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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

This was definitely the story I got from a NeXT old-timer.

I also agree on Be. While I used BeOS (even got to play with it on a BeBox) and was impressed by it, NeXT was the better system. Oh my, networking was a mess in BeOS, and I'm not sure they would have ever gotten full multi-user support.

As a youngster, I pined for NeXT after playing with one at a university lab. I still marvel that we now carry NeXT workstations around I our pockets.

I really wish the Linux / BSD communities had rallied around GNUStep. Would have been nice to see how two implementations coevolved.

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I remember when Gnome and KDE were first emerging. They were both too slow and wonky for me. Somebody suggested WindowMaker and I really liked it. At this time, I had no knowledge of NeXT or GNUStep. It was some years later after OS X emerged and I started learning Cocoa that I learned of all this history and discovered that WindowMaker was also connected to this universe and it really sunk in just how advanced they were for the time.

I'm still saddened that GNUStep never went anywhere. I still find GTK/Gnome/Qt/KDE wonky for a lot of basic things like copy-and-paste and drag-and-drop.

My wildest dreams hope to see a re-emergence of something like GNUStep, but this time be driven by all the new interest in Swift.

Funny you should mention GNUStep/WindowMaker... absolutely my favourite WM. I agree most of the rest are bloated and wonky. Gnome has removed almost all of its menus and bells and whistles and it's largely unusable now. KDE is the kitchen sink inside the kitchen sink. It's overly complicated for a DE. Sadly, there is no real focus on WM now, although last year, Window Maker Live, a Debian-based live ISO was released. It hasn't gained a real foothold among aficionados.

There was an attempt to get Window Maker back in the limelight last year. Not sure where this has gone...

Yeah, I ran a poor-man's NeXT for a long time (WindowMaker on NetBSD in my case). The Etoile project seemed like they were going to try to make a full GNUStep-based desktop environment, but I fear they are suffering from too few coder hours: http://etoileos.com

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