GhostBSD 25.02 adds 'Gershwin' desktop for a Mac-like twist The latest release of GhostBSD, an easy graphical FreeBSD distribution, includes a brand new macOS-like desktop environment, "Gershwin." GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3p2 appeared on Monday as the second release of 2025. The rather long and complicated version numbering system was explained in the announcement for 2025's first release, …
Indeed so; first saw NeXTSTEP in the mid 90s -- weirdly enough at my then-local Mail Boxes Etc.1 -- and it looked like The Future. Unfortunately it wasn't (well, sort of).
1I remember asking the counter guy what the hell system it was - IIRC he turned out to be a bit of an oddball nerd who'd installed it off his own bat, rather than it being in-house kit (but could be wrong there). Still occasionally run GNUstep/Window Maker on Linux for a change of scenery.
> I rather liked OpenSTEP and it's ilk.
Me too.
How to get it today:
* install a bare command-line copy of Debian 13, no desktop.
* add Git, `build-essentials`, sudo and a couple of other things.
* Go to: https://github.com/onflapp/gs-desktop
* Clone the repo
* Run the script therein to install dependencies
* Run the script to build the thing.
* Run the final command to install a NeXT-style display manager.
Reboot and enjoy.
Hi Liam, I note Mint (at least 20.1) still has a "wmaker" package in the repos which installs Window Maker with a NEXTStep-like desktop. Would you happen to know what relation that is to GNUstep? The homepage links to www.windowmaker.org, which in turn links to gnustep.org. Is it perhaps a completely independent implementation of GNUstep?
(Apologies if I've mangled the capitalisations.)
> package in the repos which installs Window Maker
Yes.
> with a NEXTStep-like desktop.
No.
Window Maker has been around for years. It's not a desktop. It's just a window manager. It has a dock, it has a preferences applet, but that's about all. There are applets for its dock to show status and so on.
You can try it in the Window Maker Live distro I wrote about and linked to in this article.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/25/window_maker_096_live/
But Window Maker *is not a desktop.* It has no file manager, no text editor, no full apps at all. These all exist in forms created by GNUstep, but the goal of GNUstep is not a desktop. It wants to create a set of libraries replicating the Cocoa libraries in Mac OS X, so you can write Objective-C apps on Linux.
The fact that they've implemented 90% of a desktop is an incidental aside to them. I was on the project mailing list for years and tried to persuade the leadership to acknowledge it or even release it as a desktop. In the end the project lead emailed me privately, with BLOCK CAPS shouty abuse, that I was trying to tell him how to run his project etc., and I left. I won't deal with them again.
ProbonoPD also refuses to deal with them and the HelloSystem doesn't use GNUstep code.
Thus the 2 projects I mentioned and linked to: GSDE and NEXTSPACE.
Both take lots of GNUstep and add in the missing bits to make full desktop environments. Sadly no distro includes either yet.
NEXTSPACE is the older but it targets Fedora 31 (from 2019). I've not tried it. The dev is alive but there is a war on.
Don't confuse a desktop environment and a window manager. They're not the same thing.
A WM is a small part of a DE.
Some people call their car "my wheels" but you can't drive a set of wheels. They are only 10% of the vehicle, maybe, and the easiest bit.
A WM is 10% of a desktop and it needs a file manager, a text editor, an image viewer, a media player, an email app, maybe a chat app, a settings or preferences app, etc etc etc... and these days, a web browser. GNUstep does not have one of those.
Thanks, interesting.
And yes, I'm fully aware of the distinction between a window manager and desktop environment (I don't personally run a bespoke DE - just a WM and a bunch of applications). But what I actually said was "[the wmaker package] installs Window Maker with a NEXTStep-like desktop". Although in fact I was wrong - it doesn't install any kind of desktop.
You did indeed say that, but I misread because, well, because it doesn't.
:-)
$JOB-1 was at SUSE. We got an annual "hack week" for our own projects. I tried to build a Window Maker + GNUstep spin of openSUSE. I never got it adequately working, though, not well enough to package.
There's overlap between then. Window Maker provides a dock, and so does GNUstep Workspace, for instance. Both have their own Preferences apps. WM has more system-monitoring tools and things, whereas GNUstep has pretty good accessories -- but with weird keybindings. They use Alt for what on a PC should be Ctrl, the logic being that Alt is _where the Cmd key is on a Mac or NeXT keyboard_, which seems specious to me.
