Re: GNUstep store... also, thinking of starting a foundation/503(c) for GNUstep...

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Svetlana,

You hijacked a thread :)


Svetlana Tkachenko wrote:
> What OS is the bst equipped to run GNUstep on it with minimal confusion to 
> the novice user?
>
> What hardware does this OS run on?
>
> Who would do the installs on new hardware and be the base shipping point(s)?

I think you need to better specify "run". If by run you mean just "get
the binary stuff that is ready for it" or "compile from source and get
everything I like and run it" the answers are a bit different. I would
not advise mixing the two things generally speaking and without knowing
configuration details (although compiling an app and isntalling it
should always be easy and possible)

1) "run what is ready" : you depend from what is ready in the packages
of that particular OS - if they miss something - and how they configured
it. However, as an end-user you don't really care what compiler,
depenedncy, runtime was used.
I would advise thus installation which are complete, functional and
maintained. I would not advice Debian and derivatives (ubuntu,
raspbian...) because of the way package things. FHS  does not give you
the best GNUstep experience, but it is passable anyway to play around.
- FreeBSD has among the best ready packages, is well maintained, runs
well on i386 and amd64
- OpenBSD and NetBSD have also excellent packages, but the OS may need a
little bit more experience to be used (although I find them excellent)
- Gentoo Linux is also quite nice

As hardware, everything the aforementioned supports - i386 and amd64
being the choice though.

2) "compile myself" - here the world opens again, you can configure and
install.
At this point, Debian-derived distributions are no longer an issue.
Actually Debian and Raspbian/Raspberry OS (Ubuntu, Fienix...) are very
easy to work with, maintain and install. Installing dependencies for
GNUstep is a breeze and configuring with either GCC or Clang/libobjc2
becomes fast
At this point, much more hardware opens to you: not just i386 and amd64,
but also PowerPC works perfectly and arm! So tinkering you your
Raspberry 1,2,3,4 becomes a wonderful playground for GNUstep.
NetBSD is also perfect and gets you running on SPARC, HP-PARISC,
SPARC64... and GNUstep runs on it
FreeBSD here is a little bit more tricky because of compiler/runtime
issues and I always get a headache with libobj2 and GCC is not usable
with objc-2. So a caveat here.

Riccardo