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Title: NeXTStep, OpenStep, AfterStep
Date: March 13, 2024

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 So, schroeder recently posted about trying out AfterStep, and I have to say,
I'm glad to see someone who enjoys that line of desktops as much as I do. I may
not use BSD or Linux as my daily driver, but I do use an OpenStep VM, and my
Debian VM (which I use as a basis for any bare metal install I might make) runs
WindowMaker (a part of GNUStep). Now I have /another/ one to try, and I plan on
doing so once I get some time for it.

 I fell in love with GNUStep back in the mid-2000s, when I was running Ubuntu
of all distros. Didn't like where GNOME 3 was going, didn't like that the
community was cratering Unity (which I liked), and KDE4 was kind of a puddle
of sadness when it came out. Someone in an IRC channel pointed me to GNUStep,
and I gave it a shot without *any* idea of its history. Fell in love with the
aesthetic immediately, and after I actually looked into where the ideas came
from, it ended up making me look into Mac OS X at one point.

 Eventually, I went to MacOS, but never really let go of my love for
WindowMaker. Even discovered wdm (WINGS Display Manager), which gives a *Step
style login screen. Still use it on Debian.

 Sadly, as much of the Linux community is forcing users onto Wayland, even as
it remains incompatible with some things people need (like screen readers), I
fear that many amazing projects will be left in a state where they just can't
keep up. Almost mimicking the current web browser monopoly problems caused by
Google, in my eyes. I just don't see GNUStep being ported to Wayland native,
given how few devs and users there are in its community.

 Yet, here I sit, running old OSes like Mac OS 10.6.8, Windows 98, Windows XP,
Windows 7, Ubuntu 10.04, and OpenStep. Part of me wonders if the manipulative
hands of a large community being drawn away might actually be a good thing for
stability, at least for those of us running older hardware.

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