52 ms·

Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened

418 points by JetSpiegel 4y ago

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Unity was really good in saving vertical screen space. Invaluable on notebooks with 1366*768 screens that were typical on the notebooks of the day. Gnome3, on the other hand, wastes it like the user have nothing better to look at but panels, upon panels, upon panels.
easytiger 4y ago
The mention of solaris is interesting. The Gnome 2 based Java Desktop was part of what would be used to sell commercial institutions that had regulatory requirements for things like Accessibility (e.g. banks, government) - and it did win customers. This meant Sun put a lot of fixes into G2 upstream that helped stability and viability. I used it natively on solaris 10 on a desktop for several years with few limitations or issues. You could even use it on a SunRay but the performance would never compete with the dolphins Then, at a critical time it just kind of stopped being. Sad day indeed
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Project Looking Glass was also a Sun/Java thing that led the OSS 3D window effect bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
  - easytiger 4y ago
    Yea i ran looking glass at the time to see it in operation. Sadly on commodity hardware the compositor was incredibly slow. But another project that just stopped. I too then got into the compiz craze of a fire animation when one minimised windows and a cube to change desktop. What happened to us. We used to have fun. The modern day linux/unix desktop is no better than it was 15 years ago
xiaomai 4y ago
I vaguely remember the Microsoft/SuSe deal but never linked that to GNOME3. I really love gnome-shell, but one thing I always have to tweak is putting the minimize/maximize buttons back in the toolbar (couldn't ever figure out why they would get rid of those... now i know?).
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  I assumed that it either had something to do with filesystem patents[0] or the vague patent claims they made on early Android vendors. UI design didn't even cross my mind - I didn't even know those were patentable, and Apple's foray into "look and feel" lawsuits was something Microsoft adamantly fought against. Hell, if I've heard correctly[1], Microsoft was the reason why those early UI design flourishes like faux-3D highlights made their way into CDE and Motif. Given that Miguel de Icaza already is calling BS on this I'm starting to doubt the veracity of any of this. [0] Microsoft still claims ownership over ExFAT, for example [1] It was vaguely mentioned somewhere in NCommander's very, very long "Installing every version of IBM OS/2" stream
  - toyg 4y ago
    The SuSe agreement was really about networking and filesystems. At the time, SuSe had been bought by Novell - a networking company. They saw Linux as the future of their business, but the risks around Windows interop as a real threat to that business. They did not have an adversarial relationship with MS (actually the opposite), so they moved to mitigate those risks with a friendly agreement. Other companies did not share those interests. This post is bad revisionism. (As an aside, what MS did or did not do in the '90s really has no bearing on what they did in the '00s or later. 90s MS was a hustling startup, '00s MS was a corporate behemoth. Like Apple pre- and post-iPhone, they changed behavior and (declared) values once they became the top dog.)
linguae 4y ago
This is news to me. I remember that the Linux desktop seemed to be on the ascendancy back in 2006. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were very nice desktops; while they weren’t Mac OS X Tiger (which still holds up as an amazing desktop), they were solid contenders to Windows XP. But then came GNOME 3 and KDE 4, which were major fumbles that set back the Linux desktop for years. If it’s true that GNOME’s radical direction beginning with version 3 is the result of threats from Microsoft to change its desktop to avoid influences from Windows, then that definitely changes my assessment of the era, and my distaste for Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior only deepens (this is the same Microsoft that complained about Apple’s look-and-feel lawsuits).
