[actionfromafar]

To me I always assumed it was heir apparent to NeXTSTEP. I feel like there was a lot of missed opportunities back in the day. Imagine all the manpower going into Gnome and/or KDE going into GNUStep and keeping up with Apple APIs + embrace/extend of Apple APIs.

[SSLy]

Precisely. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and literally any other Free Software DE implement the Windows kind of desktop organisation. While WindowMaker/GNUStep show what the unexplored future could've been.

[jauntywundrkind]

I hear this a lot, but I don't know why that's exciting. I remember using WindowMaker a bit as a kid & thinking it was fun & cool, liking the widgets, but it didn't strike me as radically different a desktop from everything else.

NeXTSTEP's own "Features and Benefits"[1] 6 pager doesn't particularly feel illuminating / compelling either. I'm interested in object integration, object persistence, and object linking, but I don't really know in practice what that was like or what was really there & used. The rest sounds fine & maybe quite advanced for it's age, but it's not clear to me that there was a bunch of material left unexplored over time. Other than what remains a really interesting but abstract idea, that I don't know how was used, of there being objects, somewhere, which plenty of programs individually have & which COM & DCOM had in Windows for years, which CORBA, DCOP, DBus and others also had.

I want a lot to know more. But I just don't know what exactly people are excited over. I don't know what remains novel, what got abandoned. It feels like an early version of a modern desktop, in any decent Linux compositor / display server.

[1] https://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/NeXTSTEP.pdf