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Between lawsuits from Apple, and Microsoft being Microsoft, Digital Research’s GEM desktop for DOS never really had a chance. It did have another life on Atari home computers, but it’s the DOS version that provided the code for [Tomaz Stih]’s Linux port of the GEM graphical desktop — which isn’t a WM or DE for X or Wayland, for the record. It is entirely it’s own graphical display that will live in the framebuffer of a minimal Linux installation.
[Thomaz] is leveraging DR’s original code — or at least what started as DR’s code before a series of acquisitions and open sourcing — via OpenGEM and FreeGEM. Sample applications include the clock and calendar, but [Thomaz] says the APIs are compatible with Atari ST applications; presumably given the codebase the it will match the DOS version as well.
Much like when it was originally crushed betwixt Macintosh System and Microsoft Windows, we doubt many will be rushing out to use GEM instead of Wayland or XServer on Linux, but there may well be some use cases. If nothing else, it’s got to be lightweight.
If you missed the Digital Research GEM saga, this might get you up to date. If the idea of it running on Linux tickles your funny bone, you might enjoy seeing GEM on an AlphaSmart word processor.
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