Once the last, great hope for a modern, usable, GNUstep desktop, the future of the Étoilé project now appears to be in doubt. After at least 5 years of development, it seems that the developers have lost their focus and have allowed themselves to be consumed by endless futzing around with low-level aspects of the platform and other diversions, at the expense of putting something usable in the hands of users. In their own words,:
As it stands now…most user-visible development…[has] been put on hold…. We have no working theme…our current window manager Azalea is now unsupported.
Let’s face it: without a usable desktop environment available, nobody cares if you have managed to take a foreign programming paradigm and bolt it onto Objective-C or make Objective-C code (sort of) run on the Javascript runtime. This is how projects fail, or at least manage to forever languish in obscurity.
I hate to say it, but the fate of the Étoilé project now seems doomed to follow that of the GNUstep project itself, which, while technically impressive, has repeatedly failed to produce a practical system for users, despite nearly 20 years of ongoing software development (sound familiar?). As it stands today, the GNUstep UI is basically an imperfect clone of the outdated 25 year old NeXT UI, even though it’s still not nearly as usable or solid as the NeXT was in 1992 (I know, support for themes is in the works, but it doesn’t appear to be of practical use today).
Don’t mistake my point here—I would love to be proven wrong. I have been hoping to see GNUstep succeed for the past 15 years (and for a while there at the end of the 90′s, when OPENSTEP was poised to enter the mainstream, I actually thought it had a very good chance). But I have grown very weary of waiting for a utopia that has never materialized.
What do I think Étoilé/GNUstep need to do to succeed? It’s simple. Focus on providing a comprehensive, usable, environment for the end user. Make that your number one priority. You should not worry about providing a bunch of pie-in-the-sky, next level shit until you have first achieved this goal. Don’t concern yourself with surpassing the competition in terms of usability until you have first caught up with them.
Ideally, this should come in the form of a custom OS distribution on a Live CD, or a set of packages that are dead simple to install on popular operating systems. There should be two simple installation options for users and developers.
Once you actually have this platform to offer, you will have three things that will provide the critical mass that is required to achieve your long-term goals:
- end users who care about your platform and are excited about it, which will attract
- developers who care about your platform and are excited about it, which will produce
- third-party applications that run on your platform, which in turn will make (and keep) the platform viable.
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