- https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.c...
- Étoilé was so promising….the idea of using OpenStep (via GNUstep) infrastructure in ways that went beyond NeXTstep or Mac OS X. It felt like an even deeper embrace of the Smalltalk influences of the OpenStep API to enhance the desktop computing experience. Étoilé wasn’t merely a clone of NeXTstep or Mac OS X; it was its own thing that could’ve been a compelling contender to KDE, GNOME, and even macOS.
Unfortunately Étoilé seems to have been inactive for a decade, and even Apple seems to be abandoning its Xerox PARC influences as the old guard retires and passes away (RIP Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, and Bill Atkinson). Ever since Apple struck gold with the iPhone and derivative platforms, Apple hasn’t been the same.
I’d like to see the ideas of Smalltalk and Lisp machines revisited for the modern era as a model for workstation-class personal computing. Smalltalk and Lisp environments pride themselves on flexibility and malleability (though it’s understandable to rethink some of these things in an era where security is very important), while mainstream personal computing these days feel less like productivity boosters (remember “the bicycle for the mind”) and more like advertising platforms and anti-competitive, rent-seeking moats.
- GNUStep is a good example that the bare bones language and compiler being open source it is not enough, when everything else doesn't come along.
Saying this as someone that used Afterstep and Windowmaker alongside GNUStep, and did seat a few times on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM.
Last time I checked was at the level of OS X Panther, and modern Objective-C still wasn't supported.
- Relevant -- there are 2 other desktop environments built on GNUstep that are in more active maintainance.
NEXTSPACE:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
<- Ukrainian so not much development in a while; mainly targets CentOS
GSDE:
https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html
<- More recent, native to Debian but runs on other things.
- I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it.
It bothers me a bit, though. Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, and I think GNUStep could have been that framework if the community had been willing to embrace it.
by alephnerd
2 subcomments
- It makes me glad to see Etoile is still around.
I played around with it in HS when it was in it's alpha stages because I wanted to find a Linux distro that had the same polish of MacOS X and on which I could dev Obj-C. It was a good attempt, but sadly I haven't seen any Linux skin or distro that has solved the UX polish issue.
Edit: never mind, Étoilé did die around the time I thought it did in the early 2010s.
- Also see this related Cocoa- or GNUstep-based project from some of the same people:
http://coreobject.org/
"Distributed version control + Object persistence"
by fuzzfactor
3 subcomments
- The state of Texas is well-known as the "Lone Star" state, and appropriately enough there is a small town in east Texas known as Etoile, Texas. This is not even that far from the border with Louisiana and some of the unsettled parts of that old French territory.
But they can really tell if you are from around those parts or not, since the correct local pronunciation of the word etoile is of course "yeetaw".
by SillyUsername
1 subcomments
- I miss the days of Sun Solaris' CDE desktop.
Afterstep looks too much like Stardock's Window Blinds from around 2000 (see the weird glass effect, font etc), but Etolie seems to nail the aesthetic for me.
I hope this comes back, I'd love to use it on an old netbook I have for accessing my servers remotely.
by TheAceOfHearts
2 subcomments
- Not loading for me. Here's an archive mirror [0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250901123900/http://etoileos.c...
by chris_armstrong
1 subcomments
- Damn this is a blast from the past - it was such an ambitious project with so many interesting ideas to explore. CoreObject itself was revolutionary in its thinking about distributed document sharing and versioning, let alone some of desktop environment ideas for managing projects.
I know Quentin Mathé, kept CoreObject going for a decade longer, but I haven't heard from the rest of those involved for a very long time.
- https://github.com/orgs/etoile/repositories
- Man, I love GNUStep. I haven't done anything serious with it, but I did play around with it for a while and enjoyed every second. I event went all-in on WindowMaker for a couple of months lol. It really opened my eyes to how awesome Objective-C is as a language, and almost made me want to become an iOS/Mac developer.
Etoile is dead afaik, but there are some people making another GNUStep-based DE called Gershwin (https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop) for GhostBSD.
by webworker
2 subcomments
- We need all hands on deck to bring this back to life
by lelanthran
0 subcomment
- I think if you're going to use words with ambiguous pronunciations as your product name you should at least let the reader know what it rhymes with.
That being said, this looks like it could turn into a really cool project.
- Technically, how does the "every UI action is a commit on a DVCS graph" work? Would every application that is a native étoilé app use this api to construct its UX and document formats? And every app that is not would _not_ have this?
That feels like an ambitious but perhaps misdirected invention of a new paradigm because you'd basically have a native text editor and two other utilities which use it, and then the other five dozen apps would not?
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- A previous discussion in 2021:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537538
- They had a really good blog with the intricacies for objc, but when swift came out in 2014/5. It all stopped. It’s good to hear that they moved on to to other things, though.
- Isn't GNUStep extremely old? I remember seing a webpage before even KDE existed. But I have never seem a GNUStep desktop. Just the window manager, it was popular for a while
- I remember trying to get this to work in 2008 or 2009 or something and still failing. I'm amazed the website is still up.
- GNUStep lost its opportunity to use D to go further and stuck with old ObjC.
Very good piece of software though.
- can someone please explain to me why is this a HN front page material? this seems to be a long abandoned project
by curtisszmania
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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