- dijit 4y ago
  This is my impression to, as a person deep into the Linux desktop ecosystem from back then. I even managed to give gnome2 to my mum at one point and she remarked how nice everything was and easy to find. I had more difficulty than she did since I was much more into computers and had learned all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Windows. Then gnome3 came and was a huge regression in terms of flexibility, ease of use, aesthetics and performance. Plasma was the same, though, subjectively it looked better and was a lot less antagonising than gnomes radical redesign, it was still really heavy and buggy compared to kde3 (or whatever the predecessor was, I think 3). Plasma/KDE was also very windows-like, so I don’t buy the argument that Microsoft was the cause, it was mostly gnome devs thinking that they could get a radical touch-first redesign in before anyone else. This is a very long way of saying: the parent is correct in my opinion.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    > Plasma/KDE was also very windows-like, so I don’t buy the argument that Microsoft was the cause, it was mostly gnome devs thinking that they could get a radical touch-first redesign in before anyone else. The article does touch on that, apparently Suse signed a patent deal with MS which sidestepped the issues so they could continue the design as usual. Gnome and Redhat refused. If this is true it kinda reinforces my feeling that Gnome 3 was a redesign for the sake of it. I hate almost everything about it though I'm not married to the windows concept. But everything about it just feels wrong. The huge "touch-friendly" title bars, the menus hidden in hamburger buttons, the lack of configuration options like macOS. And I really tried to like it. When I moved back to FOSS from Mac it was my first choice. I love KDE though only recently, I thought KDE 3 was too cluttery. It feels like it only came into its own right with Plasma. And I don't find it all that Windows-like though the taskbar certainly is more Windows-like than other DE's. But a taskbar doth not a windows make. Overall I find it distinctly different from Windows. The control panel is definitely a lot better than that mashup of different styles in Windows.
Gualdrapo 4y ago
I still think the Applications/Places/System triple menu was absolutely superb in terms of usability. You had three clear and coherent categories where all the GUI software in your system was placed, which made all that stuff easily scanneable by anyone even if they have never used it before. It shouldn't have been ditched, if you ask me. That clever way to separate and categorize that stuff was and is superior to any 'start' menu Windows (and any other desktop environment) has ever had.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  The Applications/Places/System is not a good idea: it doesn't scale. It worked relatively well at the time because people had something in the order of tens of megabytes of free space, allowing only a few programs installed. Nobody does that with smartphones for a reason.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    But we're not talking about smartphones with their dozens of tiny apps. We're talking about desktops. How much desktop software does a typical user run?
    - marcodiego 4y ago
      Enough to make the lists on the start submenus to become very long. People don't remember it so much because nobody uses it anymore and nobody uses it anymore because it just doesn't work. With WinME MS started hiding option that weren't used frequently, in XP and 7 MS start bringing the most frequently used options to the first page. After 7 the start menu and submenus were killed because they didn't work anymore with normal computer usage.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Historically, Windows didn't really have the grouping by application type that GNOME did - any grouping in the Start Menu was down to whatever folders any given app would create when installed. It did have some standard folders like "Accessories", but I don't recall any third-party app using those. The common practice was (and still is) for every app to create its own top-level folder, then put its shortcuts underneath. So it ended up as a linear list of apps, which of course doesn't scale well - but it's also not how GNOME did it. I will also note that, 1) the start menu is still very much there in Win11, including folders, and 2) the fact that hacks like Start8 exist and sell enough copies to be profitable indicates that quite a lot of users do prefer it to the newer arrangements.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I'm pretty happy with i3/sway and can't believe how much Microsoft spent on case studies when tiling window managers do appear more productive
- Pakdef 4y ago
