
Nextspace – NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment for Linux - JonAtkinson
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
======
jsz0
I have to admit I'm nostalgic for the straight forward nature of NS/WM and
even some of the less powerful interfaces of the time. Most modern desktop
environments including macOS feel like an exercise in evading landmines of
unpredictable or inconsistent behavior. On macOS specifically the retrofitting
of tabs into applications mostly designed to be SDI has (mixed with some legit
SDI apps and full screen stuff) is a mess. Can anyone actually keep track of
dozens of windows with maybe dozens more tabs open in each one? Sometimes I
find a randomly find a minimized window full of stuff I haven't seen in weeks.
Lost in the complexity.

~~~
machello13
eh? Tabs on macOS are an opt-in feature, right? I don't think I ever opened
more than 1 tab in an app like Finder or Mail unless I explicitly tried to.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Notably, there's a toggle in System Preferences → Dock:

> Prefer tabs when opening documents: Always | In Full Screen Only | Manually

It's difficult to find because they put it under "Dock" for some strange
reason.

------
jamesfmilne
If you want to run this alongside GNOME on CentOS 7, you can switch between
them like so:

To enable NEXTspace:

    
    
      - sudo systemctl stop display-manager
      - sudo systemctl disable gdm
      - sudo systemctl enable loginwindow
      - sudo systemctl start display-manager
    

To enable GNOME:

    
    
      - sudo systemctl stop display-manager
      - sudo systemctl disable loginwindow
      - sudo systemctl enable gdm
      - sudo systemctl start display-manager

------
qubex
Bless his soul for making this. It really brings me back.

For me, NeXTstep is still the high water mark of GUI design and usability.

~~~
rsync
As a person who has fond memories of Solaris CDE and and Irix, I can
sympathize with you.

However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and mousey-mouse-mouse
for everything ... it's bad usability and very inefficient.

The high water mark for GUI design is something like ion3/ratpoison, xterms
running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that you never see ...

~~~
nradov
What you describe as a "high water mark" is only optimal for a very limited
set of use cases. Overlapping windows with toolbars, launchers, and mouse
control is on average superior for the total set of use cases especially for
non-expert users.

~~~
qubex
The usability is perfect for me, but I recognise that different use-cases may
vary.

It forged my sense of aesthetics, though (alongside BeOS).

------
AdmiralAsshat
Clearly a hobby/passion project, so, there's no need to justify its existence,
but given this point:

>I think GNUstep needs a reference implementation of a user-oriented desktop
environment.

I wonder why he didn't just contribute to Étoilé, since he seems aware of it.

~~~
pgeorgi
> he didn't just contribute to Étoilé, since he seems aware of it.

This is a hobby and passion project and yet it looks more alive and better
maintained than Étoilé, which features "news" from 2014 about doing random
Smalltalk things - and while I _love_ Smalltalk it doesn't give me confidence
that they're focused on building a modern Cocoa-style desktop environment.

~~~
kelnos
I clicked through a Étoilé's overview page, and the screenshots were from
~2008 (with a system UI panel opening showing a 2.6 kernel!). It made me
question how alive the project is.

------
fallous
Definitely gives me some nostalgia for the days when I ran AfterStep for my
desktop machine while at Netscape.

~~~
spentrent
Afterstep blazed on a Pentium 100!

------
mixmastamyk
This is awesome and looks very nice, loved the aesthetic. Yet I hope it takes
into account modern technology, e.g. either font smoothing or high resolution
displays. There's no point in copying the 1990s wholesale.

------
unixhero
Would be great if he targeted Debian. It's after all the upstream base for
millions of Linux users.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Centos is pretty compact and easy to setup for purposes of setting up a
minimal VM to test this with, though.

~~~
whalesalad
Likewise, Debian is one of the most compact mainstream distributions you can
run.

Then you get Ubuntu, Mint, etc... for free.

------
drudru11
Wow - As I read the readme and wiki it shows what an impressive amount of
effort to pull this all together. This is the closest to OpenStep I’ve ever
seen an open source project achieve.

------
xmonkee
How is this different from Window Maker[1]?

[1]: [https://www.windowmaker.org/](https://www.windowmaker.org/)

~~~
zerr
It seems to be maintained.

~~~
alxlaz
WindowMaker is not unmaintained, for what it's worth.

~~~
bashinator
I'd say not _wholly_ unmaintained. It hasn't seen any commits since 2017.

~~~
alxlaz
The _stable_ branch hasn't seen any commits since 2017. The last head of the
-next branch is from last summer, I think, and the last time I've seen a patch
on the mailing list was about three weeks ago.

------
xvilka
Reminds me of recently open sourced and revived CDE[1]. They should move to
GitHub or GitLab though, for a better visibility.

