Gregory Casamento wrote:
James,
On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 12:12 AM, James Carthew <[email protected]> wrote:
Realistically GNUStep is not ready to replace OSX by a long way. I was
experimenting with doing so for a long time, but there hasn't been enough
changes to the core components of the system yet, a lot more focus is on API
features than application features. (System Preferences exists but lacks
everything useful: Screen Resolution
Changing/multimonitor/Wireless/Networking(Network manager or equivalent,
wrapped)/Sound(Pulseaudio Wrapper)).
Currently SystemPreferences focuses on GNUstep specific things. It
would be, however, pretty cool to have some pref panel plugins for the
things you mention.
SystemPreference is just the case and it is essentially Mac-compatible
in the interfaces, what is needed is the hard work.
Writing portable preference modules is hard, I do not want to put in the
official repository "unportable" stuff.
However, each panel is a bundle, so you can write your own bundle just
for your needs and install it and distribute it for your OS.
I started writing a tool to handle audio Volumes and found it to be an
incredible maze, so it is unfinished, being low-priority
The GWorkspace application is quite good, but could be tweaked to be more
like the Mac Finder. It already has everything you really need.
Thanks, I'm sure Enrico and Riccardo (former and current maintainer of
GWorkspace) appreciate those comments.
I do :) I actually dislike the "Finder", but there are a couple of rough
edges where I'd like to import features from Mac but also from Windows 7
into GWorkspace, in a clean, non-intursive way. Especially in things
like path handling, copy&paste, handling of directories as targets and
other conveniences.
The GWorkspace code base is however big and difficult to maintain,
putting hands into any small thing is difficult! I try to clean it up
and modernize everytime I touch it, but it hard.
Right now I was improving the file operation experience and it has been
weeks of work and I am not done yet.
One thing I miss in GNUstep for that is the ability to hide/show a
toolbar like you do on mac (the extra button in the window decorations).
That would allow for additions that can be disabled.
The big dealbreaker for me is Vespucci.app, realistically a web browser is
critical to using gnustep on a daily basis, and right now it just doesn't
have one. There used to be Mantella under Etoile which wrapped Firefox into
a gnustep window which was pretty decent. But the subsystem of firefox it
used has been deprecated so the code no longer works.
The solution here is simple. I've been thinking of creating a WebView
based on CEF3 which should be sufficient for creating a GNUstep based
browser. Basically it would just be CEF3 rendering to a view in a
GNUstep window. This would solve a lot of issues.
You could also port web.kit, but you still need a "browser", the
rendering engine is only half of the part. Vespucci is currently only a
very crude test example, although if used with Apple's WebKit it is
usable, it lacks certain basic stuff like bookmark editing, download
management, history management. I'd like to keep it quite minimal in any
case.
Another option would be to see if Firefox or SeaMonkey can be "ported"
to GNUstep. They run under Mac and they can't use Carbon, so I wonder
what components do they really use. Of course, heavy use of Core kits
would be a problem for us, but perhaps CoreBase could be improved for that?
A multi-tabbed terminal.app would also fix a lot of the frustration in using
GNUStep as a standalone desktop system.
Honestly, I don't even use the tab features as much on OS X as one
might think so I don't miss them too terribly in Terminal.app.
Actually, I even dislike tabs, I never used them in Mac and it confuses
me that in GNOME Terminal they are visible by default.
It is most probably
Riccardo
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