  I like tiling window managers but I've hit too many problems/bugs... I just use XFCE now with an add-on that let's me snap windows to 1/4, 1/2 or full screen depending on where on the edge of the screen I move them and that's good enough for me.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  If they did any research into tiling, I think a lot of their case studies would be about how to get the users to adopt and learn it. Learning a good timing WM can be very productive but you only see the benefit of it after you've already put in the work. It's not instant gratification. Though on the other hand, MS has a habit of dumping bad UI design on the user and then having to scramble to revert amid all the commotion. Windows 8 being a prime example. So perhaps they don't do this.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    There were plenty of UX studies showing that Win8 was awesome. Same story for VS 2012, another famous (at least among VS users) example - you can read the original blog post announcing it for explanations of why they thought it a good idea: http://web.archive.org/web/20140813025825/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/introducing-the-new-developer-experience.aspx http://web.archive.org/web/20140813025825/http://blogs.msdn.... It just turns out that it's very easy to bend such studies into showing what you want to see.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- davidthewatson 4y ago
gjsman-1000 4y ago
This is one of the biggest problems to Linux on the desktop that hasn't been addressed with all the work. If it gets large enough, Patents. Design patents by Microsoft, Design patents by Apple, Design patents by Google, Design patents by third parties, software patents on algorithms, and countless codec patents that Linux users violate every time they download an H.264, H.265, or AAC, or AptX encoder or decoder, and DMCA laws they violate every time they play a DVD. To this day, Fluendo sells $20-$30 Gstreamer Codec Packs that are legally licensed in the US for businesses who notice and care. However, so few care at this point Fluendo discontinued the legal DVD player, leaving basically no legal equivalent on Linux. It's easy to ignore when the companies that own most of them don't feel threatened. But if GNU/Linux was on 40% of PC Desktops, Microsoft would be absolutely eyeing those patents, and MPEG LA + Access Advance would be figuring out how to launch codec lawsuits, and the DVD CCA with the MPA would be running after anyone with a copy of VLC, Adobe might be hunting for patents in the printing stack that could be construed as PostScript-related, and on and on.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Except none of this happened. Multiple project leads from the projects in question are in this very thread denying this made up version of events, which none of us, even those of us deep into it at the time seem to remember.
migueldeicaza 4y ago
This is nonsense.
- gwd 4y ago
  I appreciate that in the heat of the moment, you want to correct the record quickly; but this adds very little to the discussion. I look forward to your longer comment / blog post setting the record straight.
  - goulor 4y ago
    I don't think that Miguel needs to waste time trying to prove a negative. He was there at the time of the supposed events. If he says it didn't happen then we can take him at his word imho.
    - notRobot 4y ago
      For others who didn't know: > Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican-American programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza
      - mananaysiempre 4y ago
        (Also Midnight Commander, which was surprising to learn. I can’t actually say why, in retrospect, but it really was.)
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I hadn't read the username and took the comment as a typical low effort HN troll but coming from Miguel, "This is nonsense" is a complete statement that stands on its own.
      - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
        "Famous person who worked on the project disagrees and does not explain why" does not meaningfully contribute to a discussion. We're left to throw random hypotheses at a wall with no evidence.
haunter 4y ago
GNOME 2 was perfect. I use the spiritual sucessor MATE wherever it’s possible. It’s not perfect and arguably “boring” but there is really something to it https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/ On a side note a similar project exist for KDE 3. Trinity Desktop https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ And on a second mildly related side note: /r/linux had a thread about a modern (2009) OpenSuse spin with KDE 2 a few months ago. It was released as an april’s fools joke but the ISO file totally disappeared from the internet. Or at least the sub couldn’t find it (and the archive.org mirror is corrupted) https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-brings-back-desktop-functionality https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-bri... Maybe someone here have it? :)
- nequo 4y ago
  > GNOME 2 was perfect. … MATE … It’s not perfect … Is MATE worse than GNOME 2 used to be? I just switched to MATE and I have run into all sorts of odd bugs. 1. If I position an external monitor above the primary, I can’t put any windows in the overlapping portion along the x axis. 2. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, maximized windows return to their original monitor but half-maximized windows don’t. 3. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, the background becomes tiled instead of zoomed with Marco + compositing and it blacks out and the desktop flickers with Compiz. 4. With Compiz, I can constrain the window switcher across all windows to the current workspace but I cannot constrain the window switcher within app group to the current workspace. 5. With Marco + compositing, due to a regression, taking a screenshot of a single window includes the boundary around it that contains the window’s shadow. There was something else too but I forget. Quite dispiriting but I have given up on finding the perfect desktop.
