Having managed to install and run OPENSTEP on a Frankenpad T61, albeit without network access, I'd wish someone similarily capable would create some network and PCMCIA drivers for the T6x Thinkpad generation to enable full use of its hardware capabilities.
It would help your question if you'd more clearly define what you intent to discuss about. Remote mindreading is still not a very common skill among the typical HN public.
Or do you expect people first google for some of the keywords you provided?
I'd wish there was a Midnight Commander available for Android that would allow for being used during an adb shell or ssh session. Ghost Commander doesn't cover that use case, sadly.
Glad you like it and thanks for the recommendation!
Nonetheless, being the maintainer of this project, i'd like to point out that this is no dedicated GNUstep distro, but a mostly Debian based distribution using a thoroughly preconfigured Window Maker as its primary user interface, and that just happens to have the whole range of available GNUstep applications added on.
As already written elsewhere[3], citing my own words, this is a better characterization of its scope:
»Window Maker is just a highly compatible X11 window manager and is supposed to work as such. There is no interest to specifically integrate it with the provided GNUstep applications, as this is not supposed to be predominantly a GNUstep desktop. The included GNUstep applications are just an addon to give people a practical way to verify what GNUstep has to offer. In fact, wmlive would be perfectly usable without providing any single GNUstep application. The freedom and flexibility provided by an X11 window manager instead of the walled garden of a specific desktop system is much more preferable to many Linux users. NeXT nostalgists might want to look elsewhere. [1][2]«
People who's interest has been sufficiently piqued to download wmlive are advised to better wait until after Debian's bookwom 12.12 point release this saturday. A final bookworm based wmlive release will be uploaded shortly after. This will also be the last and final 32bit i386 variant of wmlive. After that work on an exclusively amd64 trixie based wmlive variant will begin.
We are not really in a position to dictate what the GNUstep project ought to do. I for one am rather thankful for what they have achieved so far. Especially since they seem to mainly lack the man power which its critics probably won't provide either.
Not being a software developer myself, I've resorted to loosely following the progress of GNUstep over more than 20 years, in the hope that it will eventually become a viable option. But apparently capable people found more interest in KDE, GNOME, and similar projects based on either Qt or gtk+, and then hardly anyone cared anymore.
By all means, if anyone here is capable enough is wanting to still contribute to the GNUstep project, please do! At the current stage of the project it would be a pity if all the efforts made over the years would be wasted by not supporting it anymore.
You'd need something like Wayback[1] in Wayland to be able to use it. Being exclusivley an X11 window manager, there is no direct support for Wayland.
There is a Wayland compositor namend wlmaker[2] that tries to mimick Window Maker. But judging by its description it still appears to be a far cry from that Window Maker offers.
Development of Window Maker (as in the window manager) unfortunately seems to be almost abandoned. The last few years of it's development saw the inclusion of rather superfluous additional features (e.g., screen capture, hot corners) instead of concentrating on it's main purpose of being a window manager.
It's a pity no one ever tried to replace the WINGs widget set with actual GNUstep components, thus adding the full GNUstep themeability WINGs is not capable of, in order to finally get rid of that crufty NeXTSTEP look.
In fact, this should rather be considered a Window Maker based Debian/Bookworm distribution instead the stated reverse. Certainly more then 95% of the shipped packages are plain Debian/Bookworm packages, with only a few additional packages contributed by yours truly.
The main merit of wmlive is providing the necessary glue to properly preconfigure Window Maker with an out of the box usable environment (unlike Debian's crude/primitive Window Maker configs) and make it the default GUI.
The other merit is to make the supplied software complete enough to serve as a standalone system without the immediate need to connect to the internet to install more useful packages than are normally supplied by distributions in their quest to provide an initial system too generic to be really useful by already experienced users. This is not meant for beginners,
While some work went in homogenizing the overall looks with Window Maker's own WINGs widget set, no efforts were wasted with further eye candy stuff. The themeability of the WINGs widgets are limited to that crufty NeXTSTEP look everybody either loves or despises, being the least common visual denominator. Not being particularly enamored of these visuals, but this was the only way to find some common ground for the look and feel.
Window Maker is just a highly compatible X11 window manager and is supposed to work as such. There is no interest to specifically integrate it with the provided GNUstep applications, as this is not supposed to be predominantly a GNUstep desktop. The included GNUstep applications are just an addon to give people a practical way to verify what GNUstep has to offer. In fact, wmlive would be perfectly usable without providing any single GNUstep application. The freedom and flexibility provided by an X11 window manager instead of the walled garden of a specific desktop system is much more preferable to many Linux users. NeXT nostalgists might want to look elsewhere. [1][2]
What most people don't seem to get is that there is much more to wmlive than just the visible desktop. Below the hood is a wide range of command line tools suitable for system rescue and repair when using it as a live system booted from an USB stick. Supposedly many youngsters who were yet to be born when we already grew up with Linux from day one have never learned to look beyond what's visually obvious.
If anyone who downloaded it does like wmlive, I'd appreciate a donation via the download pages. While i hate sounding like a beggar, given the current economic situation i could really use it. Thanks!
»This mode replaces expensive and hard to find vintage SCSI bridges such as Adaptech USBXchange,USB2Xchange, Iomega, XpressSCSI, Castlewood, Microtech, and Ratoc among others.«
It would be great if there were a similar solution for directly running legacy NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP binaries on Linux without the system vitualization overhead of something like previous or virtualbox.
Mainly thinking about being able to reuse the NeXTSTEP versions of programs such as FrameMaker, WordPerfect, Quantrix, CedarWord, Adobe Illustrator, Altsys Virtuoso, and so many more.
NextStep’s influence can still be felt in modern computing. From the object-oriented philosophies that underpin macOS and iOS, to the minimalistic, function-driven design ethos that many desktop environments aspire to replicate, NextStep exemplifies a visionary approach to software. Steve Jobs’s journey from Apple to NeXT and back to Apple fundamentally shaped personal computing. Meanwhile, GNUstep and projects like Window Maker preserve the look, feel, and efficiency of NextStep, allowing its spirit to thrive in open-source communities around the world."
Just love this perl: "Yet by the late '90s, NeXT had abandoned its remaining, meager computer hardware sales and was rather desperately just shopping around its advanced but little-used software layers as the crown jewels of an empire that had never really ruled anything but the imaginations of technologists and intellectuals."