working cocoa, or even qt. But the freebsd desktop uses it in xfce, and with gnustep cocoa so unusable, I’m thinking that gtkcore is now the only way ahead to develop gui applications with gnustep. Or, I suppose you could fix cocoa - but that gets so much push back I’ve given up hope.

 

The best way to cooperate with the community is to file bugs and give useful feedback -- which you have NOT done here.  Simply saying "it doesn't work" or "it's ugly" is not going to help because people need SPECIFIC feedback to make things better.

PS.  The Gtk and Windows themes both use NATIVE widgets from those environments.

 --

Bruce Davidson

Yours Sincerely, GC

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Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
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Bruce Davidson