NuTek Mac comes

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
> I vaguely recall seeing some in a mag at the time. It looked a bit like 
> Mac apps running on CDE, if I remember correctly. The in-window menus 
> were weird (for a Mac) and made it look more Windows-like.

That's about what I'd expect. I wonder if it could crash as much as OS 8.1 
on my Quadra 700. That's a tough act to follow. :-)

> Of course, today, GNUstep is something very broadly akin to this, and 
> almost nobody pays any attention to it. :-( There have been a couple of 
> LiveCDs, never updated, and TTBOMK nobody has ever produced a 
> GNUstep-based Linux distro.

IIRC, there was an alpha-quality liveCD for a while. I never could get 
that excited about NeXT, Objective C, or any of that Steve-Jobs-in-limbo 
kruft (and by extension GNUStep, either). I saw a Color Turbo slab for 
sale recently:

http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5677975263.html

I passed. That machine is sweet, for what it is. However, like most 
hobbyists I tend to gravitate toward machines I actually used "back in the 
day". In the 90's I was a student, mostly. There was no-freakin-way I was 
going to afford a NeXT machine. They were prohibitively expensive (or at 
least that's my recollection): even more so than high-end Macs. Plus, back 
in the 1990's I met a couple of people who did own them, and they were 
*super-snobby* about it, which also turned me off. It's a bit like BMW 
owners today. I don't care if they put 1000 HP in them, even most of their 
sportscars ('cept the whacky hybrid) still looks to me like mom's car 
leaving the tennis courts at the country club to head out to a PTA 
meeting. I'm guessing I will never be a BMW fan or a NeXT bigot.

GNUStep wants to clone their whole API and the UI, as you know. I wish 
them luck but it's nothing that exciting to me personally. It's 
interesting that you bring it up now that Linux is committing anti-UNIX 
heresy on a regular basis. Maybe GNUStep's future is now brighter? It's 
still very fiddly and immature the last time I looked at it, but in terms 
of the overall approach, it does appear to have some nice plumbing and 
backing-ideas. I'd rather see GNUStep succeed than GNOME or KDE (fantasy 
on my part), honestly. Those two are just hopeless chaos-impregnated 
hairballs with ridiculous dependency chains which are starting to pollute 
working/good/not-at-all-broken areas of the *OS* at this point. I've never 
liked either project (though I could almost stand GNOME for short periods 
in the early days). Then again, I'm not one of those "Linux world 
domination" types who want to somehow capture every user, no matter how 
low we have to set the bar to snag them.

Google Android has shown that folks can (successfully) bastardize 
Linux/UNIX into something very weird, proprietary, custom, and no longer 
even resembling UNIX, much. So, now that this sort of blaspheming is 
normal, why not try to make a *decent* desktop OS from it, eh? Lord knows, 
Ubuntu is trying.  Who knows, maybe Android will become that. I'll catch 
the screenshots... I'd rather not use an OS where soooooo many of the apps 
are pre-infected with some type of malware or does things behind the 
scenes I wouldn't approve of (yet the "store" claims they are "virus" 
free, eh?). Funny how they can redefine "virus" or "malware" as it suits 
them (ie.. corporate sponsors say it's safe? Oh, ohhhhhkay then, we don't 
mind if you steal an address book, log keystrokes, or secretly GPS track 
folks - just don't replicate). The countermeasures for these issues seem 
to me to be weak and ineffective, so far.

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to trust commercial OS's or software at 
this point, no matter how much bling they cop. I still carry my Philips 
Xenium phone running Symbian (and lasting about 20 days before needing a 
charge). Tastes great, and less filling.

I'd love to see a commercial phone OS project start with the mentality of 
the OpenBSD project. I'd be willing to try something like that! Features 
like totally secure defaults, zero trust for basically anyone or anything, 
secure OS protections that are difficult to override by silly apps, etc.. 
would be welcome.

> I've always suspect that, if by some massive effort, ReactOS succeeded 
> and produced something that was usefully stable and could run Windows 
> apps usefully, Microsoft's attack lawyers would *vaporize* it leaving 
> nothing but a smoking stain on the ground.

I have absolutely zero doubt that you are quite correct. If it took 
.000001% bit of market share away from them, they'd have a nuclear 
freak-out and figure out a way to hybridize ninjas with their corporate 
lawyers and send them out riding elephant sharks for vengeance. What would 
be hilarious (but again fantasy) is if ReactOS had a breakthrough in terms 
of functionality that got them very close (say 99% or better compat). Then 
if they sat on it for a while, getting it right before subsequently 
release it the genie would be out of the bottle. If it worked 
compatibility-wise even as well as XP or Win7, it'd be a hit and crimp the 
snot out of M$. Of course, they'd probably find some way to DCMA it out of 
existence. It just depends on how widespread the release got and how 
illegal it was to own it.

> Saying that, I'm amazed at how well WINE works these days.

It's impressive when it works. There are still a large number of 
applications that don't work, too. Even bread-and-butter apps like the 
latest Firefox often crash and burn. I have seen a few that are rock 
solid, Office 97, Winamp, and a few other "gold" (winehq) or better 
certified applications. I run RegexBuddy sometimes in Wine and as you say, 
no problems. 

That's not to say the WINE team isn't amazing. They are. It's just a tough 
slog. 

-Swift