But this is why I rather like GSDE. It brings it together into a sort of cohesive whole.
Gershwin does not, not yet.
TBH if there were global settings in WM and GS to just use a global menu bar, as in Apple Rhapsody, and use the Super (Windows) key for all the commands, I'd be happy with that and no other global changes.
Something that looked like this:
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/rhapsodydr2
Ideally with the choice of NeXT or Apple Platinum themes. :-)
Ha - "cohesive wholes" inevitably, I think, end up as chimeras; this is, I think, exactly why I don't run an official DE. I've settled instead over several decades on a reasonably minimalist window manager (Fluxbox) which by default includes a taskbar, application menu, system tray, dock area ("The Slit" [sic]), configurable shortcut keys and multiple workspaces (but no pager or launchers), which I then populate with apps/applets like workspace pager, system monitors, file manager, terminals etc. (but no desktop icons - hate them!)
Sure it's a chimera - an unholy mash-up maybe, but my unholy mash-up - and actually quite a portable setup, as the apps are all bog standard and the whole thing is kicked off by the Fluxbox startup file. Maybe I should package it up as a "Fluxbox Desktop Environment" (that's never going to happen). Fluxbox and Rox desktop/filer is actually a nice combo, though, if you want something more cohesive.
>Rhapsody...https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/rhapsodydr2
Oo! MacOS 8! (MacOS 8.6 was peak OS, barring possibly BeOS. Everything's been a downhill run since then.) I wonder if it provided MacOS capabilities too, or was just another appserver like everything is today. Very refreshing seeing useful human-centric informational messages in the screenshots; reminder of how antihuman developers are now.
That's a brilliant website, Liam. Filed. Thanks for that!
ProbonoPD is actually a contributor and I talk with him daily. He joined the GNUstep meeting with me last month as well. I think his words after seeing what I did was maybe I gave up too early. I have a different opinion that GNUstep should package a desktop or become a distribution. I won't get too much into that but making a real distribution takes more experience than just putting an ISO up on github that can never be upgraded properly. I'd rather see the GNUstep team focus on things like NSMovieView that I need and don't want to work on and others like myself step up to work with others on packaging, etc which is the work I want to be part of.
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Thanks for the article. FYI the project has been around a little longer. I started with Damian sometime after livestep ended wanting to carry it forward but we did move orgs and repos a few times before anyone became aware of what we were working on. It wasn't until I pushed to GhostBSD that anyone noticed. It took 4 months to get libs-dbuskit working to support opening GNUstep apps with multiple windows which was no easy feat. I've also made other enhancements to allow dock to restore minimized GNUstep apps in libs-gui. The reason terminal and textedit stay open after closing windows but do not present a menu again is that the dbus spec requires windows to create the menus.
I am planning to resolve in libs-gui so all apps just benefit from the change, or otherwise I will have to fix each of those apps. Work is underway on uroswm a native objective C based window manager I have fixed a lot of it's issues. There is also a native panel to replace xfce4-panel already underway.
There are also some wrappers which no one has seen yet that offer better integration with dock activation, and restore (FreeBSD required for kqueue).
https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-universe-wrappers
It is largely targeting a Mac OS X style UX for now only but I have someone helping me with a new style that would feel more like "Plasma" as an option. There are also plans to make an App Store so every possible GNUstep app + wrapper can be installed that way. While the bigger changes are happening there should be another stream of updates to stable branches fix some of the things mentioned in GhostBSD packages sooner. I wish I could address all the comments but I do not want to give away everything just yet. Stay tuned.
Be warned that the GhostBSD boys have put some hard work into taking their installer massively backwards.
Basically: it requires you either
* nuke your internal drive
* or trust it to modify your partition table
: it is impossible to install to existing partitions.
They've also removed the UFS (eg ext4) option: ZFS or GTFO. So you can't run it casually interoperably with a normal Linux on an existing multiboot.
Given the antihuman + arrogant attitude (which comes normally with shall we say "technical deficit/defects" (cf. systemd)), I wasn't willing to trust their code to modify the partition table safely. And that turned out to be 100% correct.
