I’m not the parent, but I’ve been following GNUstep’s development on-and-off for 20 years (I was in high school then and thus am too young to experience NeXTstep in its heyday). I truly wish the Linux community had embraced GNUstep instead of the Qt vs GTK path we ended up on. Even if the Apple/NeXT merger never happened, we could’ve ended up being a refuge for abandoned NeXT users and have adopted NeXT’s solid application ecosystem; imagine updated versions of Lighthouse Design’s applications running on Linux. Of course, the Apple/NeXT merger happened and changed the course of history; Linux could’ve benefited from sharing a GUI API with Mac OS X.

One of the most interesting developments that came out of the GNUstep world was Étoilé, which was developed in the late 2000s and looked like a promising rethinking of what a desktop powered by GNUstep technology could do. One impressive feature was its Smalltalk implementation, which brought NeXT technology “home” to its Smalltalk inspiration (NeXTstep can be thought of as a polished Smalltalk machine, with Objective-C and Unix in place of the Smalltalk language and runtime). Sadly Étoilé doesn’t appear to have been worked on in about a decade.

I know in recent years there’s been a major effort to get GNUstep’s API on par with the latest version of Apple’s Cocoa, increasing compatibility. Maybe GNUstep will finally become more popular one day, but I’m glad the project hasn’t died after all these years.