[HN Gopher] Nextspace - NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment for Linux
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Nextspace - NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment for Linux
Author : JonAtkinson
Score : 162 points
Date : 2020-02-12 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| If you want to run this alongside GNOME on CentOS 7, you can
| switch between them like so:
|
| To enable NEXTspace: - sudo systemctl stop
| display-manager - sudo systemctl disable gdm - sudo
| systemctl enable loginwindow - sudo systemctl start
| display-manager
|
| To enable GNOME: - sudo systemctl stop display-
| manager - sudo systemctl disable loginwindow - sudo
| systemctl enable gdm - sudo systemctl start display-manager
| uranium235 wrote:
| I would really like to see a more modern version of the nextstep
| style In the same way I'm using fluxbox with my own style that
| reflects something a little more modern. Just need to figure out
| how to get proper alpha compositing for a few things. xcompmgr
| works fine with stuff like konsole for me, but the menu
| transparencies are not active in fluxbox. still looks very nice.
| You could do a lot with wmaker styling just get rid of that awful
| blue gradient and use some more modern fonts (I'm using nerdfonts
| for a lot) the ui toolkit is kinda blocky/bulky that's all
| changable though looks a little better on high-dpi
| mryingster wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002626
| simplecto wrote:
| The nostalgia on this is great. I really loved all the useful
| widgets that you could dock to the side. Mainly for me it was the
| modem status (way back in the day), battery, and sound controls.
| xvilka wrote:
| Reminds me of recently open sourced and revived CDE[1]. They
| should move to GitHub or GitLab though, for a better visibility.
|
| [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv
| nineteen999 wrote:
| While we are talking about obsolete UNIX desktops that have
| been revived, somebody was doing similar for the IRIX desktop:
|
| https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/05/maxx_interactive_de...
| coleifer wrote:
| I installed this on a whim, worked surprisingly well on my lts
| Ubuntu system. Ultimately I didn't adopt it, missing too many
| things I have come to expect and depend on, but still was a
| really fun afternoon project.
| rogual wrote:
| Is this kind of thing open to copyright or patent suits from
| Apple? I always wonder, with projects like this, how you can get
| away with doing such a close copy of a commercial OS.
| yellowapple wrote:
| NeXTSTEP and the UI thereof are thoroughly abandoned. Apple
| doesn't sell it anymore, last I checked (hell, I don't even
| think Apple acknowledges its existence at all at this point,
| beyond the parts that it now calls "Cocoa"). While I wouldn't
| put it past Apple, actually suing someone over an open-source
| reimplementation would be - to put it as diplomatically as
| possible - a dick move of the highest degree.
|
| Legally speaking, though (as a not-lawyer), I reckon it'd be
| contingent on however the Oracle v. Google war goes.
| drudru11 wrote:
| Wow - As I read the readme and wiki it shows what an impressive
| amount of effort to pull this all together. This is the closest
| to OpenStep I've ever seen an open source project achieve.
| jsz0 wrote:
| I have to admit I'm nostalgic for the straight forward nature of
| NS/WM and even some of the less powerful interfaces of the time.
| Most modern desktop environments including macOS feel like an
| exercise in evading landmines of unpredictable or inconsistent
| behavior. On macOS specifically the retrofitting of tabs into
| applications mostly designed to be SDI has (mixed with some legit
| SDI apps and full screen stuff) is a mess. Can anyone actually
| keep track of dozens of windows with maybe dozens more tabs open
| in each one? Sometimes I find a randomly find a minimized window
| full of stuff I haven't seen in weeks. Lost in the complexity.
| Artur96 wrote:
| Glad someone is reviving old projects that had potential
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Clearly a hobby/passion project, so, there's no need to justify
| its existence, but given this point:
|
| >I think GNUstep needs a reference implementation of a user-
| oriented desktop environment.
|
| I wonder why he didn't just contribute to Etoile, since he seems
| aware of it.
| hjkgfdfgh wrote:
| Seems clear they are interested in the NeXTSTEP aesthetic in
| addition to the underlying framework.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| He's not wrong either. That UI is older than Windows 95
| (which stole and misused some of its look and UI elements,
| that is an iconify control dammit) but it still looks fresh,
| simple, and get-the-job-done. As well as ignoring the "flat"
| trend and the "pretend to be a touch UI" trend.
| brian_herman__ wrote:
| Is there a GTK or KDE competitor that has the Windows 95
| theme down like Mate or something?
| msla wrote:
| http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net/
|
| There are some similar ones mentioned in its Wikipedia
| article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95
|
| IceWM is quite themeable and is actively developed:
|
| https://ice-wm.org/
| Lammy wrote:
| > that is an iconify control dammit
|
| Are you talking about Win95's "Maximize" control?
