This initial preview was intended to get people’s attention who have tried GNUstep. I was looking to get more contributors and more engagement, and it’s working. I am aiming first to make a daily driver environment for developers that myself and just a few others are already using. A couple of fixes are already in ghostbsd testing repo for now that will land in stable soon is when you close GNUstep apps when windows are closed, and the XFCE desktop menu will no longer appear in the global menu.
I have a new wrapper generator that uses FreeBSDs kqueue to monitor applications more reliably. It also allows non GNUstep apps to be activated and minimized windows can be restored from dock. I have had people testing for over a month and I tested for a month before. So based on that those kinds of subtle things like a better Firefox wrapper will land in stable updates soon as it will be the next thing I push.
Meanwhile. There are a ton of other things becoming ready from Probono who is contributing. A native panel replacement, system preferences items for boot environments, display settings, startup disk, global shortcuts, the new login manager, assistants for bhyve, media creator tools.
I am working on some bigger picture items like Gershwin software that centralize GNUstep applications and the integrated wrappers. That already works. I want it to be a contributor good first task for those looking to learn, help out. It will also allow new apps to show up independent of GhostBSD releases. I want to work on the UX a bit more, make wrappers install packages before moving it forward.
Further out my longer term item is I am making progress on a native window manager based on xcbkit. I have fixed window stacking, window tiles now work, I need to fix duplicate titles on maximize, get GSTheme decorations working to replace the Cairo decorations or some kind of theme sync for the shorter term. I want non GNUstep apps to look like GNUstep apps exactly and to remove the need for GTK decorations.
Hopefully every 30 days or so there should be some kind of fixes and improvements releasing. The incubation period for certain items like window manager will be extended longer over less intrusive items.