  - aklemm 4y ago
    Gnome 2 was peak for me too.
  - ghoul_fazer21 4y ago
    Really?
  - 4y ago
bawolff 4y ago
If gnome's menu is a "start menu", then surely macOS classic's apple menu also counts as a start menu ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.p...
- icedchai 4y ago
  It's been a while, but if I recall, the classic Mac OS Apple menu was not a general purpose "start menu." IIRC, it provided access to limited functionality, like desk accessories and recent documents.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    It had everything in it and you could put anything in it[1]. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/MacOS8AppleMenu.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/MacOS8AppleMe... 2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Mac_OS_7.6.1_emulated_inside_of_SheepShaver.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Mac_OS_7.6.1_...
    - icedchai 4y ago
      ok! you are right. It has been a while...
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] No. The Apple menu wasn't originally hierarchical, it was flat in the first 6 major version of classic MacOS; and it wasn't originally an app launcher. It held the control panel and things but no launchers. It became customisable in MacOS 7, which introduced aliases (symlinks in xNix terms, shortcuts in Win9x terms). Then you could put aliases in the "Apple menu" folder inside the System folder, and make it into an app-launch menu, but that was not its purpose and MacOS did not ship with it configured like that. Whereas the Start menu was always hierarchical, and was always an app-launch menu; in Win95 it did little else.
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
The bar at the left of the desktop on Unity is very much like the Windows 7 taskbar, which can optionally be placed at the left. This doesn't seem credible to me.
- hulitu 4y ago
  You could place the taskbar on win ( at least 98) in every edge of the screen. The same in fvwm.
  - lproven 4y ago
    [Article author here] This was a feature in Win95, even in beta in 1994 or so.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] I think that is wildly misrepresentative. I covered the differences in my 2013 (ish) article which I linked at the end of my blogpost. I don't think you've read it, from what you're saying. I suggest that you do. Win7 revamped the taskbar specifically to make it look more like a dock, but it wasn't like that before (which I suspect you haven't used) and there are salient differences between docks and taskbars.
toyg 4y ago
I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. This worry was never expressed at the time in significant terms. The FAT and SMB patents were much more of a worry than anything related to the desktop interface - only outright clones were being pursued. At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. Linux usage was in ascendancy, money was being thrown around, and the FOSS world was starting to attract young designers who saw it as a cheap way to build professional credibility. And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. The core teams really thought they had a shot at redesigning how people interact with computers, "like Apple did with phones". Interaction targets moved from keyboard+mouse to touch screens, because "convergence" and the fact that the mobile sector was suddenly awash with cash. It's sad that people try to justify their missteps in this way. Microsoft was (and is) a terrible company and a constant threat to the FOSS ecosystem, but defining some of the biggest design choices of the Linux desktop only in antagonistic or reflective terms does a real disservice to those projects and the people who worked in them. If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing.
- RicoElectrico 4y ago
  > And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. Oh, I remember when I could go to Medium every week or so, and there were numerous useful (or somewhat useful) articles tagged with UX - and then it slowly died out.
  - alfalfasprout 4y ago
    And it's quite sad. Over the years it feels like UX has become stagnant and rather sterile.
    - epolanski 4y ago
      UX? I would be even happy with more UI variety. I remember jobs and gates being asked at a d8 conference in 2008 how they imagined desktops in 10/15 years. Gates spoke about voice and motion as controls, while jobs argued that on desktop there wasn't much to change because customers were probably already used to things in certain way and any disruption without a net advantage was just not gonna happen. He also said that the only chance for a ux change were mobile devices as they were a fresh start for everyone.
smm11 4y ago
Nextstep 1.0, 1989, with a dock.
