[HN Gopher] Etoile on Gnustep
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Etoile on Gnustep
Author : rcarmo
Score : 105 points
Date : 2021-12-13 07:27 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (etoileos.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (etoileos.com)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| NeXTSTEP was beautiful, clean, and elegant. How is it that the
| Gnustep pseudo-copies, such as Etoile, can be so ugly and
| inconsistent? Everything from nasty font choices to the
| inconsistent and weird spacing between widgets to the weird
| mishmash of UI styles. You'd think that the _entire selling
| point_ (so to speak) of software like this is that it retains the
| elegance of NeXTSTEP, but no.
|
| For maybe two decades I'd argued that the fundamental problem
| with open source UIs is that there is no hegemon, no dictator who
| forces everyone to be consistent and to have good taste. Witness
| the incredible proliferation of awful X11 interface designs,
| window managers, toolkits, and platforms, and the still
| astonishing primitiveness and lack of proper interaction and
| interconnectivity between X applications. Instead you have a
| thousand flowers blooming, all nurtured by homebrew software
| developers who have no idea what they're doing designwise.
|
| NeXTSTEP, and of course MacOS, have had dictators and designers,
| and it shows. And when there is some powerful force in effect to
| keep everyone in line, open source UI software _can_ more or less
| have this quality: witness Android under Google 's, um, guidance.
|
| But Etoile is a great example, I think, of the no-hegemon effect.
| Even though they had a TEMPLATE of design elegance (NeXTSTEP),
| they _still_ managed to make a failure of a UI product.
| schmorptron wrote:
| wanted to disagree, but then noticed that the open source
| Desktops I think look good all sort of operate under that
| umbrella, like Gnome and elementary all have very strict design
| guidelines.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I think another problem is that there's no way, as far as I
| know, to _disallow_ an app that doesn 't stick to those
| guidelines. I mean, maybe the Gnome default applications can
| strictly stick to those, but what how do you ensure that
| third-party apps stick to the guidelines?
|
| Apple seems to have solved this with a combination of big
| community of enthusiasts and an App Store for macOS, and just
| the App Store for iOS. A major fear of Apple developers seems
| to be the prospect of their App being removed from the App
| Store for unclear reasons.
|
| It's hard to imagine a model where apps can remain FOSS but
| have the same sort of strict design guidelines.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The way to at least improve it is to use something like Qt
| and to make GTK consistent with Qt.
|
| You won't be able to make everything consistent but you can
| make everything at least look unified.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| NeXT took a different tack. Rather than enforce a set of
| requirements and guidelines, NeXT produced a library and
| set of tools so compelling that only an idiot wouldn't use
| them -- and these tools (such as Interface Builder)
| strongly encouraged implementation of NeXTSTEP style.
| Whereas MacOS has historically been all stick, NeXTSTEP was
| all carrot.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| This is also roughly the Qt/KDE approach. Except that
| there are alternatives such as GTK and wxWidgets that
| have to be supported too.
| [deleted]
| SeanLuke wrote:
| IMHO QT, GTK and wxWidgets are, put simply, awful. They
| are good examples of limited toolkits designed in part
| with cross-platform development in mind, rather than
| libraries designed with novel or even good interface
| design. They proliferate and compete on X despite there
| being poor interoperability _among them_. They seem to be
| focused on copying Windows (hardly a paragon of good
| interfaces) design elements and in enabling skins rather
| than deep UI functionality.
|
| I come from a background of early MacOS, NeXTSTEP, and
| the Newton, three environments which prided themselves on
| developing novel and useful interfaces tailored to the
| specific needs of their platforms. The X11-inspired
| cross-platform toolkits are head-shakingly bad compared
| to these efforts. For example, GTK on Maemo was so
| embarassingly inferior in design to NewtonScript (a GUI
| 10 years before it note) that I wrote an entire article
| about it.
|
| I think the only decently crafted open source UI on
| Linux/BSD right now is Android. Because Google has the
| resources and heft to make people do it right.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Qt is strongly associated to the KDE project, which takes
| it's heritage from CDE et Al., which predates Windows a
| fair amount. They didn't really copy Windows, and
| actually did a lot before Windows and still do many
| things Windows can't.
