NEXTSPACE is a desktop environment that brings a NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux. I try to keep the user experience as close as possible to the original NeXT’s OS. It is developed according to the “OpenStep User Interface Guidelines“.
I want to create a fast, elegant, reliable, and easy to use desktop environment with maximum attention to user experience (usability) and visual maturity. In the future I would like to see it as a platform where applications will be running with a taste of NeXT’s OS. Core applications such as Login, Workspace, and Preferences are the base for future application development and examples of style and application integration methods.
NEXTSPACE is not just a set of applications loosely integrated to each other. It is a core OS with frameworks, mouse cursors, fonts, colors, animations, and everything I think will help users to be effective and happy.
KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and later MATE and Cinnamon have sucked up so much of the Linux desktop space that there’s very little room left for anything else. You’re either mainly a Qt desktop, or mainly a GTK+ desktop, and anything that isn’t based on either of those toolkits will either waste time recreating lots of wheels, or accept that half – or more – of your applications are Qt or GTK+-based, at which point the temptation to run one of the aforementioned desktop environments becomes quite strong.
This project, while very welcome and having my full support and attention, will have a very hard time, but that’s not going to deter me from being hopeful against all odds. Reading through the documentation and descriptions, it does seem the developers have the right attitude. They’re not claiming to take on the other players – they just want to make something that appeals to and works for them.
Technically great work, but ….. meh!
There are probably a thousand good reasons to use this desktop that aren’t trivial or shallow, but none of them will get me across the line with my end users. Vintage appearance just doesn’t cut it, and reality is functionality means nothing to most of them, that antique appearance if it’s not an aquarium screensaver is not like a finely finished desk or antique cue rack! Most of my end users are more Leslie Knope than they are Ron Swanson, then want bling, new and fresh!
Sorry for the cynicism, but a phrase like visual maturity usually means rubber stamp bland! The sort of interface you find on an Apple sweatshop production line, no distractions, just do it!
However, potentially so functional for something like a Raspberry Pi or other SBC!
You just need DECENT and COHERENT theming enough to be taken seriously, and that’s all, look at http://etoileos.com/, we don’t all need glassy surfaces, material design, flat widgets blah blah (you can no longer distinguish a button nor a link from something that is not, that’s the wrong path taken a long long time ago). Even Oberon OS or BeOS were all square widgets and it were a lot better looking than Win95. At language level, Objective-C deserves more respect and popularity, based on pioneer technologies ahead of their time, C++ is an abomination created by mankind (and this post is not about C++), period, and C is well… just C. I think this project is a great starting point for an alternative paradigm and a breath of fresh air in this days…
I’d really like Etolie would get a bigger audience.
Indeed. Weren’t we complaining about the lack of experimentation in GUIs a few years ago?
Exploring the past is a good way to find a path in the future. We can see what worked, what they were trying todo, and add in the knowledge we’ve acquired over the intervening years.
With FOSS systems we can explore things the major OSs can’t. Like not throwing out the HIG guidelines because applications need to differentiate themselves with alien themes and weird workflows, or enforcing a particular windowing paradigm.
I’ve never tried Objective-C. C, C++, and lots of C-like languages. What makes it really good versus newer things like Swift, Go, or something functional?
cpcf,
You’ve got to quit being such a cynical man.
[/hypocrisy]
When I think of these SBCs, I always think of automation potential rather than desktop computing. Is that just me?
Yeah, I think the same Alfman. I don’t recall ever seeing someone use a DE on something like an RPi but then perhaps it’s popular in less developed countries? Even then there’s a ton of other super-light DEs to choose from.
Fun project nonetheless.
@Under-phil Regarding less developed countries, what I’ve seen in the past was mainly pirated Windows XP and 7. But now, ever more people do everything with their smartphone, to the point where desktops and laptops are actually becoming less common than they were in the past decade. Instead of a scanned copy of a receipt or document, they send a grey-blue, poorly lighted, crooked snapshot of the document lying on the table. Instead of a formal document drafted in (also pirated) Word, they send a million WhatsApp messages. File manager? Nahhh, just convulsively flick your thumb 25 times in the WhatsApp history of 10 or 15 comments until you find the photo or attachment you’re looking for. I am extremely alarmed at the way the whole desktop computing paradigm is rapidly being thrown out the window. (Pun not intended… ) Maybe I am a bit of a luddite, but it’s just ridiculous how perfectly good computing solutions are being discarded in favor of vastly inferior technologies and all of the haphazard, bad habits that go along with them.
I used an RPi as my primary desktop for a summer when A/C wasn’t available and my other desktop was a space heater. It was slow, but usable.
tidux,
Haha, awesome! I’ve booted up some of these thinking “wow, this is a real desktop computer running real desktop software”. Of course the specs are poor. It bugs me not to have high end ARM PCs & mainboards in desktop PC form factors. If someone were to sell an mini ATX form factor ARM desktop with all the performance/memory/storage/etc of a normal desktop computer, I’d be on board!
