Étoilé on Gnustep | Hacker News Reader

Étoilé on Gnustep

etoileos.com

111 pointsrcarmo45 comments

NeXTSTEP was beautiful, clean, and elegant. How is it that the Gnustep pseudo-copies, such as Etoile, can be so ugly and inconsistent? Everything from nasty font choices to the inconsistent and weird spacing between widgets to the weird mishmash of UI styles. You'd think that the entire selling point (so to speak) of software like this is that it retains the elegance of NeXTSTEP, but no.

For maybe two decades I'd argued that the fundamental problem with open source UIs is that there is no hegemon, no dictator who forces everyone to be consistent and to have good taste. Witness the incredible proliferation of awful X11 interface designs, window managers, toolkits, and platforms, and the still astonishing primitiveness and lack of proper interaction and interconnectivity between X applications. Instead you have a thousand flowers blooming, all nurtured by homebrew software developers who have no idea what they're doing designwise.

NeXTSTEP, and of course MacOS, have had dictators and designers, and it shows. And when there is some powerful force in effect to keep everyone in line, open source UI software can more or less have this quality: witness Android under Google's, um, guidance.

But Etoile is a great example, I think, of the no-hegemon effect. Even though they had a TEMPLATE of design elegance (NeXTSTEP), they still managed to make a failure of a UI product.

wanted to disagree, but then noticed that the open source Desktops I think look good all sort of operate under that umbrella, like Gnome and elementary all have very strict design guidelines.

I think another problem is that there's no way, as far as I know, to disallow an app that doesn't stick to those guidelines. I mean, maybe the Gnome default applications can strictly stick to those, but what how do you ensure that third-party apps stick to the guidelines?

Apple seems to have solved this with a combination of big community of enthusiasts and an App Store for macOS, and just the App Store for iOS. A major fear of Apple developers seems to be the prospect of their App being removed from the App Store for unclear reasons.

It's hard to imagine a model where apps can remain FOSS but have the same sort of strict design guidelines.

NeXT took a different tack. Rather than enforce a set of requirements and guidelines, NeXT produced a library and set of tools so compelling that only an idiot wouldn't use them -- and these tools (such as Interface Builder) strongly encouraged implementation of NeXTSTEP style. Whereas MacOS has historically been all stick, NeXTSTEP was all carrot.

This is also roughly the Qt/KDE approach. Except that there are alternatives such as GTK and wxWidgets that have to be supported too.

IMHO QT, GTK and wxWidgets are, put simply, awful. They are good examples of limited toolkits designed in part with cross-platform development in mind, rather than libraries designed with novel or even good interface design. They proliferate and compete on X despite there being poor interoperability among them. They seem to be focused on copying Windows (hardly a paragon of good interfaces) design elements and in enabling skins rather than deep UI functionality.

I come from a background of early MacOS, NeXTSTEP, and the Newton, three environments which prided themselves on developing novel and useful interfaces tailored to the specific needs of their platforms. The X11-inspired cross-platform toolkits are head-shakingly bad compared to these efforts. For example, GTK on Maemo was so embarassingly inferior in design to NewtonScript (a GUI 10 years before it note) that I wrote an entire article about it.

I think the only decently crafted open source UI on Linux/BSD right now is Android. Because Google has the resources and heft to make people do it right.

Qt is strongly associated to the KDE project, which takes it's heritage from CDE et Al., which predates Windows a fair amount. They didn't really copy Windows, and actually did a lot before Windows and still do many things Windows can't.

Also Qt is fairly independent of X11. It can operate fully independently from X and nowadays is basically agnostic to X. I suspect GTK is similar.

> CDE et Al., which predates Windows a fair amount

Windows came out in 1985.

CDE came out in 1993.

> Also Qt is fairly independent of X11.

You seem to be missing my complaint. By supporting multiple platforms, Qt is forced to support the lowest common denominator of all of them. Which means it's mediocre on all of them. Being cross-platform is fine: but no cross-platform systems can be held up as paragons of UI design excellence, not by a long shot.

> Whereas MacOS has historically been all stick, NeXTSTEP was all carrot.

Eh? MacOS had the same tools, and until quite recently the Mac App Store wasn't even a thing (and, even today, the presence of, say, Slack, or the LG monitor utility, in the App Store would argue that Apple is not particularly worried about UI stuff there...)

You do know that MacOS predates NeXTSTEP, right?

MacOS != macOS.

MacOS (capital M, no space) is generally classic MacOS, 1984-2001.

macOS (small m, no space) was formerly Mac OS X, later OS X, sometimes quoted as Mac OS (note, space between Mac and OS).

