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Re:NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @09:46AM (#22117920)
I think it is still one of Linux Desktop's largest mis-steps that GNUStep/WindowMaker was not embraced as the One True DE. Now it is basically a dead project.
Re:NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation by linguae on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @12:17PM (#22119599)
I also think that the lack of community interest in GNUstep was a missed opportunity. More of my thoughts on the matter can be found at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2019/06/some-thoughts-a....

With that being said, GNUstep is still being worked on. It’s currently roughly compatible with Mac OS X Tiger’s version of Cocoa. While this is far behind macOS Catalina, I’ll be honest and say that Mac OS X Tiger with some security updates can hold its own against modern operating systems. There’s even a fork of Firefox called TenFourFox that’s available for PowerPC Macs running Tiger.

What I personally believe is that GNUstep needs a suite of compelling applications in order for it to be more strongly considered. There are a lot of GTK and GNOME applications, and there is also a compelling collection of QT and KDE applications, but where is there a GNUstep web browser, office suite, image editor, photo library manager, etc.? GNUstep is less compelling in a world of GTK and QT apps. But if more GNUstep applications were written, then that may convince other developers to put in the work necessary to create a desktop distribution based around GNUstep and it’s applications. I was impressed by the now-defunct Étoilé project which attempted to revamp GNUstep in many ways.

Anyway, I still think GNUstep has some potential, and there’s a window of opportunity for the project to gain more support, especially in an era of increased disappointment over Windows 10 and macOS.

Re:NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation by badsectoracula on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @11:24AM (#22118875)
FWIW Window Maker (which is a completely separate project from GNUstep) is still under active development, it just doesn't get frequent releases. But the trunk has a bunch of new features and bugfixes (i even contributed a couple myself :-P). Also there was a site redesign recently, if that means anything :-P.

I'm not sure why the releases are so infrequent though as it has been almost three years since the last one.