Aside: I don’t have A/C here, I view it as somewhat irresponsible in light of global warming & carbon footprint so I’d be hypocritical if I used one. Admittedly there are maybe a handful of sweat filled days/nights that are torturous. It comes down to creature comforts versus ecological sustainability, tough choice, haha.
I used a RPi 3+ as a desktop for a little bit, it didn’t have enough RAM to run a modern desktop stack.
It probably would have been different had I run something like Openbox instead of Gnome3, but the real killer was modern JS heavy webpages plus Electron apps. To be fair, those two are problems on when I have 16GB of RAM, and 2GB of RAM on the RPi didn’t stand a chance. XD
Definitely. It’s been a while since I’ve had to profile all of my desktop apps and really count RAM usage. Of course, I’ve picked an old, USFF i5-4xxx with 4GB running OpenBSD for this experiment rather then a RPi.
But how much resources are you REALLY saving with this thing? Has anybody done any tests? Because I’ve installed Peppermint OS on a truly ancient AMD netbook (which is probably weaker than a modern Pi as CPU designs have come a long way from 2012) which uses LXDE and…it really doesn’t use hardly any CPU while looking very nice. And on the memory side I have all the bling bling on and its using something like 700mb? I’m sure if I turned off some of the visual effects I could probably cut that in half and again it would still look really nice and be user friendly.
So I have to wonder if its a solution in search of a problem as even the super cheap SOCs have so much computing power and memory compared to when NeXT was a thing I have to wonder if the NeXT UI has any real practical use in 2020. I mean if you want to go insanely low on CPU/Mem you’d probably be better off going ASM like Kolibri, and if you have a system with enough power to run Linux? I seriously doubt the difference between this UI footprint and say LXDE or Icewm is gonna be a deal breaker.
The DE could be a dealbreaker. The DE is not the only thing you’re going to be running; most people like to run an application or two.
I look at the compute potential, and I’m dismayed by the focus on automation. Everything hanging off of the USB bus? No builtin serial port or IPMI? Not using UEFI for booting? I’m still waiting for them to get serious with the hardware, but that’s just me. Everyone else seems to be fine with it.
Anyway, the RPi is setup to be a desktop board more then a server board. It’s a video chip with a CPU strapped to it after all. The original demos showcase the graphics ability of the board, and the projects which use it as a headless server are not using it’s strength.
Flatland_Spider,
I find most SBCs do have a built in serial port. I guess you are specifically referring to the old 9 pin +/-25V rs232 connectors? That’s true, most SBCs and microcontrollers use TTL voltage level serial ports (0 to 5V)…
https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/215
Quite a few peripherals and serial cables are compatible with TTL level serial ports. It’s just that the high voltages and large connectors are less practical since both the host and peripheral devices would need voltage converters.
The Max232 is a very popular chip for converting the voltage levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAX232
UEFI is fairly complex compared to coreboot. UEFI is the norm in PCs whereas coreboot is more prevalent on embedded platforms. I don’t really have a strong preference either way….the most important thing is that it works and isn’t locked down.
https://linuxhint.com/coreboot-vs-uefi/
It’s interesting you bring up IPMI, I wouldn’t really think to use IPMI on an embedded device, but now that you say it I could see the appeal. Couldn’t you install the necessary daemons yourself? Many PC don’t support this ether even though sometimes I wish they would.
I’d like to see a good ARM server board, not necessarily from raspberry pi though. I’ll hand it to them, they’ve accomplished their goal of being extremely cheap, but I’d also like to see high end ARM server boards with much power and desktop grade cooling.
Yes. 🙂 Or just some port builtin because I’m probably going to want that while also not wanting to carry around an adapter. The adapters are like $5, and cases don’t make provisions for them.
Oh yeah, coreboot. I’d generally prefer coreboot/oreboot/libreboot over UEFI. There would need to be better support for the BSDs, or vice versa, for it to be a standard though.
Possibly with OpenIPMI. I was thinking of a BMC like iDRAC, iLO, or others. A BMC is kind of a security hole for desktops and laptops, but it’s super handy with servers. Especially now that everyone has the RedFish API.
Are you thinking of SNMP? The Net-SNMP daemon works great. 🙂
Most of my wishlist is server related. 🙂 I’d like barebones compute units which I can build things on and not take up lots of space or power.
Something like this? https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-workstation/
I’ve looked for ARM server equipment, and it’s still pretty rare.
Flatland_Spider,
I get that, and I find sideband management extremely handy to have. In fact I just bought another lantronix spider to make up for the fact that some of my computers lack remote administration capabilities. I absolutely hate that these things are proprietary though. I’ve got a few systems with dracs and others using Intel AMT, but in every case the proprietary firmware is a source of bugs, vulnerabilities and stupid limitations. I wish that the sideband computers themselves (the BMC/drac/AMT/etc computer) would just run a lightweight open source linux image and get out of the way with their proprietary crap. I’m really tired of this, if you couldn’t tell, haha. I want to vote with my wallet, but all too often that’s impossible because there are zero open source options.
