[malco_2001]

I am absolutely blown away to have the author of AppImage (Probono) partnering with me on a project I started that to be honest I didn't know if it would ever go anywhere. There is no better validation, and this is exactly what the spirit of creating open source solutions is all about for me. I wish I had known now years ago about GNUstep earlier. I took a path of learning FreeBSD deeper instead in 2004 when I started my career. I contributed to PCBSD as I learned programming in 2013 which eventually brought me to making FuryBSD for a short time.

When I started FuryBSD which was a livecd creator for FreeBSD that made it easy for others to spin up projects Probono noticed and started reaching out, helping me making some great contributions. It became the basis for the current GhostBSD LiveCD, HelloSystem, I believe RavynOS, and FyneDesk used it or at least were also using it in the past.

Probono blew me away with his work on LiveSTEP, and it just kind of stuck with me. I ended up silently carrying it forward, and getting back in touch after I realized what we could do with it. I recently gave Probono ownership for the GitHub org, and full creative control so I could focus on harder functional parts like a truly integrated WindowManager. It's all just been somewhat a miracle, and a matter of timing lining up I suppose. I am very much looking forward to seeing the cool things we can do together in 2026!

[lproven]

> I am absolutely blown away to have the author of AppImage (Probono) partnering with me

:-)

> which eventually brought me to making FuryBSD for a short time.

Ahaaaa. I did not realise that. Perhaps you should mention that in a FAQ or something? I think tying the different projects together like that would make it clear there is a quite considerable bit of history in here.

> I am very much looking forward to seeing the cool things we can do together in 2026!

Kudos for the positivity.

I left the GNUstep community a year or so back, after the admins got angry with me for daring to have opinions about the project that differ from theirs.

I think that as well as (1) a set of development libraries, it's also (2) a quite impressive set of apps, (3) an app packaging format, and perhaps most importantly (4) a quite complete desktop environment. They only seem to care about #1 and regard points 2-4 as annoying distractions.

For what it's worth, I know of two other active, current GNUstep-based desktop environments, which have slightly different focuses.

1. Ondrej Florian's GSDE: https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html

I've written a bit about this:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_deskto...

I had great difficulty getting it to build on Debian 13, but I should try again at some point.

2. Sergii Stoian's NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

Slightly more mature but Stoian's been distracted recently by Russia invading his country, so it's not seen much work of late.

[malco_2001]

Apologies I am not familiar with how to quote back here. I'll just try to stay in order. I think that is a great suggestion to try to document the history of how Gershwin came to be. I'll put some thought into how to do that soon.

We do largely operate outside of GNUstep. Now we approach it like let us be the desktop, let them be the core libs. My take is I do think GNUstep should be marketed as more of a cross platform solution to build applications than anything else. You are more than welcome to come discuss ideas with us at Gershwin anytime.

GSDE (Screenshot.app), more so NextSpace a lot of things do not work with a lot of modifications on FreeBSD for example and I found the build systems unexpectedly difficult. I am a fan of the efforts otherwise and will try to make Gershwin components like WindowManager.app something they could use if they want to make use of in the future. I think each project has a place, and a role in promoting GNUstep. I wish they each had Live ISO's with installers. There is also agnostep now that looks promising by the way. https://github.com/pcardona34/agnostep

[malco_2001]

Liam also something you may be interested in:

https://youtu.be/DDwLzy8map8

Probono gave a very good presentation today with slides at the GNUstep meeting and we also both did some demos of things like Ladybird, restored spatial mode and more.