- masswerk 4y ago
  However, RISC OS (Acorn), 1987, with an icon bar. :-) Project lead Paul Fellows is quoted in this article [1] as follows ("Arthur" being the code name for one of two competing projects, which became RISC OS), > "I found this page I was very pleased by: 'Apple acquired the Dock from Steve Jobs' NeXTstep OS which stole it from Acorn's Arthur Operating System of 1987.'" and, > "There was a guy at Colton Software with us… who joined Microsoft in Seattle, and it was shortly after that that Windows acquired an icon bar. I know how that idea got there." And on the rationale behind it, > "In case anyone ever asked where it came from, we were sat in a room thinking 'how do we design this to be different, so we don't get sued by Apple?' The Mac had a menu bar of text across the top, so we thought 'we can't go across the top, we'll have to go across the bottom – and we can't use text, so we'll have to use icons.' That's why it's like that," [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ Edit: That said, Xerox PARC had the Cedar development environment in the 1980s and this featured sort of a task/icon bar already. Notably, the second, long ongoing project for an Acorn operating system, written in Modula 2, was conducted at ARC (Acorn Research Center) in Palo Alto, next to PARC. There may have been some exchange (and inspiration) involved. [2] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-11_The_Cedar_Programming_Environment_A_Midterm_Report_and_Examination.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-1... [3] Video, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar", CHM YT channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
marcodiego 4y ago
TLDR: > SUSE signed a patent-sharing deal: https://www.theregister.com/2006/11/03/microsoft_novell_suse_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2006/11/03/microsoft_novell_suse... > Note: SUSE is the biggest German Linux company. (Source: I worked for them until last year.) KDE is a German project. SUSE developers did a lot of the work on KDE. > So, when SUSE signed up, KDE was safe. > Red Hat and Ubuntu refused to sign. > So, both needed non Windows like desktops, ASAP, without a Start menu, without a taskbar, without a window menu at top left and minimize/maximize/close at top right, and so on. I remember Unity was born because GNOME (Red Hat) wouldn't accept Canonical changes. I remember GNOME 3 was born like a long term project that could adapt better for the future (nascent adaptive UI's) just like KDE4. It was known to be slow in its first iterations to get better over time. Of course, if the described reasons really make sense, it is not something that would be discussed in the open, but is not what I felt at the time. I even vaguely remember the "genie" effect in Compiz needed two curves when minimizing a window to be "different enough" from apple, but that was all. I also remember you couldn't play a DVD or an MP3 out of the box because of DRM and patents. Everything else... never had the vision the author described. Disclaimer: around 2010-2013 I was a sporadic contributor to Compiz and GNOME.
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  At the time, both Novell/SUSE and Red Hat were significant contributors to GNOME. Novell acquired Ximian around the same time they bought SUSE and merged the two. That effectively made SUSE into a GNOME shop rather than a KDE one, though it didn't last as SUSE bled out all of their GNOME developers...
lloydde 4y ago
I don’t doubt it, but the post does not lay out the timeline. Those events likely aligned the business interests to what the designers were already wanting to make happen. From what I recall, by 2004, Linux on Desktop designers were already looking to move on from mimic and displace Windows to win on their own terms. There seemed to be a lot of energy do something new and different by 2005. It seemed like there was a lot of wireframes and prototypes in both GNOME and KDE camps. Also around 2005, touchscreen tablets were also having a moment. I think I remember a popular Nokia model. 2006 had Sugar UI for interactive learning on OLPC XO.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] I provided citations for my claims. Can we see some for yours, please?
  - lloydde 4y ago
    I am going from memory. I can anchor the memories as September 2005 till early 2006 as it was a memorable time for me. I spent that time working out of a Palo Alto garage working on a "web 2.0" web browser, Flock, with a small group of people that included a few who had previously been at Eazel and were still passionate GNOME participants. Thinking further on it now, unrelated to that work, Jeff Waugh @jdub would be person I'd go to for receipts. If I was searching the web, I'd be looking for references to Gnome ToPaZ with topaz being a play on ThreePointZero: "When the prospect of GNOME 3 was first discussed by developers in 2005, the concept took on a life of its own among the users who imagined that it would be an audacious reinvention of the desktop with completely new interaction paradigms and a new kind of user interface. This pie-in-the-sky vision was referred to as ToPaZ, word play on the phrase three-point-zero. " https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/07/gnome-3-0-officially-announced-and-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/07/gnome...
