GNUstep Keeps Marching 4
navindra writes: "While KDE and GNOME often grab the headlines, other projects are silently making progress. Dennis Leeuw tries to make sense of the situation in this interesting GNUstep article featured on LWN Daily."
Re:Yea, but... (Score:1)
As soon as they adopt the Application Kit and Foundation APIs and write an InterfaceBuilder clone, then we will.
Windowmaker (Score:1)
Re:Windowmaker (Score:3)
AFAIK GNUStep can be run without using WindowMaker and I'm deffinitley sure, that WindowMaker can be run without GNUStep (which makes it an excelent choice for low-resource-environments, which need X and where the users don't want to use something like fvwm or twm.)
Indeed WindowMaker is probably the most exposed part of GNUStep (at least it is the only reason I ever looked at GNUStep).
Re:Yea, but... (Score:1)
Well, I can understand your desire to have simplicity and standardization, but I feel that one of the strengths of "free OS" is choice. Granted, this makes things more overwhelming for a beginner (and for an application writer), but choice enables one to find the best "fit" for their needs.
Take, for example, the ROX Desktop [sourceforge.net]. It's yet another alternative to the prominent desktop environments, and one with some significant benefits. Its development is behind that of Gnome/KDE, but I feel it is still worth the "effort." Why? Because it has a differing vision from the other projects, leading to new innovations; even if ROX is discontinued at some point, fresh ideas can be taken from its development to strengthen other desktops.
Another excellent example is the Berlin Project [berlin-consortium.org]. The Berlin Project aims to replace the X standard for graphical displays on Unix-based systems. Once again, its vision differs from X, making it wiser to spend efforts on this new project than trying to retrofit their ideas onto X.
I guess that in my mind, it's all about choice. I fell in love with FreeBSD because of its power and flexibility, but I also use OpenBSD and Linux variants when they are more fitting to the task. I love Ruby, but I still write shell and Perl scripts. I love Gnome, but I also use ROX, and now I want to try GNUstep.
Now I'll bet that you are disagreeing with some of my choices. Perhaps you use software that has similar capabilities, or is far-and-away better. But that's the great thing about choice: you can use your thing and I can use mine! If someone shows me something they think is better and I agree, I'll switch. But if I don't like it, I can keep using my thing and it doesn't really hurt either of us (with the obvious example of a project or something *requiring* use of the same technology, in which case we can *choose* what we feel to be best suited).
The problem still remains, however, that a standard doesn't exist. I feel that it is often times impractical (or even impossible) to define one, however. Everyone has their own world view, their own tastes, and their own problems, and it would be virtually impossible to take all those into account in one rigid standard, or one unwieldy piece of software. I feel that it's better to go with the Unix philosophy on this one: offer a myriad of little tools, and let the user decide which ones to use to accomplish their goals. It assumes that the user has a clue, but it's easy to provide that: man pages, books, READMEs, web sites, and gurus all exist to keep people informed.
Choice is a scary thing sometimes. Nevertheless, it has always been humankind's desire to have free will. Might as well keep that going in our software. :)
Matthew Sebastian Comella.
"They're not homeless, they're in a band...
It's the same thing!"