Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

GNUStep is a good example that the bare bones language and compiler being open source it is not enough, when everything else doesn't come along.

Saying this as someone that used Afterstep and Windowmaker alongside GNUStep, and did seat a few times on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM.

Last time I checked was at the level of OS X Panther, and modern Objective-C still wasn't supported.

20-25 years ago, one of the problem GNUStep had is it was never packaged in the Linux distros. You had to compile everything.

One of the reason might have been GCC refused to include the Objective C extensions or something like that. I vaguely remember there might have been some legal concerns.

Maybe someone can clarify this.

But damn GNUStep was fast, snappy and a much better platform than let's say Gnome at the time. There was simply no comparison.

You could take a GNUStep app like Mail.app and just compile in Apple IDE and run it on Mac OS X (but the opposite wasn't possible).

It was one of the most impressive Free Software project out there at the time.

Debian woody (2002) shipped gnustep. I tried it back then, but as far as I remember, it was weird enough that anybody who didn't have NEXTSTEP experience would bounce right off. The floating menus, the weird scrollbars, etc. There were also no non-trivial applications that I can remember.

People back then were looking for something that would be familiar to Windows/Mac users. GNUStep (at least at the time) was not interested in being that.