Gershwin Desktop

Gershwin is a desktop environment based on GNUstep welcoming to switchers.

Why Gershwin?

Gershwin offers Workspace, Terminal, TextEdit, System Preferences, a native Window Manager for X11 apps, Global Menu server for GNUstep/X11 apps, and more.

• Gershwin can be built from source code in less than a few minutes using a First-class Clang/LLVM toolchain.
• The entire system including Window Manager only consumes under 50MB of storage.
• Gershwin is completely self contained from the underlying operating system.
• Local Users and Local Applications are kept separate from Network Users and Network Applications and System Applications.
• Users can install Application bundles without root credentials in the Users folder.
• Applications built using Gershwin and its underlying GNUstep foundation can run on other many operating systems including Windows.
• Multiple versions of core libraries can co-exist to guarantee long term ABI stability.

Installation and testing

• Gershwin can be installed in under a few minutes by using gershwin-build.

• Testers can try a gershwin-on-freebsd live iso, gershwin-on-debian live iso, or gershwin-on-arch live iso, or the GhostBSD Gershwin Community Preview live iso (out of date).

• GhostBSD users can also install Gershwin by installing following package (currently not up to date):

 # pkg install gershwin-desktop

Please see the wiki for more information.

Building the live ISOs

This repository builds the Gershwin live ISOs for several base OSes (FreeBSD, NextBSD, Debian, Devuan, Arch Linux) from one tree — each on an rc and a dev release channel. Every flavor builds inside a container of its own distribution using that distro's native live-media tooling, then shares one boot/login/screenshot gate and one publish step.

To add a new flavor (e.g. Artix) or change how the ISOs are built, see docs/ADDING-A-FLAVOR.md. (Claude Code users: the repo also ships an add-iso-flavor skill that automates the same procedure.)

Wiki

The Gershwin Desktop wiki contains more information, including changelogs.

Community Support

All community support tickets and feature requests should be created through our community issue tracker.

For questions and other feedback, the Github Discussions is a great place to reach out.

There is also #gershwin on Libera Chat, but be aware that answers may take several days since this is all run by volunteers.

Contributing

Please see our help wanted section under our GitHub project.

For resources to get started with development:

• http://developer.gnustep.org/