[wmlive]

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.

[mikestorrent]

Ultimately, the GNUstep project should have taken on the burden of porting whatever could be kept from Windowmaker into the GNUstep world, and made a complete solution to compete with GNOME / KDE with a chance of also making it easier to write an app for both OS X and Linux using much of the same underpinnings (Objective-C, etc).

A lot of really great work went into GNUstep but looking back... for what? It would have needed so many more resources than it had to ever have a chance at becoming something like the above.

Maybe with AI, one day it will be easy enough to pick some of these ideas back up and run with them.

[wmlive]

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.

[anthk]

Well, GNOME it's becoming RedhatWare disallowing Adwaita theming and forbidding custom vendor icons. All when Gnome 2 with Tango (and before, BlueCurve) were one of the best designs ever. Readable icons with outlines, clear themes, no bullshit, and a very lightweight classic desktop.

On KDE, hope QT and Nokia or whoever controls QT today doesn't crap out everyone with a new licensing again. Because if that happens, Plasma it's dead. And Marble and tons of nice projects such as Okular. Yes, QT forks, but that takes tons of time.

[gryf73]

> It's a pity no one ever tried to replace the WINGs widget set with actual GNUstep

It was by purpose at the beginning. Window Maker suppose to be lightweight window manager which resembles nextSTEP, nothing else. GNUstep people has decided to adopt wmaker as their window manager, not other way around.

[anthk]

NeXTSpace it's trying to do that.

[badsectoracula]

> 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.

Hot corners is a great feature and it is in fact part of being a window manager since providing means to move and resize windows is one of the core aspects of window management.

> It's a pity no one ever tried to replace the WINGs widget set with actual GNUstep components

Uh, no, GNUstep is heavy, weird, doesn't look that good (all these smoothed out approximations of the NeXTSTEP look are ugly) and is incredibly buggy and unstable.

> thus adding the full GNUstep themeability WINGs is not capable of

I'd rather see WINGs adopt themes itself than use GNUstep.

> in order to finally get rid of that crufty NeXTSTEP look.

Some people actually like that NeXTSTEP look. In fact AFAIK historically Window Maker exists exactly because the original developer didn't like Afterstep not looking NeXTSTEP-like enough.