Hi, I am happy to see fellow-thinkers. GUIs are moving to a disaster. Windows 2000 was usable, heck even Windows 7, once its features are tuned, is a good and usable OS! But have you seen Windows 8? It is pure crap for desktop use. GNOME became a monstrum.. and Mac was nice... years ago. The latest version are full of stupid things, incoherencies.
When I used scientific stuff a couple of years ago, software was often written with a toolkit on Unix that oculd run on Solaris and Linux osing Motif and which gave windows-like calls and appearance, so that it oculd exist on windows too. It was commercial though, it wasn't wxWidgets Let me give my *personal* view. The only thing I like is GNUstep. It runs on BSDs, Linux and Solaris. It is nice to code GUIs in and being objective-c you know that porting to Mac is easy and even iOS could be not so bad. It works on windows, but you get compromises about the looks, but it usually works, I ported successfully lots of programs there. Patrick Mc(avery wrote: > Hi Everyone > > > It looks like OpenBSD is all about software correctness and I am sure > it will be great to work with, in a sort of "back end" way but is > there a desktop manager to work with it that can match the reliability > of OpenBSD? > > I tried to load Fluxbox and was disappointed with it. It had several > menubuttons for application that were not yet installed. > That is perhaps more a question about the package itself which needs to be tuned. If you like it, if you like the toolkit to program with, if it is stable on the operating system of your choice. Tuning the menu entries is really the last step. GNUstep packages on OpenBSD are actively maintained and Sebastian is active and responds to suggesions. > Any help would be very much appreciated, I feel trapped and it sounds > weird to say this but I am really a bit depressed about the idea of > heading back to Windows. > I hope not. Depends on your need. Writing input and output panels with textboxes and buttons is really fun and nice in GNUstep. I am writing a proprietary app with it tha tI cannot share which does that: monitoring, launching tasks.. nice and usable GUI. Since you mention data, I am working on a simple charing and plotting toolkit for GNUstep to display, currently, mostly static data (=it is not yet optimized for fast-paced changes, but in future releases I know where I can squeeze speed out, but getting a 0.1 release is already proving a feat). Look if you like in these two screenshots (it is just a demo app). You can also see that it works on Mac and how it compares. http://multixden.blogspot.it/2011/09/oresme-plotting-for-gnustep.html http://multixden.blogspot.it/2011/09/oresmekit-plotting-two-functions.html Right now I am concentrating on Charts instead of plots, because I need that for an application, I can share screenshot s if you are interested. A general look of the environment (here on FreeBSD, but I assure that on OpenBSD it works fine): http://multixden.blogspot.it/2013/03/gnustep-on-freebsd.html Riccardo [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type text/x-vcard which had a name of riccardo_mottola.vcf]