Nextspace – NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Nextspace – NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment for Linux

github.com

222 pointsJonAtkinson80 comments

I have to admit I'm nostalgic for the straight forward nature of NS/WM and even some of the less powerful interfaces of the time. Most modern desktop environments including macOS feel like an exercise in evading landmines of unpredictable or inconsistent behavior. On macOS specifically the retrofitting of tabs into applications mostly designed to be SDI has (mixed with some legit SDI apps and full screen stuff) is a mess. Can anyone actually keep track of dozens of windows with maybe dozens more tabs open in each one? Sometimes I find a randomly find a minimized window full of stuff I haven't seen in weeks. Lost in the complexity.

eh? Tabs on macOS are an opt-in feature, right? I don't think I ever opened more than 1 tab in an app like Finder or Mail unless I explicitly tried to.

Notably, there's a toggle in System Preferences → Dock:

> Prefer tabs when opening documents: Always | In Full Screen Only | Manually

It's difficult to find because they put it under "Dock" for some strange reason.

I agree modern macOS has too many UI inconsistencies—but I really don't think tabs are one of them. They behave predictably enough in proper Cocoa apps. (If you're using an app with its own tab implementation that behaves differently, there's not much any OS can really do about that.)

Although to your point of keeping track, I do think tabs could be integrated with Exposé ("Mission Control") a bit better.

If you want to run this alongside GNOME on CentOS 7, you can switch between them like so:

To enable NEXTspace:

  - sudo systemctl stop display-manager
  - sudo systemctl disable gdm
  - sudo systemctl enable loginwindow
  - sudo systemctl start display-manager

To enable GNOME:

  - sudo systemctl stop display-manager
  - sudo systemctl disable loginwindow
  - sudo systemctl enable gdm
  - sudo systemctl start display-manager

Bless his soul for making this. It really brings me back.

For me, NeXTstep is still the high water mark of GUI design and usability.

As a person who has fond memories of Solaris CDE and and Irix, I can sympathize with you.

However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and very inefficient.

The high water mark for GUI design is something like ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that you never see ...

What you describe as a "high water mark" is only optimal for a very limited set of use cases. Overlapping windows with toolbars, launchers, and mouse control is on average superior for the total set of use cases especially for non-expert users.

The usability is perfect for me, but I recognise that different use-cases may vary.

It forged my sense of aesthetics, though (alongside BeOS).

""However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and very inefficient.""

Citation needed.

""The high water mark for GUI design is something like ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that you never see ...""

Says who? Again citation needed.

Have you ever used desktop solaris? it was terrible. I'll vouch. resize a window in the file manager, and every single item would need to be reprocessed and the entire system would lock until 1 by 1 they re-spawned. It was infuriating.

I used to work on a next-ish GUI toolkit (in plain C though, not Objective C) - http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lforms/ - which i mainly used under Window Maker (though it also has a Win32 backend) and my biggest issue UX-wise was how alien it felt in anything else outside Window Maker... especially the floating menus.

I like the look myself but i don't even use Window Maker itself that much nowadays (it is still my #1 WM for Linux, i just use Windows more).

For me, the high water mark is Snow Leopard. I don't think I remember any single operating system iteration for which I held such little contempt. I only have fond memories of it.

(Second place is probably a tie between Windows 2000 and Windows 7 depending on how nostalgic I'm feeling.)

Windows 7 in classic mode?

I was perfectly happy with the default/native skin for Windows 7, either with or without its transparency effects.

Like most people I greatly preferred Windows XP in its classic mode because XP's default "luna" skin was so hideous. Whereas the Windows 7 classic mode felt slightly broken and abandoned—new UX behaviours didn't quite line up with expectations set by the traditional interface design. A change of appearance is appropriate when there is a change of behaviour.

Clearly a hobby/passion project, so, there's no need to justify its existence, but given this point:

>I think GNUstep needs a reference implementation of a user-oriented desktop environment.

I wonder why he didn't just contribute to Étoilé, since he seems aware of it.

Seems clear they are interested in the NeXTSTEP aesthetic in addition to the underlying framework.

He's not wrong either. That UI is older than Windows 95 (which stole and misused some of its look and UI elements, that is an iconify control dammit) but it still looks fresh, simple, and get-the-job-done. As well as ignoring the "flat" trend and the "pretend to be a touch UI" trend.

> that is an iconify control dammit

Are you talking about Win95's "Maximize" control?

The one that visually resembles a NeXTStep iconified window, yes.

There's no need for the sarcasm.

It's aimed at Microsoft.

The "Maximize" icon in Windows is clearly a stylized depiction of a window with a toolbar, sized to fit the button on which it is. I don't know if it's the perfect icon for this action, but it makes a lot of sense. Why should it stand for iconification, even if Windows still had that feature (last time it did was Win 3.11)

In the context of Nextspace, Nextstep, or Windowmaker, it stands for Iconificaiton because it is "clearly a stylized depiction of" the icon that appears when a window is iconified.

Compare the iconify button with the icons representing iconified windows below:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trunkmaster/nextspace/mast...

