HN user
Having managed to install and run OPENSTEP on a Frankenpad T61, albeit without network access, I'd wish someone similarily capable would create some network and PCMCIA drivers for the T6x Thinkpad generation to enable full use of its hardware capabilities.
It would help your question if you'd more clearly define what you intent to discuss about. Remote mindreading is still not a very common skill among the typical HN public. Or do you expect people first google for some of the keywords you provided?
Someone is also working on GNUstep integration for this browser:
https://github.com/pkgdemon/ladybird/issues/1
https://old.reddit.com/r/gnustep/comments/1q0pdd6/ladybird_p...
Maybe a bit more noteworthy is that this finally also includes a proper ARM64 version. And it installs and runs fine also on a Pinebook Pro.
I'd wish there was a Midnight Commander available for Android that would allow for being used during an adb shell or ssh session. Ghost Commander doesn't cover that use case, sadly.
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
We are not really in a position to dictate what the GNUstep project ought to do. I for one am rather thankful for what they have achieved so far. Especially since they seem to mainly lack the man power which its critics probably won't provide either.
Not being a software developer myself, I've resorted to loosely following the progress of GNUstep over more than 20 years, in the hope that it will eventually become a viable option. But apparently capable people found more interest in KDE, GNOME, and similar projects based on either Qt or gtk+, and then hardly anyone cared anymore.
By all means, if anyone here is capable enough is wanting to still contribute to the GNUstep project, please do! At the current stage of the project it would be a pity if all the efforts made over the years would be wasted by not supporting it anymore.
You'd need something like Wayback[1] in Wayland to be able to use it. Being exclusivley an X11 window manager, there is no direct support for Wayland.
There is a Wayland compositor namend wlmaker[2] that tries to mimick Window Maker. But judging by its description it still appears to be a far cry from that Window Maker offers.
Development of Window Maker (as in the window manager) unfortunately seems to be almost abandoned. The last few years of it's development saw the inclusion of rather superfluous additional features (e.g., screen capture, hot corners) instead of concentrating on it's main purpose of being a window manager.
It's a pity no one ever tried to replace the WINGs widget set with actual GNUstep components, thus adding the full GNUstep themeability WINGs is not capable of, in order to finally get rid of that crufty NeXTSTEP look.
wmlive maintainer here.
In fact, this should rather be considered a Window Maker based Debian/Bookworm distribution instead the stated reverse. Certainly more then 95% of the shipped packages are plain Debian/Bookworm packages, with only a few additional packages contributed by yours truly.
The main merit of wmlive is providing the necessary glue to properly preconfigure Window Maker with an out of the box usable environment (unlike Debian's crude/primitive Window Maker configs) and make it the default GUI.
The other merit is to make the supplied software complete enough to serve as a standalone system without the immediate need to connect to the internet to install more useful packages than are normally supplied by distributions in their quest to provide an initial system too generic to be really useful by already experienced users. This is not meant for beginners,
While some work went in homogenizing the overall looks with Window Maker's own WINGs widget set, no efforts were wasted with further eye candy stuff. The themeability of the WINGs widgets are limited to that crufty NeXTSTEP look everybody either loves or despises, being the least common visual denominator. Not being particularly enamored of these visuals, but this was the only way to find some common ground for the look and feel.
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]
What most people don't seem to get is that there is much more to wmlive than just the visible desktop. Below the hood is a wide range of command line tools suitable for system rescue and repair when using it as a live system booted from an USB stick. Supposedly many youngsters who were yet to be born when we already grew up with Linux from day one have never learned to look beyond what's visually obvious.
If anyone who downloaded it does like wmlive, I'd appreciate a donation via the download pages. While i hate sounding like a beggar, given the current economic situation i could really use it. Thanks!
[1] https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace [2] https://github.com/onflapp/gs-desktop
Is there any better alternative site for easy and free bulk data distribution of ISO images?
I really wouldn't want to host my stuff on any Microsoft controlled sites.
»This mode replaces expensive and hard to find vintage SCSI bridges such as Adaptech USBXchange,USB2Xchange, Iomega, XpressSCSI, Castlewood, Microtech, and Ratoc among others.«
It would be great if there were a similar solution for directly running legacy NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP binaries on Linux without the system vitualization overhead of something like previous or virtualbox.
