So.... Does anyone use AfterStep / used it?

So recently I started going through all the DE’s and WM’s I used to use and remembered that I have a laptop with AS installed on it. Its an embedded thing from like 2004 that has some form of linux on it and pretty much the same config as the default AS install I get when I pull if off the repo’s. Does anyone… use it? I know my boss loved it in HS but even I am having a hard time grasping it. It can’t be that hard, right?

Seems like something @ReeseRiverson might be into.

But, personally, I only used it once. And that was a long time ago when I installed arch… or maybe it was Gentoo. I would go back to it, since it reminds me of *box. But it seems to foreign to me out of the box.

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Yeah, well I think its TECHNICALLY a DE. I don’t think its a WM. But I’ve been looking at using something new for a while and its between Awesome, AS, or Pantheon. Pantheon has the edge out so far.

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The elementary team has been working wonders on that. Its very beautiful.

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I’ve not heard of it, so I just looked it up and I am quite intrigued by it.

http://www.afterstep.org/

Holy fuck my eyes are burning.

Latest Version 2.2.12 was released on June 10, 2013

Dead AF

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Theres not much that needs to be added to it. It pretty much does its job lol.

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Yeah but that UI is straight outta 1995 1991

even older than I thought

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1991 its based off of nextstep.

Did try afterstep many years ago.

you’re better off with Windowmaker, IMHO.

Similar look/feel, but plugs into GNUStep a bit better.

Is AfterStep a fork of GNUStep, or is it a fork of Windowmaker?
How do these pieces fit together?

Afterstep is a fork of FVWM (i may be showing my age here) and pre-dates GNUstep by a very long time. It’s purely an eye candy thing.

It was made to look like Nextstep (which was later renamed Openstep when it was available for intel back in the 90s), way back in the day before GNUstep was a project.

GNUstep/Windowmaker are intended to work like Nextstep in the back end as well (intent is to be programmed via objective-c, using nextstep like libraries, etc.). Windowmaker has sort of been adopted as the “Default” GNUStep window manager, and there’s a lot of crossover between the two. In fact Windowmaker is part of the GNUstep project.

GNUStep isn’t a window manager.

Think of GNUStep as being like the COCOA part of macOS (after all, Cocoa is descended directly from Nextstep itself)- all the libraries for building applications, and the objective-C runtime environment.

In theory, so long as you aren’t using any apple-specific libraries that were never included in Nextstep or Openstep, you should be able to reasonably easily port your code from the Mac to GNUStep, so long as it is written in Objective-C. Not sure if it supports swift at all yet. Though that is probably getting more difficult now with Apple changing cocoa so much in recent years and replacing heaps of old nextstep stuff.

Windowmaker is a window manager intended to play nicely in that environment and look like Next.

Afterstep is “just” a hacked version of FVWM that is made to look like Nexstep’s UI.

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