MacOS: 1984-2001

Mac OS X (formerly NeXTstep): 2001-2012

OS X: 2012-2016

macOS: 2016 onwards.

NeXTSTEP -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody.

and macOS is still Mac OS X in places.

All good corrections. Thank you. :-)

If we're gonna be anal about it, it's NeXTStep -> NeXTSTEP -> NeXTstep -> NEXTSTEP. Likewise OpenStep -> OPENSTEP.

But yes, by MacOS I had meant the original.

The way to at least improve it is to use something like Qt and to make GTK consistent with Qt.

You won't be able to make everything consistent but you can make everything at least look unified.

NeXT started with Display PostScript as the underlying rendering engine.

The X Windows fonts require a great deal more work to be visually consistent; and are not integrated with the coordinate system of the rest of the display.

Whereas under DPS it is all one integrated method/system, making it easy to adjust the spacing between all graphical elements. I think at least, that is the reason for any visually jarring things under Etoile and this is seen in multiple Linux GUIs...

It's surprising they emphasize that it's beautiful in the page title, when it's really anything but beautiful. Even the alignment of buttons and text seems random, and the dock bar looks quite ugly.

Take a look at the date at the bottom right in the main screenshot[0]. For 2008 the style was quite good looking, though it had some issues, most likely since GNUstep didn't had theme support until they implemented it and like Etoile itself, it was never finished.

It is possible that these were fixed later but... even in screenshots with GNUstep themes i see small glitches here and there. NesedahRik[1], which is based on Etoile's theme, does seem to have the least issues though. But if i was to use such a setup, i'd try my best to fix that icon alignment at the top left corner and add some space between it and the menu text :-P.

[0] http://etoileos.com/uploads/screenshots/etoile-0.4-about-vs-...

[1] https://github.com/gnustep/plugins-themes-nesedahrik

I noticed that some screenshots were from 2008 indeed, but back then Ubuntu for example looked better than this (and so did commercial OSes at that time). I wouldn't mind that it looks ugly actually, but if they are going to emphasize that it's beautiful they better make sure it looks at least as good as other OSes (that make no such claim).

Dunno, I always remembered Etoile being described as beautiful though so i guess the standards did change over the years. But also remember that this was basically the goal and the project was never finished, most of the apps shown are regular GNUstep apps that were designed for a completely different look while Etoile wanted to do something a bit more exotic (check the FAQ page for some ideas).

> For 2008 the style was quite good looking

Not really. It doesn't look good now, and it didn’t look good then. It's just not good-looking.

For comparison, Leopard/Snow Leopard looked good in 2008, and it looks good now: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leopard_Desktop.png>

Among the things that I find really surprising in the computing industry is that everyone doesn't make things easy for themselves and agree to just rip off Cocoa.

On the one hand, we hear every time that Electron or the Windows/.NET UI framework discussions come up that developers have no good choices for doing cross-platform UIs. Meanwhile, Cocoa's API is no more or less protected than the ones that Sun/Oracle went to war over. It's also extremely mature. So make it easy and just rip off Cocoa already.

On the other hand, Apple have moved to flat, mobile-like UI. There's hardly a case to be upset, then, if someone were to show up with a lookalike of the old, decrepit Mac OS visual style—something like Aristo <https://www.cappuccino.dev/aristo/>. So make it easy and just rip off Cocoa already.

Sorry but can you go from point by point and show me how different they look, because there doesn't seem to be much of a difference to me.

I expected this kind of comment would appear. The short answer is no.

Cross platform Cocoa would be a dream, even if it doesn’t check all of the current buzzword boxes. It’s great to work with and quite consistently when working in other toolkits I find myself a bit disappointed about how many widgets are missing or how bare bones the widgets are compared to Cocoa. The only thing that really comes close is Qt Widgets, which I find takes a good deal more effort to produce a good looking product with and doesn’t feel as nice to work with.

Relative to Linux desktop stuff in 2008, it’s not terrible. This stuff was never completed either so of course there’s obviously stuff that needs to be cleaned up. For its time and place it was decent.

> Relative to Linux desktop stuff in 2008, it’s not terrible.

That's not the rubric the commenter I responded to laid out, but even if you wanted to move the goalposts there, then for comparison, here's a stock Ubuntu desktop installation from 2008: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu-desktop-2-804-2008...> Not especially bad, but not especially great, either. Something else that it's not, though, is anywhere near as bad as the Étoilé screenshots that are the subject of discussion.

It isn't really a goalpost move though, since that is basically what i meant with my original comment. And to me the Ubuntu desktop doesn't look that much better than the Etoile desktop (if anything one the most common comments i remember from the time is that it looked like "shit" due to the brown color scheme :-P), which again remember that it was never finished and had to work theme support in GNUstep - the applications of which (that are shown in screenshots) weren't even made with theming support in mind. The biggest issues that the Etoile shots have are bad text alignment and some unthemed or badly themed controls that are both results of their WIP theming efforts.