Is there a GTK or KDE competitor that has the Windows 95 theme down like Mate or something?

http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net/

There are some similar ones mentioned in its Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM95

IceWM is quite themeable and is actively developed:

https://ice-wm.org/

Is Étoilé still under development or has it been abandoned?

I do rather like the NeXT aesthetic more, personally.

I wrote to the maintainer in late 2018 and he informed me that the project is no longer under development. He mentioned that CoreObject (coreobject.org) would still be active, but that was over two years ago and I can't say for sure.

Looks like the CoreObject repo hasn't been touched in a few years either.

That's unfortunate about Étoilé, which looked promising and cool. Last summer I wrote an article about the current state of GNUstep, and I was hoping that someone would pick up from where Étoilé left off.

http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2019/06/some-thoughts-a...

However, I just saw a recent comment from one of the current GNUstep maintainers that said that the GNUstep Foundation Kit is now at par with macOS Catalina, and work will begin on updating GNUstep's Appkit implementation, which is currently roughly compatible with Mac OS X Tiger.

Making GNUstep more compatible with recent versions of macOS's Cocoa API will definitely help with enticing more developers to the platform.

> he didn't just contribute to Étoilé, since he seems aware of it.

This is a hobby and passion project and yet it looks more alive and better maintained than Étoilé, which features "news" from 2014 about doing random Smalltalk things - and while I _love_ Smalltalk it doesn't give me confidence that they're focused on building a modern Cocoa-style desktop environment.

I clicked through a Étoilé's overview page, and the screenshots were from ~2008 (with a system UI panel opening showing a 2.6 kernel!). It made me question how alive the project is.

Because, at least according to him, Etoile is targeting a MacOS level of UX, which is not his preference.

That, and the last activity on Etoile was quite a while ago, and seems to have stalled out rather badly.

Need a feature comparison between

* NextStep

* macOS

* GNUStep

* Nextspace

* Étoilé

* KDE/Gnome themes emulating any of the above

Definitely gives me some nostalgia for the days when I ran AfterStep for my desktop machine while at Netscape.

Afterstep blazed on a Pentium 100!

Anyone still remember 'bowman', IIRC the first of the NeXt wms? Man, that fvwm was a versatile codebase.

IIRC my first WM, on RedHat 5.2

This is awesome and looks very nice, loved the aesthetic. Yet I hope it takes into account modern technology, e.g. either font smoothing or high resolution displays. There's no point in copying the 1990s wholesale.

Would be great if he targeted Debian. It's after all the upstream base for millions of Linux users.

Centos is pretty compact and easy to setup for purposes of setting up a minimal VM to test this with, though.

Likewise, Debian is one of the most compact mainstream distributions you can run.

Then you get Ubuntu, Mint, etc... for free.

To be honest it's super easy. All he needs to do is to run "checkinstall" from the root of the source tree after a successful compile, and it will generate a valid Debian (ANY SUPPORTED DISTRO) package.

This can of course be done as last pass a part of a CI runner pipeline with Gitlab or Jenkins build job.

To match the install procedure with the nostalgia, you really should build from source.

True

Wow - As I read the readme and wiki it shows what an impressive amount of effort to pull this all together. This is the closest to OpenStep I’ve ever seen an open source project achieve.

How is this different from Window Maker[1]?

[1]: https://www.windowmaker.org/

It seems to be maintained.

WindowMaker is not unmaintained, for what it's worth.

I'd say not wholly unmaintained. It hasn't seen any commits since 2017.

The stable branch hasn't seen any commits since 2017. The last head of the -next branch is from last summer, I think, and the last time I've seen a patch on the mailing list was about three weeks ago.

Do you have outstanding issues/bugs/feature requests? I remember using it, like, 15 years ago and it was largely feature-complete and mostly bug free.

> I'd say not wholly unmaintained. It hasn't seen any commits since 2017.

Has it needed any since then? That's the real question.

I'm certain it is still maintained because i occasionally see patches coming in in the development list and in 2018 i submitted a bugfix for icon persistence and a new feature to force client side decorations on windows: https://i.imgur.com/xcVSNaN.jpg

Though i don't know why exactly there hasn't been a new release. The current maintainer is active (he does the merges) and there have been a bunch of features and fixes, so i'm not sure what is going on.

From the readme, though I find it a little confusing:

”” Note: Workspace is NOT:

WindowMaker with some patches. WindowMaker with some good configuration defaults only. Another implementation of WindowMaker. It's written from scratch. Some WindowMaker code is a part of Workspace (as well as configuration defaults) to provide window management functions. It's tightly coupled with Workspace to provide seamless intergation. Configurable parameters of the integrated WindowMaker are spread across Workspace's Preferences and Preferences application. Theoretically, Workspace can be used without WindowMaker. However, the current development focus is on a single application to deliver the best user experience.

See the section under Workspace, specifically TFA says:

Note: Workspace is NOT:

        WindowMaker with some patches
        WindowMaker with some good configuration defaults only
        Another implementation of WindowMaker*

The description then goes on to say what it shares in common with WM and what's different in a bit more detail.
Edit: formatting

Reminds me of recently open sourced and revived CDE[1]. They should move to GitHub or GitLab though, for a better visibility.
[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv

I installed this on a whim, worked surprisingly well on my lts Ubuntu system. Ultimately I didn't adopt it, missing too many things I have come to expect and depend on, but still was a really fun afternoon project.

