> he didn't just contribute to Étoilé, since he seems aware of it.
This is a hobby and passion project and yet it looks more alive and better maintained than Étoilé, which features "news" from 2014 about doing random Smalltalk things - and while I _love_ Smalltalk it doesn't give me confidence that they're focused on building a modern Cocoa-style desktop environment.
I clicked through a Étoilé's overview page, and the screenshots were from ~2008 (with a system UI panel opening showing a 2.6 kernel!). It made me question how alive the project is.
He's not wrong either. That UI is older than Windows 95 (which stole and misused some of its look and UI elements, that is an iconify control dammit) but it still looks fresh, simple, and get-the-job-done. As well as ignoring the "flat" trend and the "pretend to be a touch UI" trend.
The "Maximize" icon in Windows is clearly a stylized depiction of a window with a toolbar, sized to fit the button on which it is. I don't know if it's the perfect icon for this action, but it makes a lot of sense. Why should it stand for iconification, even if Windows still had that feature (last time it did was Win 3.11)
In the context of Nextspace, Nextstep, or Windowmaker, it stands for Iconificaiton because it is "clearly a stylized depiction of" the icon that appears when a window is iconified.
Compare the iconify button with the icons representing iconified windows below:
I wrote to the maintainer in late 2018 and he informed me that the project is no longer under development. He mentioned that CoreObject (coreobject.org) would still be active, but that was over two years ago and I can't say for sure.
That's unfortunate about Étoilé, which looked promising and cool. Last summer I wrote an article about the current state of GNUstep, and I was hoping that someone would pick up from where Étoilé left off.
However, I just saw a recent comment from one of the current GNUstep maintainers that said that the GNUstep Foundation Kit is now at par with macOS Catalina, and work will begin on updating GNUstep's Appkit implementation, which is currently roughly compatible with Mac OS X Tiger.
Making GNUstep more compatible with recent versions of macOS's Cocoa API will definitely help with enticing more developers to the platform.
>I think GNUstep needs a reference implementation of a user-oriented desktop environment.
I wonder why he didn't just contribute to Étoilé, since he seems aware of it.