Mainly thinking about being able to reuse the NeXTSTEP versions of programs such as FrameMaker, WordPerfect, Quantrix, CedarWord, Adobe Illustrator, Altsys Virtuoso, and so many more.
"Conclusion
NextStep’s influence can still be felt in modern computing. From the object-oriented philosophies that underpin macOS and iOS, to the minimalistic, function-driven design ethos that many desktop environments aspire to replicate, NextStep exemplifies a visionary approach to software. Steve Jobs’s journey from Apple to NeXT and back to Apple fundamentally shaped personal computing. Meanwhile, GNUstep and projects like Window Maker preserve the look, feel, and efficiency of NextStep, allowing its spirit to thrive in open-source communities around the world."
The GNUstep project offers a similar tool:
The GNUstep project offers a similar tool:
The GNUstep project offers a similar tool:
The GNUstep project offers a similar tool:
Just love this perl: "Yet by the late '90s, NeXT had abandoned its remaining, meager computer hardware sales and was rather desperately just shopping around its advanced but little-used software layers as the crown jewels of an empire that had never really ruled anything but the imaginations of technologists and intellectuals."
A few months ago I installed the venerable OPENSTEP 4.2 on an old Thinkpad T60 using a T7200 CPU and a PATA SSD, with about 950MB of usable RAM. On top of that I installed as many flagship applications as i could find to get an idea how working in such a vintage environment would feel like. The applications included FrameMaker, WordPerfect, the complete Lighthouse Suite of word processors and spread sheets, and a few dozen more applications.
The execution speed and general performance of these very capable applications on that old vintage Thinkpad was absolutely amazing. If this environment would be capable running on a more modern machine there wouldn't be much to miss, as these old applications are already sophisticated enough to get real work done. And definitely at a much more snappier pace than all those contemporary software behemoths we are blessed with today.
Since this is using Cocoa and one of the targets is MacOS, have you considered using the GNUstep framework {instead of|in addition to} gtk* for the Linux side of your browser project?
"This feature request is to add a new "mode" to BlueSCSI that allows it to connect legacy SCSI devices to a modern-ish host via USB. [...] The scope of this issue will be to add basic mass storage support (hard drive, cd-rom) to BlueSCSI on a Linux host."
This article is from 2017 but it perfectly resonates with my GNUstep experience today, sadly. But judging by the discussions on the GNUstep mailing lists over the course of the year this gap has been recognized and people have started working on it. Apparently, this is not enough because there is a shortage of helping hands. May this submission serve as a reminder to people interested in GNUstep to help making a difference.
Happy Birthday to NeXTSTEP!
Personally, i'd wish Window Maker wouldn't fall for pointless feature creep (in-built screenshot feature!?) and would instead replace WINGs with the GNUstep framework.
GNUstep has silently matured over the years but still lacks a real native window manager. Window Maker once aimed to be that but unfortunately didn't ever manage to fully integrate with GNUstep.
Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features Wayland support and also offers a theming capabality for which WINGs' hardcoded and thus unchangeable NeXTSTEP aestetics are no match. So replacing WINGs with the GNUstep framework would instantly provide Wayland and more advanced theming support, for free.
People interested in an integrated Window Maker centric system based on Debian/Bookworm should have a look at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net and https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ for downloads.
OneStepBack is a Gtk 2, 3 and 4 theme with some colors and embossed widgets inspired by the good old NeXTSTEP look. It is developed from scratch, is light and minimal, uses only three shades of grays and one color.
It has been tested on Arch Linux with Gnome-Shell, Gtk+ from 3.16 to 3.24 and Gtk+ 4.12.4, a good amount of Gtk2 and Gtk3 applications and a very few Gtk4 applications. A lot of widget controls are still missing (but the defaults should be good enough) and it is not tested at all with unity or xfce.
QT applications can use some base colors of the gtk theme after installing qt5-styleplugins and qt6gtk2, for a more consistent overall appearance.
Back in 1994 or so, the standard installation routine of SuSE Linux offered playing tetris on another virtual console while waiting for the installation to finish. Still being used to flaky DOS 6.22 combined with Windows 3.1 on my i486 machine, I was completely blown away.