Re: Plans for ahead

[David Chisnall]

On 29 Nov 2015, at 19:40, James Carthew <jcarthew@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm going to weigh in here in the UI discussions. I come from a mainly user 
> background. A couple observations. Yes gnustep is a bit ugly, but that's not 
> really my biggest concern. I have been trying to run GNUStep as a desktop 
> environment mostly to replace OSX on Linux. 

One thing that I have learned, from Étoilé and other projects, is that you are 
almost guaranteed to fail if you do not have an incremental adoption path.  No 
matter how good GNUstep is, you will not persuade most people to ditch their 
existing application suite in a single step.  This is why being able to run 
things like OpenOffice and Firefox has been so good for desktop Linux: you get 
people to switch to a new web browser, then you get them to switch to a new 
office suite, then you switch them to a few more cross-platform applications, 
and then replacing their desktop OS is the easy step.

This is why things like the GNOME theme[1] are absolutely essential and why, 
contrary to some of my earlier opinions, I think that having apps that run on 
both GNUstep and Cocoa are important.  If people use and enjoy using GNUstep 
applications, this makes it easier to attract developers.  If you attract 
developers, then it’s easy to develop more apps.  Once you have a large enough 
ecosystem, then a pure-GNUstep (or, at least, mostly-GNUstep) environment 
becomes possible.

On the web browser front, I’ll note that the Chrome UI absolutely sucks when it 
comes to integration with the surrounding environment, yet Chrome and Chromium 
are very successful.  I think that, given the wide variety of UIs on the web in 
general, a lot of people are willing to put up with a web browser that doesn’t 
integrate well with their platform UI.  Having a native GNUstep web browser is 
a huge engineering effort and should not be a priority yet.

David

[1] Or, rather, a better GNOME theme, that also picks up things like the 
shortcut keys used for navigating in a text field.  It took Qt over a decade to 
get this right on OS X, which is one of the main reasons that Qt apps are 
painful to use on a Mac.

-- Sent from my brain