On 28 Nov 2015, at 09:41, Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]> wrote: > > Perhaps the best card deck is covered by GNOME/GTK, since even if not "gnome" > other GTK application blend nicely in. So for example You can have Xfce, then > Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape blend quite well in. No real native Office suite, > but for the end-user OpenOffice will fit in. > > On GNUstep, because of its distinctive design, an application like OpenOffice > sticks out immediately. > > Perhaps we could do with some "ports" similar to the Mac ones, to have a more > integrated look. It could be perhaps done for Firefox/Seamonkey and > OpenOffice. With our menu subsystem, app bundles and some integration it > would be nice. > > Without, it would be a bad advertisement, like the original "GNUstep LiveCD" > ended up to be.
I agree. The FreeBSD GNUstep packages include a lot of things, but you need to do a lot of tinkering to make them integrate even vaguely with typical environments. For the ones that we use in the lab, I’ve configured a more modern looking theme[1] and the in-window menus. With this, the apps still look fairly distinctive, but work quite well and people don’t complain. The problem is the difficulty of setting this globally. I’ve not been able to find a good way of setting these globally at all. The symlink approach to making tools appear in bin/ doesn’t work with rpaths, so I have to manually replace those symlinks with shell scripts anyway and have been able to shoehorn things into that script. This works well for a single application on a single machine, but is not really a scalable solution. I would love to be able to ship a port of the GNOME theme that, on installation, would allow GNUstep applications to look and feel like GNOME applications *for all users of the system with no additional configuration*. Without this, it requires *huge* buy-in from potential developers: yes GNUstep may be great, but it’s not great enough to persuade your users to abandon their favourite DE and existing software. David [1] With the default GNUstep theme, people assume that the applications are written with tk. It doesn’t look distinct and NeXT-like to most people, it just looks old. -- Sent from my PDP-11 _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