    - lloydde 4y ago
      December 2005 article: "So, the GNOME people have started to focus on questions such as universal access, so if you have motor difficulties or other disabilities, software still should be usable. Likewise, it shouldn't matter what language you use or character set you need, software should be usable. Part of Galago and Telepathy comes from getting beyond questions of windows, menus, icons and pointers and focusing on the things people really care about. In Jeff's view, these things are people, events, documents and sex. When questions of when GNOME 3.0 will be released arose, people have suggested it was a stupid idea. So Jeff came up with TOPAZ, taking the first letters from Three Point Zero and inserting some vowels. TOPAZ is not planned for release at this time." An Evening with Jeff Waugh Linux Journal by Colin McGregor on December 27, 2005 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8752 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8752
0xbadc0de5 4y ago
Regardless of the reasons, I'm quite happy with Gnome 3 as my daily driver. Once I understood the design philosophy of the /Shell/ aspect of /Gnome Shell/, the friction disappeared. The idea is that Gnome 3 can (should) be a keyboard-centric UI for most tasks whereas Gnome 2 and other similar UI's were/are arguably mouse-centric. For me, it's much faster to navigate using hotkeys and shortcuts than mouse/trackpad movements.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Traditional desktops supported keyboards heavily; they were born at a time when mice were optional. Original Mac as well. Gnome3 has removed most menus, which can't help it in that area, although I'm guessing they added a few others.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dopeboy 4y ago
Ubuntu user since 2005. I was one of those users who flew to Mint. I loved MATE and eventually Cinnamon. Over the years, some of my work habits changed + Cinnamon slowed down my system. So I went back to unity but I still prefer windows like DEs...
tannhaeuser 4y ago
I'm still using gnome 2 with Unity on Ubuntu 16 ESM while Gnome 3+ has no future on my notebooks. Never thought that Gnome 2's LaF is Windows-y; if anything, it looks more like Mac Os, with global menu and minimal window decorations. I always thought Gnome devs wanted to jump onto the tablet bandwagon (or simply wanted to try out something different and non-WIMPy), but failed hard.
- lproven 4y ago
  I wrote the article. I do not understand your points here. GNOME 2 does not have global menus. GNOME 2 did not have minimal window decorations, with separate min./max/close/menu buttons. GNOME 2 (and MATE) does have: * a taskbar with iconic buttons for windows (a Win95 innovation); * a hierarchical app-launch menu (a Win95 innovation); * a system tray with the clock and status icons at the opposite end of the panel from the app-launch menus (a Win95 refinement of a MacOS feature). And so on. I think you're remembering wrongly or are confusing different GNOME versions.
psalminen 4y ago
It's always interesting for me to see that I'm so alone in loving Gnome 3. As a keyboard heavy user, it has always matched my workflow. I never appreciated a start menu. It leaves essentially the full screen for my program. The settings drop-downs are intuitive. Granted I use the Material Shell tiling extension now, but vanilla gnome 3 will always have a place in my heart.
- uneekname 4y ago
  I love it too. It works so well on my machines. I hope it sticks around
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  > It's always interesting for me to see that I'm so alone in loving Gnome 3. You're not alone. Complaints always get projected louder and wider than happiness. GNOME 2 was the same way. So many users treating it as the end of the world, and it took a few versions to improve and fix initial issues, but after those first couple of versions it was a great upgrade. GNOME 3 likewise took a couple of versions to find its feet, and then it was a great upgrade.
