GNUstep Releases Early Wayland Support, Many Other Improvements Too

[kpedersen]

Point is, no amount of apple marketing can make even the medically blind and brainwashed believe CDE is "so modern". CDE sucked then as much as it sucks now, the only difference being 20 years in between.

Exactly. CDE and NeXTStep were both pretty ugly. So it isn't unfeasible to believe that macOS today is also going to be considered pretty ugly one day.

All this is obviously opinion based. It is important to understand that there is no such thing as "universally modern looking". Not everyone likes Apple's current designs. Unfortunately so many desktop environments are being blindly told to follow them. Even more so than back then.

CDE vs current macOS... both are pretty naff looking! But at least CDE only takes 32MB of RAM

[dreich]

Exactly. CDE and NeXTStep were both pretty ugly. So it isn't unfeasible to believe that macOS today is also going to be considered pretty ugly one day.

It isn't unfeasible to believe that macOS today is not going to be considered pretty ugly one day either.

All this is obviously opinion based.

Oh that's for sure. The market decided in favor of the macOS GUI a long time ago. Ask freebsd developers they'll tell you.

[StarterX4]

Honestly I wonder why people even bothered back then, nextstep was not that interesting, OSX even less due to its weird mix-in of classic mac os GUI technology.

Not really. I really like even the "weirder" connection of Mac OS and NeXT GUIs, since like 2013.
Now, Plasma 5.21: https://i.imgur.com/AA1ZibQ.png
2016, XFCE4: https://i.imgur.com/OisZrLf.png

[stormcrow]

People have always been obsessed with Apple / NeXT stuff. I do even recall people saying that CDE was ugly and that NeXTStep looked "so modern" (Again, slightly brainwashed). So naturally people copied and made their little themes like they do now.

Forward on many years later and people are still making little themes to clone macOS which I still find an ugly and dated looking consumer environment.

20 years from now, people will be looking back and wondering why macOS was being cloned. Well, the answer kind of is "Apple's marketing told them it looked good".

That's because CDE was ugly and it was an absolute pig to use. I used it at the time it was current. I'm not looking back at it with rose colored glasses. NeXT came along and, for the technology of the time, gave the big iron world a bit of a shake up. People liked it because it was considerably better than what Unix systems generally had for GUIs. These days there's some nostalgia associated with NeXT, just like with many things. It looks a bit awful now, because hardware display technology has moved on. I'd argue GUI design paradigms have not. We're still using the same menu driven systems we had then, just prettied up and rearranged somewhat thanks to more capable hardware.

[kpedersen]

It isn't unfeasible to believe that macOS today is not going to be considered pretty ugly one day either.

50:50 chance. Guess we will have to wait and see. History says otherwise

Oh that's for sure. The market decided in favor of the macOS GUI a long time ago. Ask freebsd developers they'll tell you.

Not sure I follow when

1. Microsoft Windows is the overwhelming leader for consumer desktops. Surely the market favours Win32 and MFC.
2. Why would a FreeBSD developer care? You aren't one of those guys who still seem to incorrectly think macOS is simply a layer built ontop of FreeBSD are you?

That's because CDE was ugly and it was an absolute pig to use. I used it at the time it was current. I'm not looking back at it with rose colored glasses.

A while back I started the OpenCDE project. I actually stopped it only when we managed to get the original CDE open-sourced (under the cdesktopenv project). Yes, it wasn't the easiest to attempt to implement its dodgy parts. At almost every turn there was temptation to... "fix" it

It looks a bit awful now, because hardware display technology has moved on. I'd argue GUI design paradigms have not. We're still using the same menu driven systems we had then, just prettied up and rearranged somewhat thanks to more capable hardware.

Annoyingly I would say many GUI design paradigms have regressed these days. The usability is not always getting better. It is just getting wider to support things like tablets and phones (or at least in theory, very few open devices exist to benefit from this anyway).
However in terms of sheer uglyness, it still stands, CDE and NeXT were on pretty equal footing. When it comes to theming, people only really care about the looks, they never duplicated the functionality.

[dreich]

50:50 chance. Guess we will have to wait and see. History says otherwise

History's already happened and proves my point, not yours.

Why would a FreeBSD developer care?

Oh I don't know I'm just a Linux user. Why don't you ask them? They probably think the macOS GUI puts CDE to shame.

You aren't one of those guys who still seem to incorrectly think macOS is simply a layer built ontop of FreeBSD are you?

Correct, I'm one of those that correctly think that freebsd developers use macOS and prefer it as a graphical desktop over freebsd with CDE.

[kpedersen]

History's already happened and proves my point, not yours.

That NeXTStep GUI isn't seen as dated? Perhaps you should check the history books again. The world has moved on. That point is fairly proven.
Likewise in 20 years the world will have moved on again and current macOS will look old and dated like NeXTStep's UI. Trends change.

... though they do go in cycles. So who knows, the next desktop environment you will be using really could look like CDE

Oh I don't know I'm just a Linux user. Why don't you ask them? They probably think the macOS GUI puts CDE to shame.

Indeed you are. Otherwise I suppose you would know that FreeBSD doesn't by default provide a desktop environment. Similar to Arch and Gentoo in that regards.

I speak to many of the developers daily. They don't really mention GUI at all, let alone macOS's UI. There is more to computing than "modern/gimmicky" UI systems. You *might* be thinking of the unrelated helloProject: https://github.com/helloSystem/hello?

Correct, I'm one of those that correctly think that freebsd developers use macOS and prefer it as a graphical desktop over freebsd with CDE.

Oh you are referring to that old pun. You should know that was originally said by a FreeBSD developer as a self deprecating joke. It always feels a little awkward when mere users repeat it.

[dreich]

The world has moved on. That point is fairly proven.

That much has been proven. History proved you wrong about CDE and the macOS GUI so your hopes to be proven correct lie in the vanity of your future prophecies.

Oh you are referring to that old pun. You should know ...

No need to explain; I know.

[kpedersen]

That much has been proven. History proved you wrong about CDE and the macOS GUI so your hopes to be proven correct lie in the vanity of your future prophecies.

Yep. Notice you didn't even mention NeXTStep's desktop? This will project well into the future for the dated macOS UI. Just wait and see

[wizard69]

Interesting discussion! I’ve been a long time Linux user all the way back to RedHat 4 somethings by. My first Mac was a Mac Plus and I’ve been a very on again off again Mac user. The off periods being when Apple had nothing of value on the market for my interests or simply being pissed over poor customer service. In any event I’m an Apple user again and that is directly due to Apple introducing a fanless ARM based laptop that doesn’t suck.

Comparing Mac OS to Gnome on Fedora I have to say that over all Mac OS is more polished. I generally don’t get into look and feel much that both due to my nature and also to running non native apps on both platforms. In any event I’d say they are light years ahead of Windows 10 which to me has a UI that is at once cluttered and ships with apps that waste white space. So I’d always opt for an alternative to Windows if it existed.

In any event as far as Nextstep/GNUStep I really see this as old technology and I believe Apple does too. Thus Swift and SwiftUI, which I suspect will slowly phase out NextStep as a user facing API. In the short term anyways. In ten years we may very well have a AI based UI that can be likened to what the Star Trek crew modeled. The funny thing here that AI based OS might come from Tesla and not your traditional vendors.

Why Tesla? Because of Musk and Tesla’s head long plunge into AI tech. Who else has the vision and money to shake up the industry? Apple just strikes me as stagnant when it comes to their operating systems. Good for now but nothing happening to keep them in a leadership role. I say that but I’m also hoping that the have big plans for Apple Silicon and AI at the OS level.