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Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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