I discovered an incredible project called NEXTSPACE which is building a complete desktop environment (and perhaps eventually a Linux distribution) using GNUstep, which is a FOSS implementation of Cocoa.
Starting as a starving college student, I spent around a decade programming in Objective-C and Cocoa for iOS. While I’m less interested in Apple’s closed source platforms these days, I really enjoyed developing in Objective-C and Cocoa, and I am glad that I can use that skillset to build rich GUI applications for Linux.
But real talk: I mainly just love retrocomputing. I love how retro NEXTSPACE looks and functions. Usually I’m happy with just using exwm as a tiling window manager, but I am also always happy to disrupt my workflow in search of innovation and new experiences.
So leveraging my DevOps skillset, I built NEXTSPACE a continuous integration pipeline: https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/enzuru/nextspace/39/workflows/79b536ed-98e6-4204-9c2d-c76612012aa6/jobs/39
I’m still looking for ways to contribute to the Linux Cocoa scene. I began contributing some money to GNUstep’s Patreon, and reached out to see if there was any work suitable for me. Fingers crossed!
I’m also reading reports that Emacs.app (the Cocoa version of Emacs) is not running well on modern GNUstep. I’ve contributed to Emacs before and have signed legal contracts with the FSF, so perhaps I can help in that regard as well.