Also FWIW i explicitly remember a comment from an Etoile developer that their goal with Etoile's style was to avoid the "shiny" look Aqua had at the time (and other desktop themes, like Ubuntu's Human style shown in the screenshot, had copied).

> NesedahRik[1], which is based on Etoile's theme

> i'd try my best to fix that icon alignment at the top left corner

I agree there's an alignment issue there, but it's more an issue with the alignment of the menu text than with the icon. The icon looks reasonably centered (vertically) in the menu bar, it's the menu text that's placed too low.

> and add some space between it and the menu text

I believe the icon and the word "Terminal" together make up the first menu item, and thus the tight spacing is intentional, rather than a visual design glitch.

[1] https://github.com/gnustep/plugins-themes-nesedahrik

It's fun to think that the NeXT ideas won in the end. OPENSTEP is now one of the leading desktop and mobile OSs and all it took for it to take off was a facelift and Apple's brand. That, and being renamed OSX.

If we want an OS that can build on top of NeXT's legacy, macOS is the OS to track.

Has anyone done some research on what parts of what SomethingKits would need to be implemented to be able to compile and run as much macOS open-source software currently in, say, GitHub?

I wouldn't call 10% of market share leading desktop.

And for iOS, there is very little NeXTSTEP on it, at least from the point of view of how OS components interacted with each other, it goes beyond of just using Objective-C frameworks.

There is very little of Web Objects, Distributed Objects, Driver Kit, Plugins,... on iOS.

I think it's fair to call a 2nd ranking Desktop OS a leading desktop.

> For desktop and laptop computers, Windows is the most used at 75%, followed by Apple's macOS at 16%, and Linux-based operating systems, including Google's Chrome OS, at 5% (thereof "desktop Linux" at 2.35%).

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

Then given that point of view "Desktop Linux" is also a leading desktop, given that on most sport events there is a top 3.

Would you call a third runner that's significantly behind "leading"?

No, just like I wouldn't call one that only has 16% market share.

Does David Chisnall hang out around here? I remember reading some of the stuff he was publishing around the time Étoilé was active, and their ambitions for the polyglot LanguageKit and associated Smalltalk dialect seemed especially attractive. Somewhat similar to what GraalVM is doing these days.

David Chisnall nowadays is busy with the CHERI project.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/

I always found Etoile very attractive, but it is long dead. If you check the sites news page, the latest post is from 2014…..

Not 'dead' dead according to Github activity https://github.com/etoile/

It is dead. There is some minor admin commits, but most of the activity stopped in 2016.

There are only two types of software: incomplete and abandoned.

Better to look at https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ Now as Etoile is not active last i checked

The key differences between helloSystem and Étoilé are their philosophies and underpinnings. My understanding of helloSystem is that it's primary concerns are ease-of-use and UI consistency. It's aiming for the ease-of-use of the classic Mac OS with the UI design and polish from the Tiger era of Mac OS X. I haven't tried it yet, but I've been keeping up with its progress and it looks very nice. helloSystem is not based on GNUstep or any other Apple-inspired APIs, however. Rather, it uses Qt as its GUI toolkit.

Étoilé was an attempt to bring a refreshed desktop experience that is based on GNUstep yet isn't a reimplementation of the NEXTSTEP or Mac OS X user experiences (though there are heavy influences), introducing its own concepts of what makes an ideal desktop environment. In addition, Étoilé is very aware of the Xerox PARC influences of NeXT, being cognizant of the notion of NEXTSTEP being a pragmatic Smalltalk OS. With this in mind, Étoilé supports a Smalltalk dialect called Pragmatic Smalltalk, which is able to leverage Objective-C libraries and thus fully integrates with the rest of the Étoilé system, which makes it quite different from the experience of running Squeak or Pharo in a window on top of a host operating system and addresses one of the primary complaints some prospective Smalltalk programmers have about Squeak and Pharo. Pragmatic Smalltalk is built on top of Étoilé's LanguageKit, which allows for the development of dynamic programming languages that can interoperate with Objective-C. There's also an EMCAScript implementation built on top of LanguageKit.

In my opinion, if Étoilé were still active, it would attract a different type of user from helloSystem. While both helloSystem and Étoilé are heavily inspired by the Mac, helloSystem is focused on recreating the Mac user experience, while Étoilé was focused on extending the NEXTSTEP/Mac OS X power user/developer experience.

Thanks for explaining.

taste is undervalued

Looks really nice!

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