They have one slight non-backwardation relative to Linux Mint: they haven't written code to PREVENT you installing to an external disk (in Mint, you need a screwdriver: remove your hard disk and their custom code collapses back to underlying: you're suddenly a grownup again and are allowed to install to external). So I installed to an external I could & did wipe for it.
Not even GhostBSD can even MOUNT the resulting disk, never mind booting off it.
Please note; that's GhostBSD itself unable to mount the disk it just created.
...
I've been round the houses trying to see if maybe I can copy the files (apparently 3.38 GiB of them) over to an internal partition to get the additional boot I wanted, but I am unable to find ANY permutation of ZFS's twiddles which will even present the files. Had to mini-script just to be able to get the only visible "partition"(pool) mounting (the Swap partition has entirely vanished). And GhostBSD can't even do that: it replaces mountpoints in use; well, their installer created /home and suddenly your userid vanishes and you no longer have any binaries available: shell builtins only. hrmpf can cope with (eventually) forcing a mount. But no files: just directories for mountpoints (which then start catching logfiles like dmesg...! )
I've given up.
Summary: looks nice on LiveCD but don't bother unless you are willing to wipe your internal drive.
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GhostBSD 25.02 is ~50% larger and a serious regression on 25.01:
It can't even boot off LiveCD.
3/4 through the boot it suddenly loses the ability to continue reading its own LiveCD. Same disk that 25.01 carries on with fine. (But note 25.01's bootloader, when running off hard drive not LiveCD, after one-only successful boot, likewise suddenly loses ability to read (tries both ZFS & UFS) contents of the hard disk halfway through, too. (No UEFI Settings changes.) ... Seems to be a bit of a pattern.)
So:
* They're doing Active work to cripple the installer.
* They're doing Negative work to delete code which any successful installation relies on.
Summary:
* It still requires you to nuke your hard disk.
* But project-wise, it's going backwards at root level. Historically, this is the pattern for coders disappearing up their own arse. Or parasite infestation. Either way: ~always means dead-end/death.
This is a non-starter. (Literally, too.)
They've written themselves off. I'm not going to bother with GhostBSD.
Two notes to the above, stripped out as footnotes for better readability:
----
1. (ZFS tangent: I did eventually copy out the external's files, and in the "process" discovered why ZFS has failed outside the server room. It's at least a 3 State machine, with 1 written to your external disk regardless of Mount state & affecting all future work, chain style/endless-soup style. Eg, external disks are MODIFIED when you (attempt to) mount them: HARDWIRED into your current config.
!!
Also, "partitions" ' contents (files) will mount alternately with {the pool's ("/" 's) contents/files, & the partitions' root/parent directories now replacing your LiveCD's live OS's live mountpoints as live buckets}: either/or. I had to copy them out on alternating boots.
!!
Excruciatingly poorly thought-out. Magnificent in the server room. Do not touch in any non-~static environment (eg, desktop).)
----
2. [re "Withdrawn":
Very strange behaviour on returning to the phone an hour+ later. Posting revealed that my pre-minorclarifications draft was posted by restarting the browser. I prefer the clarity of the first subject-line, so reposting with that. Otherwise unchanged.
This is currently showing as 2 "Withdrawn" posts.]
>[any disk access ATTEMPT actually WRITES] to your external disk regardless of Mount state
It just occurred to me that ZFS is therefore the paedophile's dream.
Simply store all their CSAM on an external ZFS disk.
If the police even try to LOOK at it, they can prove break of chain of custody, "Beyond Reasonable Doubt" fails, and they walk off Scot-free.
Holy f*ck.
How many coppers are able to hex crawl a raw device? And even if they are warned to then learn to: have you SEEN the mess ZFS blurts raw??? I have, while trying to debug. It's a mess. Makes NTFS's MFT look good. Good luck standing THAT up in front of a jury.
In its current form, ZFS on an external disk is a paedophile's Get Out Of Jail Free card.
WindowMaker is one of my go-to desktops for low (computing) power machines, I've run it happily on a DEC 3000/400 with 64MB RAM in the past. I'll keep an eye out for Gershwin in the future, I tried GhostBSD a few years ago but it didn't seem to like the old laptops I put it on for testing and I moved off it pretty quickly.