[1]
[https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv](https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv)

~~~
nineteen999
While we are talking about obsolete UNIX desktops that have been revived,
somebody was doing similar for the IRIX desktop:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/05/maxx_interactive_de...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/05/maxx_interactive_desktop_revives_sgi_irix_and_magic_desktop/)

------
uranium235
If I didn't know any better I'd say you were trying to sell me wooden nickels.
This looks exactly like Windowmaker :D I like to say that about people's next
stations whenever I have the chance

~~~
harikb
I was about to say you are being cruel by calling these widowmakers

------
uranium235
I would really like to see a more modern version of the nextstep style In the
same way I'm using fluxbox with my own style that reflects something a little
more modern. Just need to figure out how to get proper alpha compositing for a
few things. xcompmgr works fine with stuff like konsole for me, but the menu
transparencies are not active in fluxbox. still looks very nice. You could do
a lot with wmaker styling just get rid of that awful blue gradient and use
some more modern fonts (I'm using nerdfonts for a lot) the ui toolkit is kinda
blocky/bulky that's all changable though looks a little better on high-dpi

------
simplecto
The nostalgia on this is great. I really loved all the useful widgets that you
could dock to the side. Mainly for me it was the modem status (way back in the
day), battery, and sound controls.

------
rogual
Is this kind of thing open to copyright or patent suits from Apple? I always
wonder, with projects like this, how you can get away with doing such a close
copy of a commercial OS.

~~~
yellowapple
NeXTSTEP and the UI thereof are thoroughly abandoned. Apple doesn't sell it
anymore, last I checked (hell, I don't even think Apple acknowledges its
existence at all at this point, beyond the parts that it now calls "Cocoa").
While I wouldn't put it past Apple, actually suing someone over an open-source
reimplementation would be - to put it as diplomatically as possible - a dick
move of the highest degree.

Legally speaking, though (as a not-lawyer), I reckon it'd be contingent on
however the Oracle v. Google war goes.

------
stevekinney
I'd love to see something similar for the classic (pre-Aqua/OS X) Mac OS look
and feel. Does anyone know if that exists?

~~~
mhd
There are some OS 9 ("Platinum") GTK themes, but AFAIK there's no clone of the
classic finder available. Nor other parts of the default OS 8/9 desktop.

Which is quite interesting, considering that the classic Finder is often
thought as the pinnacle of spatial navigation. And Linux does have more
obscure file managers cloned, like Amiga's Dopus[1] or the RiscOS one[2].

[1]:
[http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/](http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/)

[2]:
[http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/](http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/)

~~~
alxlaz
Worth a warning: the recent history of GTK theming is pretty tortuous, and the
GTK3 theming engine, while extremely flexible, doesn't really lend itself to
non-modern (I can't think of a better euphemism) designs.

There are some themes, like Memphis98, that sort manage to create the sort of
visual appearance that you're after. However, the GTK 3-ness is obvious even
there: the "Open file..." dialog has huge, unresizable widgets on the left,
combo bars are long. Lots of UI elements are bulky and oversized.

Consequently, in my experience, you're actually better off with a GTK2 theme
and Qt applications with the gtk2 style engine.

I'm not really a fan of old-time themes -- I mean, I miss my Amiga but not
_that_ much. I know about this stuff for altogether different reasons -- I
spent a lot of time trying to get a more _compact_ layout, because GTK3
applications are pretty much unusable on small/low-density/low-resolution
screens (and, IMHO, way too large even on "normal"-ish screens. I have a 27"
monitor and, at 2560x1440, everything is so big it drives me nuts). I even
tried to write my own, and failed pretty badly. So yeah.

~~~
mhd
Never mind that the biggest part of the classic finder experience wasn't the
look-and-feel, so just a theme won't help you much.

And speaking of modern screens, even if you get a copy of the OS 9 font
(Chicago?), it would look quite odd on high resolution, especially if it's
anti-aliased.

And I definitely agree about the weird issues we've got with screen sizes
today. I rarely get something in the "goldilocks" zone, either it's all
Material/Aero with yuge margins and white space that would make Jan Tschichold
blush, or its old UIs that are just a bit too small (try running the
aforementioned Worker file manager on a HiDPi screen).

~~~
philwelch
Mac OS 8 migrated from Chicago to Charcoal, I think. Chicago was resurrected
as the UI font on the first iPods because it was a similar situation as the
original Macintosh that Chicago was designed for (low-res monochrome screens).

------
rcarmo
This would be amazing on a Raspberry Pi. Too bad it’s based on CentOS rather
than Debian.

------
machinecoffee
Seems to be largely written in C and Objective C, with Gnustep providing the
Foundation Kit.

Objective C I've found to be a great and productive language for writing GUI
based apps, with the selector based event handling.

Nice work by the developer.

------
mryingster
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002626)

------
Artur96
Glad someone is reviving old projects that had potential

------
jjuel
May have to install CentOS just so I can use this. I love the look of this.

------
ajphdiv
Is the panel on the top left a right click menu or is that always there?

------
winrid
Now someone fork it and re-skin it to look like OSX.

(nice job - feeling very nostalgic)

------
briandilley
What about WindowMaker?