|
| Also Qt is fairly independent of X11. It can operate
| fully independently from X and nowadays is basically
| agnostic to X. I suspect GTK is similar.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > CDE et Al., which predates Windows a fair amount
|
| Windows came out in 1985.
|
| CDE came out in 1993.
|
| > Also Qt is fairly independent of X11.
|
| You seem to be missing my complaint. By supporting
| multiple platforms, Qt is forced to support the lowest
| common denominator of all of them. Which means it's
| mediocre on all of them. Being cross-platform is fine:
| but no cross-platform systems can be held up as paragons
| of UI design excellence, not by a long shot.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Whereas MacOS has historically been all stick, NeXTSTEP
| was all carrot.
|
| Eh? MacOS had the same tools, and until quite recently
| the Mac App Store wasn't even a thing (and, even today,
| the presence of, say, Slack, or the LG monitor utility,
| in the App Store would argue that Apple is not
| particularly worried about UI stuff there...)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| You do know that MacOS predates NeXTSTEP, right?
| lproven wrote:
| MacOS != macOS.
|
| MacOS (capital M, no space) is generally classic MacOS,
| 1984-2001.
|
| macOS (small m, no space) was formerly Mac OS X, later OS
| X, sometimes quoted as Mac OS (note, space between Mac
| and OS).
|
| MacOS: 1984-2001
|
| Mac OS X (formerly NeXTstep): 2001-2012
|
| OS X: 2012-2016
|
| macOS: 2016 onwards.
| mattl wrote:
| NeXTSTEP -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody.
|
| and macOS is still Mac OS X in places.
| lproven wrote:
| All good corrections. Thank you. :-)
| shrubble wrote:
| NeXT started with Display PostScript as the underlying
| rendering engine.
|
| The X Windows fonts require a great deal more work to be
| visually consistent; and are not integrated with the coordinate
| system of the rest of the display.
|
| Whereas under DPS it is all one integrated method/system,
| making it easy to adjust the spacing between all graphical
| elements. I think at least, that is the reason for any visually
| jarring things under Etoile and this is seen in multiple Linux
| GUIs...
| elinchrome wrote:
| Looks really nice!
| batman-farts wrote:
| Does David Chisnall hang out around here? I remember reading some
| of the stuff he was publishing around the time Etoile was active,
| and their ambitions for the polyglot LanguageKit and associated
| Smalltalk dialect seemed especially attractive. Somewhat similar
| to what GraalVM is doing these days.
| pjmlp wrote:
| David Chisnall nowadays is busy with the CHERI project.
|
| https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's fun to think that the NeXT ideas won in the end. OPENSTEP is
| now one of the leading desktop and mobile OSs and all it took for
| it to take off was a facelift and Apple's brand. That, and being
| renamed OSX.
|
| If we want an OS that can build on top of NeXT's legacy, macOS is
| the OS to track.
|
| Has anyone done some research on what parts of what SomethingKits
| would need to be implemented to be able to compile and run as
| much macOS open-source software currently in, say, GitHub?
| pjmlp wrote:
| I wouldn't call 10% of market share leading desktop.
|
| And for iOS, there is very little NeXTSTEP on it, at least from
| the point of view of how OS components interacted with each
| other, it goes beyond of just using Objective-C frameworks.
|
| There is very little of Web Objects, Distributed Objects,
| Driver Kit, Plugins,... on iOS.
| [deleted]
| soraminazuki wrote:
| I think it's fair to call a 2nd ranking Desktop OS a leading
| desktop.
|
| > For desktop and laptop computers, Windows is the most used
| at 75%, followed by Apple's macOS at 16%, and Linux-based
| operating systems, including Google's Chrome OS, at 5%
| (thereof "desktop Linux" at 2.35%).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste.
| ..
| pjmlp wrote:
| Then given that point of view "Desktop Linux" is also a
| leading desktop, given that on most sport events there is a
| top 3.
