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Comment by wmlive | Hacker News Reader

Personally, i'd wish Window Maker wouldn't fall for pointless feature creep (in-built screenshot feature!?) and would instead replace WINGs with the GNUstep framework.

GNUstep has silently matured over the years but still lacks a real native window manager. Window Maker once aimed to be that but unfortunately didn't ever manage to fully integrate with GNUstep.

Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features Wayland support and also offers a theming capabality for which WINGs' hardcoded and thus unchangeable NeXTSTEP aestetics are no match. So replacing WINGs with the GNUstep framework would instantly provide Wayland and more advanced theming support, for free.

People interested in an integrated Window Maker centric system based on Debian/Bookworm should have a look at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net and https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ for downloads.

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> Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features Wayland support

I feel like this oversimplifies the situation. It's not like WindowMaker could adopt gnustep and then automatically be a Wayland compositor. It would need code tailored to that situation, which wouldn't fit the gnustep architecture without modification. Same for using it as an x11 wm. You can't just drop in gnustep inside a WM and it instantly becomes a window manager for all the existing rendering targets supported by gnustep. Gnustep is not currently a WM on any platform.

This is mentioned in the WINGs documentation here: https://www.windowmaker.org/docs/wings.html

Also I was under the impression that GNUstep's Wayland support was experimental at best. I believe it's very incomplete, at least that's what the readme says: https://github.com/gnustep/libs-back/tree/master/Source/wayl...

Feel free to try yourself http://bananas.ethz.ch/debian/gnustep-back/2/

Concur.

On the other hand, I had high hopes for Etoile, which had the goal of being a modern GNUstep-based user environment: http://etoileos.com/etoile/

Interesting! I used to use WM as a desktop, and while it wasn't bloated feeling, it did feel like there were rough edges. GNUStep looked interesting, but I guess I never gave it much thought, or hit a roadblock with it.

If both are really two sides to the same coin, it would be nice if they merged. I obviously don't have the full details, though.

GNUStep still looks pretty much stuck in the pack.

Okish if only pretending it is Next step clone, macOS is probably still around Panther or Snow Leopard.

Window Maker was my favourite window manager, until I went back to Windows 7 as main OS.

> Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation

We see what you did there!

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