![]() Florian has put together a collection of GNUstep components, including some drawn from NEXTSPACE, to create the GNUstep Desktop Environment. This is where Ondrej Florian, also known as OnFlApp, comes in. We are happy to report that Stoian is alive and well, but what with his country being invaded and so on, he's been a bit too busy to work on his project in recent years. Sadly, development stalled a couple of years ago, before CentOS Linux' premature end-of-life. So a few years ago, a Ukrainian programmer called Sergii Stoian started to build a modern Linux desktop environment based around the GNUstep components running on top of CentOS Linux, which he called NEXTSPACE. ![]() GSDE brings the classic NeXTstep look and feel to Debian, complete with a whole suite of useful apps - even including a browser Its inclusion in Debian 12 means that Lomiri (and Mir) are now available to a lot more people without building from source, and we hope that this will lead to more development and increased usability soon. The reports that we've heard about using it on smartphones, for example on the old-mobe-centric postmarketOS, are much more encouraging. With the best will in the world, the desktop version is in an extremely preliminary state: it's not ready for use. In an bare-metal install, it did succeed as far as displaying a desktop, but the panel lacked any controls and almost no applications would open. However, you can open a bunch of terminals, and for some Linux users, that may be enough. The environment was primarily built for tablets, and assumes a single fixed resolution. Most X11 applications wouldn't launch for us, although we did get the Netsurf web browser running successfully.Īt present, Lomiri is both bare-bones and incomplete for instance, we couldn't find a way to change the screen mode. That, unfortunately, is about as good as it gets: for instance, the web browser has never opened successfully for us on any platform, which also means that you can't access the environment's built-in help. The best results that we had were in Virtualbox on x86-64, where the environment launches successfully, and displays its dock and top panel, complete with controls. Lomiri is an option in Debian Bookworm, but while it installs and runs, it's not ready for daily use yet ![]() Installation of Lomiri also installs Canonical's Mir display server, which it requires, and we found that if we had another desktop already installed, Lomiri failed to launch. From our experiments so far, we advise starting with a bare installation of Debian 12, with no other graphical user interface or display server installed. We've tried it on a few different machines now, on both Arm64 and on x86-64, the latter on both bare metal and in a virtual machine. If you're curious, this means that it's very easy to give it a try – you can install it with a single command: It's not one of the desktops offered in the Debian installer, but the Lomiri desktop, complete with Mir display server, is in the Bookworm's repositories. ![]() We misunderstood what this implied: he didn't mean that it now runs on Debian, but rather that as of Debian 12 "Bookworm", it is part of Debian. What made this possible to get it into Debian was the effort we did on renaming and dropping legacy dependencies. Along with changing its name, now it's much more cross-platform, but we must confess that we missed the full significance of what lead developer Marius Gripsård told us at the time: As we covered back in February, Lomiri's Ubuntu dependencies – and trademarks – have been cleaned up. Lomiri is the now cross-platform desktop environment that was formerly called Unity 8, which Canonical cancelled in 2017. Maybe the DBUS developers have a point: desktops are like buses… you wait for ages, then two of them come along at once: Lomiri on Debian, and GSDE, the GNUstep Desktop Environment.īoth the new offerings focus on Debian for now, although that may well change in time, and although both are quite different to more mainstream offerings, they each have roots in tech that's been around for some time.
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