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Yes

It is actually quite nice. I tend to fall back on GNUstep everytime the sluggishness of Gnome makes me go nuts

You might want to take a look at étoilé:

http://www.etoile-project.org/etoile/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main...

and from OSNews recently:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17381/Etoile-Live-CD-0.2-Developer-...
http://xdev.org/etoile/

I dunno aboot that.

But this one I like: http://www.stud.fit.vutbr.cz/~xcapmi00/etoile/

"excuse my ignorance but does anyone actualy use this?"

There are some GNUstep based applications available, such as:

gnustep-cdplayer GNUstep CD player with CDDB support
gnustep-notebook: A place to store notes in an organized manner
gnustep-wrapper: Create GNUstep app-wrappers of non-GNUstep applications
gnustep-ftp: Compact and handy FTP client for GNUstep
gnustep-slideshow: SlideShow Viewer
gnustep-preview: Simple image viewer
gnustep-mplayer: GNUstep port of MPlayerOSX
gnustep-ticker: RSS monitor for RSS and Atom feeds
ruby18-gnustep A Ruby interface to the GNUstep development environment

I don't think anybody even knows them. On the other hand, GNUstep can evolve to a desktop environment that can compete with KDE or Gnome, at last in the professional sector. And the ability to use GNUstep based applications on UNIX and on Apple systems is very interesting in terms of interoperability.

Because of the intended MacOS X compatibility and the Objective C based framework I'm considering GNUstep being the base for one of my next projects, but I'm still thinking Gtk + C would be better... I've not decided yet.

As far as I know, the window manager WindowMaker (a GNUstep compliant window manager "cloning" NeXTstep) is the official window manager of GNUstep. NB: WindowMaker != GNUstep. BTW, I'm using it right now. :-)

Maybe you're interested in having a look at some GNUstep stuff? They even offer a live file system CD iso image for download.

Finally, to answer your question in a few words: No, no one actually uses this. :-)

"You are all individuals.
- Yes, we are all individuals.
- No, I'm not. "

And, of course, GNUstep does not have a significant oh joy oh market share. Market share beats everything. :-)

GNUstep is a great framework, a valuable platform for application development, no matter what I say.

GNUStep was my primary environment for a year: then I got a Mac. I am setting up an email server now, and if I need a GUI for some reason, I will use the GNUStep environment again. I love it for its simplicity and speed. Its the one DE that I did not need to force to my workflow.
I've used XFCE (Made it look like BeOS), GNOME(I only like it with XFWM as the manager), KDE (ugh! Used it when GNOME was trashier), and blackbox(when all I did was code. Its wonderful for that... keeps you focused, but a pain to configure).
Sometimes I wished MacOS X worked like GNUStep does (I know it used to).

Sometimes I wished MacOS X worked like GNUStep does (I know it used to).

Hmm, I need some elightment about this. I found that Cocoa along with XCode is working very well. GNUStep = Cocoa - Aqua (that's ugly). And I experienced that installing GNUStep requires big effort, like Aaron Hillegass said in his book.

GNUStep seems to be based more directly on NeXT/OPENStep, while OS X took some inspiration from those, but on a lot of points felt they could do better and made a bunch of changes. OS X has been diverging more and more over the years. Many times those changes where for the better and sometimes (in my opinion) not.

OS X made its series of changes, first, to satisfy the legacy Mac OS user base. I dealt with that for over a year in-house. It resulted in a lot of ease-of-use in NeXTStep to take a back seat.

To answer your question, does anybody use GNUStep, I can most definitly say YES.

I work at the physics department of a major university and we are developing a series of applications to interface with lab equipment, and all the development is being done is objective-c and Cocoa / GNUStep.

It is a fairly straight forward process to re-compile a Cocoa application under GNUStep, it is an excellent cross platform solution for Mac and Linux (I do not do Windows so I do not know how well GNUStep work there).

I am also working on a set of numerical quantum and fluid dynamics simulations where the visualization / user interface is using opengl with Cocoa / GNUStep and the numerics are C / lapack, and so far I have not run into any real compatibility issues between GNUStep and Cocoa.

In a previous life, I was forced to use Windows and develop in MFC and C-sharp, what a nightmare that was. It is a true joy to develop in Objective-C / Cocoa / GNUStep, far superior to any other enviornment I have worked in (well QT is not bad, but still not as nice as Cocoa).

My company is using GNUstep to develop a commercial long-range data multiplexer equipment configuration and monitoring application. It is a distributed client-server system, so yes, GNUstep can be used to do more than simple stuff. We've also written our IPTV solution in it (live streaming server, VoD server and a few other pieces of IPTV headend software).

It is a true joy to develop in Objective-C / Cocoa / GNUStep, far superior to any other enviornment I have worked in (well QT is not bad, but still not as nice as Cocoa).

Actually Obj-C's syntax is not conformtable. I can't see the benefit of the promised source-code readability. It is just a pain if you have too many nested brackets. I tried Ruby-Cocoa, though the syntax is more conformtable, but the very low performance make me back to pure Obj-C.

I agree with you here. I find Objective-C's syntax to be fairly verbose. People chastise Java for having too verbose a syntax, yet I've found that Objective-C is worse when it comes to verbosity.

There is a big difference between verbosity and readability. Take Python for example. It's not that verbose, yet it's highly readable.

Are those shell scripts you mention wrappers to source GNUstep.sh before launching the actual application? If so, do the sourcing from .xinitrc and you'll be fine.

I don't know much about it, but I think that it's easier to compile GNUstep apps for OSX than the other way around, e.g. if you use XCode, it'll be harder to make it into a GNUstep application since some things in XCode are closed, AFAIK. Plus a lot of OSX APIs are not available in GNUstep.

But it's fully possible to have fairly advanced apps such as GNUmail working on both platforms.

http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail.data/screenshots/v1.2.0p...

http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail.data/screenshots/v1.2.0p...

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Writing_portable_code has some information about porting to and from OS X.

"Why is that people can't type “Mac OS X”?

It's not “MacOS-X”. It's not “Mac OS-X”. It's not “MacOSX” and it's not “MacOS X”."

Thank you for this correction. I always thought it was "MacOS X" because of the previous form "MacOS 9", but I'll use the correct / official form "Mac OS X" from now.

May I ask you if it's "e mail", "e-mail" or "email" in AE / BE? (In german, it's "E-Mail", not "Email", "eMail", "e-Mail" or "e Mail".) And, yes, I know, this is OSNews and not TranslateMe. :-)

I second that, GNUstep app deployment on Windows is in a bad state and needs improvements. App deployment in *nix-es is possible and functional (although you need to compose a special bundle with all the libs inside, but it works).

In Windows, if you're only using the FoundationKit (i.e. non-graphical part), the process is pretty straightforward - copy DLLs, launch executable, done. I've written a small Objective-C + OpenGL + GLUT game at my school, and it was more portable than most of my fellow students' games (written in things like Java or C#).

However, after rummaging through CocoTron's source, you will realise that it's lacking a LOT of functionality, GNUstep already provides.

A lot of CocoTron's classes are just dummies with no operational code whatsoever.