It's painful how good WindowMaker could've been
Is there something deeper here? Because on the surface it primarily looks like some desktop widgets/dock-apps. Which isn't bad, it's more than the irrelevancy of the desktop today! widgets are great!
But I always feel like there was something more weird & implied with WindowMaker. Maybe just that it was taken as heir apparent to NeXTSTEP. But did it actually have interesting data systems, could apps talk? Or was it still lots of isolated micro-apps/desktop widgets?
NeXTSTEP's own "Features and Benefits"[1] 6 pager doesn't particularly feel illuminating / compelling either. I'm interested in object integration, object persistence, and object linking, but I don't really know in practice what that was like or what was really there & used. The rest sounds fine & maybe quite advanced for it's age, but it's not clear to me that there was a bunch of material left unexplored over time. Other than what remains a really interesting but abstract idea, that I don't know how was used, of there being objects, somewhere, which plenty of programs individually have & which COM & DCOM had in Windows for years, which CORBA, DCOP, DBus and others also had.
I want a lot to know more. But I just don't know what exactly people are excited over. I don't know what remains novel, what got abandoned. It feels like an early version of a modern desktop, in any decent Linux compositor / display server.