| emteycz wrote:
| Would you call a third runner that's significantly behind
| "leading"?
| pjmlp wrote:
| No, just like I wouldn't call one that only has 16%
| market share.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| It's surprising they emphasize that it's beautiful in the page
| title, when it's really anything but beautiful. Even the
| alignment of buttons and text seems random, and the dock bar
| looks quite ugly.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Take a look at the date at the bottom right in the main
| screenshot[0]. For 2008 the style was quite good looking,
| though it had some issues, most likely since GNUstep didn't had
| theme support until they implemented it and like Etoile itself,
| it was never finished.
|
| It is possible that these were fixed later but... even in
| screenshots with GNUstep themes i see small glitches here and
| there. NesedahRik[1], which is based on Etoile's theme, does
| seem to have the least issues though. But if i was to use such
| a setup, i'd try my best to fix that icon alignment at the top
| left corner and add some space between it and the menu text
| :-P.
|
| [0] http://etoileos.com/uploads/screenshots/etoile-0.4-about-
| vs-...
|
| [1] https://github.com/gnustep/plugins-themes-nesedahrik
| cxr wrote:
| > For 2008 the style was quite good looking
|
| Not really. It doesn't look good now, and it didn't look good
| then. It's just not good-looking.
|
| For comparison, Leopard/Snow Leopard looked good in 2008, and
| it looks good now:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leopard_Desktop.png>
|
| Among the things that I find really surprising in the
| computing industry is that everyone doesn't make things easy
| for themselves and agree to just rip off Cocoa.
|
| On the one hand, we hear every time that Electron or the
| Windows/.NET UI framework discussions come up that developers
| have no good choices for doing cross-platform UIs. Meanwhile,
| Cocoa's API is no more or less protected than the ones that
| Sun/Oracle went to war over. It's also extremely mature. So
| make it easy and just rip off Cocoa already.
|
| On the other hand, Apple have moved to flat, mobile-like UI.
| There's hardly a case to be upset, then, if someone were to
| show up with a lookalike of the old, decrepit Mac OS visual
| style--something like Aristo
| <https://www.cappuccino.dev/aristo/>. So make it easy and
| just rip off Cocoa already.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Cross platform Cocoa would be a dream, even if it doesn't
| check all of the current buzzword boxes. It's great to work
| with and quite consistently when working in other toolkits
| I find myself a bit disappointed about how many widgets are
| missing or how bare bones the widgets are compared to
| Cocoa. The only thing that really comes close is Qt
| Widgets, which I find takes a good deal more effort to
| produce a good looking product with and doesn't feel as
| nice to work with.
| jrsj wrote:
| Relative to Linux desktop stuff in 2008, it's not terrible.
| This stuff was never completed either so of course there's
| obviously stuff that needs to be cleaned up. For its time
| and place it was decent.
| cxr wrote:
| > Relative to Linux desktop stuff in 2008, it's not
| terrible.
|
| That's not the rubric the commenter I responded to laid
| out, but even if you wanted to move the goalposts there,
| then for comparison, here's a stock Ubuntu desktop
| installation from 2008:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu-
| desktop-2-804-2008...> Not especially bad, but not
| especially great, either. Something else that it's not,
| though, is anywhere near as bad as the Etoile screenshots
| that are the subject of discussion.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| It isn't really a goalpost move though, since that is
| basically what i meant with my original comment. And to
| me the Ubuntu desktop doesn't look that much better than
| the Etoile desktop (if anything one the most common
| comments i remember from the time is that it looked like
| "shit" due to the brown color scheme :-P), which again
| remember that it was never finished and had to work theme
| support in GNUstep - the applications of which (that are
| shown in screenshots) weren't even made with theming
| support in mind. The biggest issues that the Etoile shots
| have are bad text alignment and some unthemed or badly
| themed controls that are both results of their WIP
| theming efforts.
|
| Also FWIW i explicitly remember a comment from an Etoile
| developer that their goal with Etoile's style was to
| avoid the "shiny" look Aqua had at the time (and other
| desktop themes, like Ubuntu's Human style shown in the
| screenshot, had copied).
| noobermin wrote:
| Sorry but can you go from point by point and show me how
| different they look, because there doesn't seem to be much
| of a difference to me.
| cxr wrote:
| I expected this kind of comment would appear. The short
| answer is no.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| I noticed that some screenshots were from 2008 indeed, but
| back then Ubuntu for example looked better than this (and so
| did commercial OSes at that time). I wouldn't mind that it
| looks ugly actually, but if they are going to emphasize that
| it's beautiful they better make sure it looks at least as
| good as other OSes (that make no such claim).
