As an exercise, I threw OpenBSD and GNUStep on a machine the other day. I wouldn’t say GNUStep provides the best Free/Open desktop, but I want to believe that it could.

The thing is, many of the modern Linux desktops seem to be heavily wedded to a lot of dconf and systemd infrastructure. OpenBSD has managed to build analogs for enough of the heavily Linux-centric infrastructure that Gnome 3 depends on, but man it’s clear that Gnome 3 was written with Linux and only Linux in mind.

I didn’t see KDE in the OpenBSD ports when I looked, and I suspect it too is because KDE has become wedded to Linux-only services.

XFCE remains the most portable full-featured Desktop environment and runs well on OpenBSD.

But GNUStep... GNUStep is my biggest regret. GNUStep isn’t entirely comparable to XFCE, because GNUStep isn’t a desktop. It’s more like all GTK plus dconf plus all the desktop services required for interaction between GUI apps plus a uniform display layer.

In short, GNUStep is more or less like Cocoa from macOS. Add GWorkspace, and you have a solid reimplementation of macOS’s Finder.

I wish GNUStep had caught on or that someone would inject new life into it. There are apps that compile on both GNUstep and macOS. For whatever reason macOS seems to attract better desktop apps—both Free and commercial.

Had GNUStep and not KDE or Gnome become the defacto *Nix desktop, I imagine people would be writing macOS apps for free on Linux, and macOS users would be recompiling apps to run on Linux... and not just Linux, but all the platforms that GNUStep supports, like OpenBSD and Windows.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and why I thought to write this, is because GTK vs QT both feel like lower potential toolkits. And GNUStep also feels very lightweight and portable.