While we are talking about obsolete UNIX desktops that have been revived, somebody was doing similar for the IRIX desktop:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/05/maxx_interactive_de...

If I didn't know any better I'd say you were trying to sell me wooden nickels. This looks exactly like Windowmaker :D I like to say that about people's next stations whenever I have the chance

I was about to say you are being cruel by calling these widowmakers

I would really like to see a more modern version of the nextstep style In the same way I'm using fluxbox with my own style that reflects something a little more modern. Just need to figure out how to get proper alpha compositing for a few things. xcompmgr works fine with stuff like konsole for me, but the menu transparencies are not active in fluxbox. still looks very nice. You could do a lot with wmaker styling just get rid of that awful blue gradient and use some more modern fonts (I'm using nerdfonts for a lot) the ui toolkit is kinda blocky/bulky that's all changable though looks a little better on high-dpi

The nostalgia on this is great. I really loved all the useful widgets that you could dock to the side. Mainly for me it was the modem status (way back in the day), battery, and sound controls.

Is this kind of thing open to copyright or patent suits from Apple? I always wonder, with projects like this, how you can get away with doing such a close copy of a commercial OS.

NeXTSTEP and the UI thereof are thoroughly abandoned. Apple doesn't sell it anymore, last I checked (hell, I don't even think Apple acknowledges its existence at all at this point, beyond the parts that it now calls "Cocoa"). While I wouldn't put it past Apple, actually suing someone over an open-source reimplementation would be - to put it as diplomatically as possible - a dick move of the highest degree.
Legally speaking, though (as a not-lawyer), I reckon it'd be contingent on however the Oracle v. Google war goes.

I'd love to see something similar for the classic (pre-Aqua/OS X) Mac OS look and feel. Does anyone know if that exists?

There are some OS 9 ("Platinum") GTK themes, but AFAIK there's no clone of the classic finder available. Nor other parts of the default OS 8/9 desktop.
Which is quite interesting, considering that the classic Finder is often thought as the pinnacle of spatial navigation. And Linux does have more obscure file managers cloned, like Amiga's Dopus[1] or the RiscOS one[2].
[1]: http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/
[2]: http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/

Worth a warning: the recent history of GTK theming is pretty tortuous, and the GTK3 theming engine, while extremely flexible, doesn't really lend itself to non-modern (I can't think of a better euphemism) designs.
There are some themes, like Memphis98, that sort manage to create the sort of visual appearance that you're after. However, the GTK 3-ness is obvious even there: the "Open file..." dialog has huge, unresizable widgets on the left, combo bars are long. Lots of UI elements are bulky and oversized.
Consequently, in my experience, you're actually better off with a GTK2 theme and Qt applications with the gtk2 style engine.
I'm not really a fan of old-time themes -- I mean, I miss my Amiga but not that much. I know about this stuff for altogether different reasons -- I spent a lot of time trying to get a more compact layout, because GTK3 applications are pretty much unusable on small/low-density/low-resolution screens (and, IMHO, way too large even on "normal"-ish screens. I have a 27" monitor and, at 2560x1440, everything is so big it drives me nuts). I even tried to write my own, and failed pretty badly. So yeah.

Never mind that the biggest part of the classic finder experience wasn't the look-and-feel, so just a theme won't help you much.
And speaking of modern screens, even if you get a copy of the OS 9 font (Chicago?), it would look quite odd on high resolution, especially if it's anti-aliased.
And I definitely agree about the weird issues we've got with screen sizes today. I rarely get something in the "goldilocks" zone, either it's all Material/Aero with yuge margins and white space that would make Jan Tschichold blush, or its old UIs that are just a bit too small (try running the aforementioned Worker file manager on a HiDPi screen).

Mac OS 8 migrated from Chicago to Charcoal, I think. Chicago was resurrected as the UI font on the first iPods because it was a similar situation as the original Macintosh that Chicago was designed for (low-res monochrome screens).

Gnome's own Nautilus had direct support for spatial navigation for a long time in the Gnome 2 era (including briefly on by default in something like Gnome 2.6 before complaints reversed that decision), though it was obviously a small bit underwhelming compared to Mac Classic, and lost entirely in the Gnome 2 to 3 transition.
https://people.gnome.org/~bmsmith/build/nautilus-spatial-mod...
http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html

I was going to say, I'd love something like this for OS X circa Leopard era.
We all have our dead favorites I suppose...

This would be amazing on a Raspberry Pi. Too bad it’s based on CentOS rather than Debian.

Seems to be largely written in C and Objective C, with Gnustep providing the Foundation Kit.
Objective C I've found to be a great and productive language for writing GUI based apps, with the selector based event handling.
Nice work by the developer.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002626

Glad someone is reviving old projects that had potential

May have to install CentOS just so I can use this. I love the look of this.

Is the panel on the top left a right click menu or is that always there?

Now someone fork it and re-skin it to look like OSX.
(nice job - feeling very nostalgic)

What about WindowMaker?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com