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| The one that visually resembles a NeXTStep iconified
| window, yes.
| Lammy wrote:
| There's no need for the sarcasm.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| It's aimed at Microsoft.
| maximilianburke wrote:
| Is Etoile still under development or has it been abandoned?
|
| I do rather like the NeXT aesthetic more, personally.
| scroot wrote:
| I wrote to the maintainer in late 2018 and he informed me
| that the project is no longer under development. He mentioned
| that CoreObject (coreobject.org) would still be active, but
| that was over two years ago and I can't say for sure.
| favorited wrote:
| Looks like the CoreObject repo hasn't been touched in a few
| years either.
| linguae wrote:
| That's unfortunate about Etoile, which looked promising and
| cool. Last summer I wrote an article about the current
| state of GNUstep, and I was hoping that someone would pick
| up from where Etoile left off.
|
| http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2019/06/some-
| thoughts-a...
|
| However, I just saw a recent comment from one of the
| current GNUstep maintainers that said that the GNUstep
| Foundation Kit is now at par with macOS Catalina, and work
| will begin on updating GNUstep's Appkit implementation,
| which is currently roughly compatible with Mac OS X Tiger.
|
| Making GNUstep more compatible with recent versions of
| macOS's Cocoa API will definitely help with enticing more
| developers to the platform.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| > he didn't just contribute to Etoile, since he seems aware of
| it.
|
| This is a hobby and passion project and yet it looks more alive
| and better maintained than Etoile, which features "news" from
| 2014 about doing random Smalltalk things - and while I _love_
| Smalltalk it doesn't give me confidence that they're focused on
| building a modern Cocoa-style desktop environment.
| kelnos wrote:
| I clicked through a Etoile's overview page, and the
| screenshots were from ~2008 (with a system UI panel opening
| showing a 2.6 kernel!). It made me question how alive the
| project is.
| mondoshawan wrote:
| Because, at least according to him, Etoile is targeting a MacOS
| level of UX, which is not his preference.
|
| That, and the last activity on Etoile was quite a while ago,
| and seems to have stalled out rather badly.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This is awesome and looks very nice, loved the aesthetic. Yet I
| hope it takes into account modern technology, e.g. either font
| smoothing or high resolution displays. There's no point in
| copying the 1990s wholesale.
| qubex wrote:
| Bless his soul for making this. It really brings me back.
|
| For me, NeXTstep is still the high water mark of GUI design and
| usability.
| rsync wrote:
| As a person who has fond memories of Solaris CDE and and Irix,
| I can sympathize with you.
|
| However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and
| mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and
| very inefficient.
|
| The high water mark for GUI design is something like
| ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that
| you never see ...
| nradov wrote:
| What you describe as a "high water mark" is only optimal for
| a very limited set of use cases. Overlapping windows with
| toolbars, launchers, and mouse control is on average superior
| for the total set of use cases especially for non-expert
| users.
| qubex wrote:
| The usability is perfect for me, but I recognise that
| different use-cases may vary.
|
| It forged my sense of aesthetics, though (alongside BeOS).
| zokula wrote:
| ""However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and
| mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and
| very inefficient.""
|
| Citation needed.
|
| ""The high water mark for GUI design is something like
| ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop"
| that you never see ...""
|
| Says who? Again citation needed.
| [deleted]
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I used to work on a next-ish GUI toolkit (in plain C though,
| not Objective C) - http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lforms/ -
| which i mainly used under Window Maker (though it also has a
| Win32 backend) and my biggest issue UX-wise was how alien it
| felt in anything else outside Window Maker... especially the
| floating menus.
|
| I like the look myself but i don't even use Window Maker itself
| that much nowadays (it is still my #1 WM for Linux, i just use
| Windows more).
| unixhero wrote:
| Would be great if he targeted Debian. It's after all the upstream
| base for millions of Linux users.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Centos is pretty compact and easy to setup for purposes of
| setting up a minimal VM to test this with, though.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Likewise, Debian is one of the most compact mainstream
| distributions you can run.
|
| Then you get Ubuntu, Mint, etc... for free.
| jjuel wrote:
| May have to install CentOS just so I can use this. I love the
| look of this.
| stevekinney wrote:
| I'd love to see something similar for the classic (pre-Aqua/OS X)
| Mac OS look and feel. Does anyone know if that exists?
| mhd wrote:
| There are some OS 9 ("Platinum") GTK themes, but AFAIK there's
| no clone of the classic finder available. Nor other parts of
| the default OS 8/9 desktop.
|
| Which is quite interesting, considering that the classic Finder
| is often thought as the pinnacle of spatial navigation. And
| Linux does have more obscure file managers cloned, like Amiga's
| Dopus[1] or the RiscOS one[2].
|
| [1]: http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/
|
| [2]: http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/
| alxlaz wrote:
| Worth a warning: the recent history of GTK theming is pretty
| tortuous, and the GTK3 theming engine, while extremely
| flexible, doesn't really lend itself to non-modern (I can't
| think of a better euphemism) designs.
|
| There are some themes, like Memphis98, that sort manage to
| create the sort of visual appearance that you're after.
| However, the GTK 3-ness is obvious even there: the "Open
| file..." dialog has huge, unresizable widgets on the left,
| combo bars are long. Lots of UI elements are bulky and
| oversized.
