Riccardo Mottola wrote: > Yavor Doganov wrote: > > they persuaded rms that GNUstep is a dead end and it will take an > > eternity to produce a desktop, so they revealed their plans for a > > new desktop environment based on GIMP's toolkit which would become > > GTK. > > I remember those times ... I think Miguel never fully grasped the > power and simplicity of the OpenStep approach (which then wasn't yet > "history", it was quite contemporary).
I always had the same feeling. It is fair to say that GNUstep (especially GUI/Back) was much less complete than it is nowadays. Miguel also used the argument of the "foreign language", insisting that the GNU desktop should be written in C as the rest of the system. While Objective-C is formally another language, the learning curve from C is pretty straightforward (compared to C++ which is a completely different beast). However, rms apparently listened to that dubious argument, too. > GNOME then caught a lot of momentum, like when it was chosen by Sun > for Solaris. Yes, Sun employees wrote most (if not all) of the user documentation and also implemented some accessibility features. But it's not only Sun, there were armies of programmers (paid and unpaid) working on GNOME. I remember the times when I used to build GNOME to test my translations, some libraries broke ABI before I manage to finish it so I had to recompile certain components. > > He also doesn't like the direction GNOME is heading to. > > A lot of people don't like where GNOME is going especially after 3.x > (now with the absurd new numbering scheme to look cool like Firefox or > Chrome). I should have mentioned the ethical aspect; rms pays little attention to the technical details. GNOME is getting more and more detached from GNU, they even avoid saying it's a GNU project. I can talk a lot about the technical part but of course it's off-topic on this list. I can't stand the aristocratic behavior of most GNOME developers, thinking they are involved in something divine and ultimately correct by nature. The mere fact that a lot of prominent projects (GCompris, Wireshark, gLabels, to name a few) moved away from GTK/GNOME speaks a lot. GNOME 3 is completely unusable without serious configuration intervention and even after that it's still unusable for me -- I have a built-in nVidious card but I use the poor free (nouveau) driver so it constantly crashes. Their insistance for hardware acceleration because "the world has moved on" naturally eliminates some of the traditional user base. > I also believe that and it is continuing, we had quite some > improvements. I would even say "major" improvements. Some time ago I tormented Fred about a "double slider" feature that Lynkeos used but was broken in GNUstep. He fixed it and it was working for a while but I had to switch to using XIBs as the upstream author made some changes and I could no longer patch the source to use NIBs. Despite GNUstep advertising XIB parsing, it was apparently incomplete because pressing one of the knobs in the slider made them disappear. This is now working perfectly with GUI 0.31.1. Only a few years ago it was unthinkable to load a XIB file, I think you got an exception for such brave attempt. I like the steady approach, it is like an army on a march or like a ship with a low-speed internal combustion engine heading to her destination (and always arriving). The GNUstep team is small but very talented and stubborn.
