Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Project status and basic info

  • Site is HTTP-only; some use an archive mirror or GitHub org to browse code.
  • Most of Étoilé’s code has been untouched for ~a decade; a tiny subproject saw commits in 2024 but the DE itself is considered dead.

Vision and promise of Étoilé

  • Seen as a very ambitious attempt to go beyond NeXTstep/macOS while building on OpenStep via GNUstep.
  • Embraced Smalltalk-like, componentized, end‑user‑programmable ideas and novel concepts like DVCS-backed document/object persistence (CoreObject).
  • Some commenters view it as a “road not taken” that could have offered a serious alternative to KDE/GNOME/macOS.

GNUstep: strengths, stagnation, and timing

  • Praised historically as fast, snappy, with strong tools (including Interface Builder-like Gorm) and an elegant API.
  • Criticisms: fragile/bug‑prone, stuck on old Objective‑C, weak modern ObjC support, little UX evolution, poor integration with mainstream Linux, ambiguous identity (SDK vs desktop).
  • Several think it missed its window: it wasn’t ready when ex‑NeXT developers might have adopted it, and KDE/GNOME took the oxygen. Lack of distro packaging early on didn’t help.

UX comparisons: macOS, GNOME, Elementary, etc.

  • Some lament that no Linux DE matches macOS polish or its “simple on the surface, deep over time” UX with strong discoverability and stability.
  • GNOME/Pantheon/Elementary criticized either for over‑simplification (little to learn beyond the first week), inconsistency, or visual polish without good use of screen space.
  • Frequent complaint: Linux desktops change UX too often; desire expressed for a DE that “locks” its design and then only optimizes/bugfixes, like XFCE/Cinnamon have accidentally done.

Related research and successors

  • One of Étoilé’s main developers moved on to CHERI, explicitly trying to enable safe composition of small, expressive components with strong isolation/sharing guarantees.
  • Future work may build on Arcan; some find its documentation hard to penetrate, intentionally targeting deep experts.
  • Other Smalltalk/Lisp-inspired directions mentioned: Pharo, Glamorous Toolkit, Newspeak, Objective‑S/Objective‑Smalltalk.

Other GNUstep desktops and nostalgia

  • Actively maintained or newer GNUstep-based environments: NEXTSPACE, GSDE, Gershwin, plus Window Maker setups and WMlive.
  • Some still love GNUStep/Window Maker aesthetics; others reminisce about CDE and older UNIX desktops.

Fragmentation and “one framework” debate

  • One commenter wishes GNUStep had become a single standard Linux desktop framework; others strongly defend plurality and cite governance, politics, and history (e.g., GNOME’s shifts) as reasons unification is unlikely or undesirable.