|
| Consequently, in my experience, you're actually better off
| with a GTK2 theme and Qt applications with the gtk2 style
| engine.
|
| I'm not really a fan of old-time themes -- I mean, I miss my
| Amiga but not _that_ much. I know about this stuff for
| altogether different reasons -- I spent a lot of time trying
| to get a more _compact_ layout, because GTK3 applications are
| pretty much unusable on small /low-density/low-resolution
| screens (and, IMHO, way too large even on "normal"-ish
| screens. I have a 27" monitor and, at 2560x1440, everything
| is so big it drives me nuts). I even tried to write my own,
| and failed pretty badly. So yeah.
| mhd wrote:
| Never mind that the biggest part of the classic finder
| experience wasn't the look-and-feel, so just a theme won't
| help you much.
|
| And speaking of modern screens, even if you get a copy of
| the OS 9 font (Chicago?), it would look quite odd on high
| resolution, especially if it's anti-aliased.
|
| And I definitely agree about the weird issues we've got
| with screen sizes today. I rarely get something in the
| "goldilocks" zone, either it's all Material/Aero with yuge
| margins and white space that would make Jan Tschichold
| blush, or its old UIs that are just a bit too small (try
| running the aforementioned Worker file manager on a HiDPi
| screen).
| philwelch wrote:
| Mac OS 8 migrated from Chicago to Charcoal, I think.
| Chicago was resurrected as the UI font on the first iPods
| because it was a similar situation as the original
| Macintosh that Chicago was designed for (low-res
| monochrome screens).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Gnome's own Nautilus had direct support for spatial
| navigation for a long time in the Gnome 2 era (including
| briefly on by default in something like Gnome 2.6 before
| complaints reversed that decision), though it was obviously a
| small bit underwhelming compared to Mac Classic, and lost
| entirely in the Gnome 2 to 3 transition.
|
| https://people.gnome.org/~bmsmith/build/nautilus-spatial-
| mod...
|
| http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I was going to say, I'd love something like this for OS X circa
| Leopard era.
|
| We all have our dead favorites I suppose...
| fallous wrote:
| Definitely gives me some nostalgia for the days when I ran
| AfterStep for my desktop machine while at Netscape.
| mhd wrote:
| Anyone still remember 'bowman', IIRC the first of the NeXt wms?
| Man, that fvwm was a versatile codebase.
| spentrent wrote:
| Afterstep blazed on a Pentium 100!
| xmonkee wrote:
| How is this different from Window Maker[1]?
|
| [1]: https://www.windowmaker.org/
| zerr wrote:
| It seems to be maintained.
| alxlaz wrote:
| WindowMaker is not unmaintained, for what it's worth.
| bashinator wrote:
| I'd say not _wholly_ unmaintained. It hasn 't seen any
| commits since 2017.
| alxlaz wrote:
| The _stable_ branch hasn 't seen any commits since 2017.
| The last head of the -next branch is from last summer, I
| think, and the last time I've seen a patch on the mailing
| list was about three weeks ago.
| neurobashing wrote:
| Do you have outstanding issues/bugs/feature requests? I
| remember using it, like, 15 years ago and it was largely
| feature-complete and mostly bug free.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I'm certain it is still maintained because i occasionally
| see patches coming in in the development list and in 2018
| i submitted a bugfix for icon persistence and a new
| feature to force client side decorations on windows:
| https://i.imgur.com/xcVSNaN.jpg
|
| Though i don't know why exactly there hasn't been a new
| release. The current maintainer is active (he does the
| merges) and there have been a bunch of features and
| fixes, so i'm not sure what is going on.
| Seenso wrote:
| > I'd say not wholly unmaintained. It hasn't seen any
| commits since 2017.
|
| Has it needed any since then? That's the real question.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| From the readme, though I find it a little confusing:
|
| "" Note: Workspace is NOT:
|
| WindowMaker with some patches. WindowMaker with some good
| configuration defaults only. Another implementation of
| WindowMaker. It's written from scratch. Some WindowMaker code
| is a part of Workspace (as well as configuration defaults) to
| provide window management functions. It's tightly coupled with
| Workspace to provide seamless intergation. Configurable
| parameters of the integrated WindowMaker are spread across
| Workspace's Preferences and Preferences application.
| Theoretically, Workspace can be used without WindowMaker.
| However, the current development focus is on a single
| application to deliver the best user experience.
| smhenderson wrote:
| See the section under Workspace, specifically TFA says:
|
| _Note: Workspace is NOT: WindowMaker
| with some patches WindowMaker with some good
| configuration defaults only Another implementation
| of WindowMaker*
|
| The description then goes on to say what it shares in common
| with WM and what's different in a bit more detail.
|
| Edit: formatting
| uranium235 wrote:
| If I didn't know any better I'd say you were trying to sell me
| wooden nickels. This looks exactly like Windowmaker :D I like to
| say that about people's next stations whenever I have the chance
| harikb wrote:
| I was about to say you are being cruel by calling these
| widowmakers
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