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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

I will have to try this out when I get the free time! I’ve been periodically checking on the GNUstep ecosystem since 2004, and this is the most exciting development I’ve seen since Étoilé from the late 2000s. Judging by the screenshots, the desktop appears to be Mac-like while also not being an exact clone.

If this desktop takes off, maybe we’ll finally see an ecosystem of applications that use GNUstep instead of GTK or Qt. In my opinion, the traditional charm of the Mac isn’t just the desktop; it’s the entire ecosystem of applications that conform to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. It would be cool to finally see this happen with a GNUstep/Gershwin ecosystem!

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> “In my opinion, the traditional charm of the Mac isn’t just the desktop; it’s the entire ecosystem of applications that conform to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines”

Sadly this barely exists anymore.

Cross-platform Electron apps have replaced native AppKit. Cloud-based apps like Linear, Slack and Figma cater to the lowest common denominator of desktops by shipping their web client in a wrapper.

The last real native Mac app that was truly successful was probably Sketch ten years ago, and Figma ate their lunch.

Meanwhile Apple themselves have given up on the HIG. In the Alan Dye era, it’s been form over function across all the Apple operating systems. Their own apps don’t follow any guidelines and the latest macOS 26 is a UI disaster – probably the most inconsistent Mac release since OS X early betas.

I wholeheartedly and sadly agree with you. Seems like the idea of native apps on both macOS and Windows has been losing ground in favor of Electron apps. I understand the challenge of writing applications tailored to each platform and why Electron is so appealing to many companies, but I’d feel better about Electron if it were more conformant to platform HIGs and if it were less resource-intensive, especially now with RAM prices skyrocketing.

I hate how mainstream desktop computing has gone to crap in recent years. Thank goodness for free, open-source software.

This is why we think something inspired by the HIG needs to be reborn as open source.

I’m working on something similar for Linux. Would love to chat if this is interesting to you.

The idea is to bring the UX of OSX Snow Leopard back, adjusted for today’s possibilities (better developer experience, AI, etc.). I’m developing a DE, SwiftUI/AppKit-equivalent, and a bunch of reference apps I‘m personally missing in terms of quality (e.g. Raycast/Spotlight, Mail).

Is there a link for this project? It sounds exciting!

https://github.com/gershwin-desktop

Thank you. Not all parts are open-sourced yet. I published the first repo yesterday: https://github.com/cihantas/applib

Going to launch a few apps powered by AppLib in the next few weeks and then continue with the DE.

Definitely let's talk. You'll find us on GitHub Discussions and Libera Chat.

> adjusted for today’s possibilities

You would want to adjust it for today's display and input technologies. A high resolution OLED display deserves a different UI design than a 6-bit low-contrast TN LCD display did.

I agree that displays and input changed. But if you think in fundamentals, like clarity, readability, affordances, you tend to arrive at the right answers anyway.

Those principles survived CRTs, TN panels, Retina, touch, trackpads. They’re not tied to a specific technology.

Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?

> Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?

There are a lot of places where I now see a miniature thumbnail preview of a file's contents, where in the 1990s you would only have seen an icon corresponding to the file type. Those previews are enabled partly by faster IO and processors making the preview rendering cheap, but also by higher resolution displays making the previews a lot more useful than they could have been at 32 pixels or smaller.

While it's not exactly a quality change as the driving force, the proliferation of dark mode UIs is a result of OLED displays that draw meaningfully less power with darker content, so pushing users toward darker UIs helps battery life. And it looks much better on a display with decent black levels than it would on a crappy LCD that washes out all the dark colors.

> Those previews are enabled partly by faster IO and processors making the preview rendering cheap

That's not really it. You could cache the thumbnails so it was never expensive to do.

If anything standards for performance were lower then (no 120hz displays) so people felt free to do more expensive things at the time.

> Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?

The extremely heavy "pinstripe" Aqua UI existed because displays were so low contrast at the time that it didn't look nearly as heavy. A much higher contrast display that actually displays blacks properly means it'd look more like visual noise.

Sadly, GNUStep is hardly moving, plus last time I remember there were still issues regarding the adoption of modern Objective-C, given that it is only supported on clang, and they were focused on using only what was available in GCC.

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