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Dunno, I always remembered Etoile being described as
| beautiful though so i guess the standards did change over
| the years. But also remember that this was basically the
| goal and the project was never finished, most of the apps
| shown are regular GNUstep apps that were designed for a
| completely different look while Etoile wanted to do
| something a bit more exotic (check the FAQ page for some
| ideas).
| [deleted]
| occoder wrote:
| > NesedahRik[1], which is based on Etoile's theme
|
| > i'd try my best to fix that icon alignment at the top left
| corner
|
| I agree there's an alignment issue there, but it's more an
| issue with the alignment of the menu text than with the icon.
| The icon looks reasonably centered (vertically) in the menu
| bar, it's the menu text that's placed too low.
|
| > and add some space between it and the menu text
|
| I believe the icon and the word "Terminal" together make up
| the first menu item, and thus the tight spacing is
| intentional, rather than a visual design glitch.
|
| [1] https://github.com/gnustep/plugins-themes-nesedahrik
| jfvinueza wrote:
| taste is undervalued
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I always found Etoile very attractive, but it is long dead. If
| you check the sites news page, the latest post is from 2014.....
| forlorn wrote:
| Not 'dead' dead according to Github activity
| https://github.com/etoile/
| [deleted]
| 1_player wrote:
| It is dead. There is some minor admin commits, but most of
| the activity stopped in 2016.
| rbanffy wrote:
| There are only two types of software: incomplete and
| abandoned.
| jayp1418 wrote:
| Better to look at https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ Now as
| Etoile is not active last i checked
| linguae wrote:
| The key differences between helloSystem and Etoile are their
| philosophies and underpinnings. My understanding of helloSystem
| is that it's primary concerns are ease-of-use and UI
| consistency. It's aiming for the ease-of-use of the classic Mac
| OS with the UI design and polish from the Tiger era of Mac OS
| X. I haven't tried it yet, but I've been keeping up with its
| progress and it looks very nice. helloSystem is not based on
| GNUstep or any other Apple-inspired APIs, however. Rather, it
| uses Qt as its GUI toolkit.
|
| Etoile was an attempt to bring a refreshed desktop experience
| that is based on GNUstep yet isn't a reimplementation of the
| NEXTSTEP or Mac OS X user experiences (though there are heavy
| influences), introducing its own concepts of what makes an
| ideal desktop environment. In addition, Etoile is very aware of
| the Xerox PARC influences of NeXT, being cognizant of the
| notion of NEXTSTEP being a pragmatic Smalltalk OS. With this in
| mind, Etoile supports a Smalltalk dialect called Pragmatic
| Smalltalk, which is able to leverage Objective-C libraries and
| thus fully integrates with the rest of the Etoile system, which
| makes it quite different from the experience of running Squeak
| or Pharo in a window on top of a host operating system and
| addresses one of the primary complaints some prospective
| Smalltalk programmers have about Squeak and Pharo. Pragmatic
| Smalltalk is built on top of Etoile's LanguageKit, which allows
| for the development of dynamic programming languages that can
| interoperate with Objective-C. There's also an EMCAScript
| implementation built on top of LanguageKit.
|
| In my opinion, if Etoile were still active, it would attract a
| different type of user from helloSystem. While both helloSystem
| and Etoile are heavily inspired by the Mac, helloSystem is
| focused on recreating the Mac user experience, while Etoile was
| focused on extending the NEXTSTEP/Mac OS X power user/developer
| experience.
| jayp1418 wrote:
| Thanks for explaining.
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