I actually don’t have much eqipment that supports SNMP. Alot of my consumer/prosumer grade hardware doesn’t support SNMP and I’m not generally willing to pay extra for it. For example, my switches are managed, but not SNMP capable. I do have an SNMP capable remote IP PDU though and I admit it’s much easier to program for than “interactive” alternatives.
Wow that’s a great find! Thank you for mentioning it.
This is awesome. I’m already thinking of applications. The 4 X 10gb SFP ports made my eyes light up 🙂
I wish it took regular DIMMs instead of SO-DIMMSs, but not a show stopper.
The one thing that probably is a show stopper for me is this
Unfortunately this is a big problem with a lot of ARM boards, I don’t want to be dependent on the manufacture to provide linux support. This isn’t usually a problem with x86 hardware; I can buy almost any x86 server board and be confident that it will run my own mainline linux distro indefinitely without any fuss. The lack of portability & consistency has been my biggest ongoing frustration with ARM devices. Granted, some users don’t care since they don’t intend to run anything other than what it came with.
Yeah, I dislike not being able to replace things when they become limiting or outdated. I’ve had this conversation many times about car infotainment systems.
OpenBMC (https://www.openbmc.org/) looks to be BMC OS replacement we want. 🙂
I like SNMP for monitoring purposes. It’s nice especially when the piece of equipment is basically a black box, like switches and routers.
The Honeycomb board is very new, and Solid Run is still working on it. It’s been featured on Phoronix, and one of the engineers on the project has commented in the forum about their plans. I’m getting pretty good vibes from them, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Exactly. Right now, ARM’s ease of use does not compare favorably to x86, and it’s a barrier.
I didn’t know this project existed! It looks great.
I love the NeXTSTEP user interface design. Or, more specifically, I hate the taskbar that was introduced in Windows 95, and that has perpetuated in so many user interfaces since then. Something about seeing a tiny representation of the windows I have currently open all the time really bothers me. I think it’s a confusing waste of space.
I used (and loved) Window Maker for years as my primary user interface. I only moved away from it because of the tiny little bugs, and lack of development that existed at the time.
I’ve moved on to Openbox, but still with a very Window Maker style user interface: a full, blank deskstop, right click to open the applications menu, and left click to open the minimized windows menu. That’s it.
I hope this project continues to mature!
meh… They could put their energy into the OpenCDE project… But they want their own thing, I wont fight it.
OpenCDE 😉
– released as open source in 2012
– last commit on Github: 2012
– website: some Chinese ads
Interesting that it took so long until it showed up on OSnews. The project is now in its fifth year …
It’s a big world out there.
Wow, nice to see someone remembered when user interface guidelines were a thing!
I always liked NeXTstep, it was such a revelation when it showed up in the labs at university.
I know right. 🙂
It’s funny. HIGs are a big thing in the UI/UX community these days. They are “inventing” HIGs 20 years after trashing them. XD
Flatland_Spider,
I concur as well.
The industry worked so hard on UI standard decades ago, yet all that’s been thrown away on trendy interfaces that do away with design standards and almost takes pride in a lack of discoverability.
Gnome had (has?) an HIG. But yeah, I always liked the NeXTStep look/feel. Loved Afterstep and wmaker. Which made me wonder, how is this different than wmaker?
I’d LOVE to see Amiga Workbench recreated on top of Linux. But then the Amiga Workbench has some oddities to it for sure. But I love the styling.
Windowmaker is only a window manager. Sergio, the author of NextSpace, is trying to setup a complete desktop reference implementation for GNUstep. For now, he has almost finished the login panel, the filemanager (Workspace.app, which runs with a modified version of windowmaker for windows and dock management), a terminal, a control panel for the whole system (screen, sound, login, devices, network…) , a text editor and an image viewer, and 2 or 3 other utilities. He has integrated its desktop with different libraries (alsa and pulseaudio, networkmanager, udisk). You can add to this ProjectCenter.app and Gorm.app, which are the standard gnustep apps for development and you will have a complete desktop to start writing gnustep sofware or porting osx apps.
Of course, if you don’t like the grey look of the default theme, you can switch to other gnustep themes.
Whenever a project like this, or perhaps Haiku, AmigaOS or even the Trinity desktop are posted there’s so many voices saying “what’s the point”, “who is going to use this?” or maybe even “my users want xxxxx, not this…”
Sometimes I swear that some nerds have lost the love of computers. There used to be a time when the computer itself was part of the (if not the whole) hobby. Not necessarily doing work with it, but enjoying tweaking it, tinkering with it and seeing what it could do. It wasn’t just a tool for work, but also a tool for learning, a tool for having nerdy fun, a tool even for nostalgia.
Maybe it’s just because the internet diversified but sometimes these kind of responses just take the fun out such projects. It doesn’t need a purpose or even a target audience. It exists, and if that’s fun for just one person then great. The developer doesn’t have to justify why it exists, or why he doesn’t “put his energy into an existing project” (which is another one I hear all the time).
Just stop analyzing and learn to enjoy computing again.