  - psalminen 4y ago
    Interesting, I never saw (or knew) that Gnome 2 received the same treatment. It's heyday was before my time though.
    - JoshTriplett 4y ago
      Massive blowback for "removing configuration options". GNOME 1 had an absurd about of configuration, including many of what the GNOME 2 designers described as "unbreak me" options: options where only one answer could possibly make sense ("make X work"), and worse, some of them were off by default. GNOME 2 removed those, in favor of better autodetection, better defaults, and similar. However, in doing so, they ended up removing some that were actually important to people, for use cases that weren't as well known. Some of those were added back, or better replacements provided, in the first few versions; as a result, GNOME 2.4 or so was much better than 2.0.
stormking 4y ago
That's a historical misrepresentation. There were no treads against the "traditional" Linux desktops from Microsoft. There were, however, a lot of mediocre designers who wanted to "be like Apple".
- AreYouSirius 4y ago
- lproven 4y ago
  How many citations would you require before you believe it? https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m... https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/ https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuit... https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/patent-suit-against-red-hat-novell-threatens-open-source-world-59806.html https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/patent-suit-against-red-h... https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240057754/Open-source-is-a-threat-admits-Microsoft https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240057754/Open-source-i...
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    I don't think commenters are denying there was a legal threat; I think they seem to be denying that threat was the motivation for Unity.
  - meragrin_ 4y ago
    I was into really into Linux and had M$ derangement syndrome at the time. Nothing in those really relate to GNOME and Unity. Who are you going to believe? People trying to stoke fear or an important GNOME project member? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035
ineedasername 4y ago
I don't remember MS being all that threatening, though certainly there may have been less public pressure. The author worked for SUSE which signed an agreement w/ MS to sidestep any issue, so maybe that closeness made it seem a much larger issue than it was. I don't even see much of a real change in the ecosystem: A single command or a few clicks in the GUI will get you LXDE on a fresh Ubuntu install. I certainly don't see any hurdles here that would have been a major set back for desktop Linux. Desktop Linux was (is?) always just around the corner, but never quite got there for reasons unrelated to MS's actions. Maybe MS would have taken more aggressive action if it ever looked closer to mainstream? I'd rather hear from Unity and Gnome devs though, what motivated them at the time? That would determine if MS threats were a significant factor. From what I remember of those times it seemed more like UI folks wanted to explore other options in general, especially after a very nice looking and usable non-MS example came along in the form of OS X. There is also now a major commercial distro that does use an MS-like desktop: SteamOS. Around May I saw analyst estimates of about 1.5M units sold of the Deck. If the author's claim is still part of MS's playbook then SteamOS will be an interesting test for it. Especially because Valve's Proton development has in some cases improved performance above native Windows. SteamOS with wider hardware support to drive gamer's primary systems would be a larger threat of desktop Linux than I think has really ever been present in the past.
chungy 4y ago
Not sure I really buy it. The patent suits seemed more related to VFAT than anything else, especially not as vague as desktop metaphors (remember, Microsoft succeeded against Apple trying to come after them in the mid-1980s on similar notions; they'd be fools to think that precedent would not hold on yet another competitor). It's also the same time that Microsoft seemed to want to abandon Windows 95 paradigms as quickly as possible, with the release of Windows 8. It did seem like everyone just went crazy at about the same time.
jmmv 4y ago
Interesting theory, but I don't recall this happening. As other commenters are saying, there were indeed patent-related issues around FAT and the like, and huge interoperability problems with NTFS (to name one, but that's irrelevant here)... but I don't remember anything around patents and the desktop style -- which may exist, but they were not the problem here. From my recollection, the real issue was Mac OS X (as it was spelled at the time) gaining territory by being a real Unix with a good interface, thus attracting a lot of Unix/Linux users into the Mac. I'd even bet that many old-timers abandoned Linux on the desktop to move to the Mac, which in turn left room for the newcomers to replace the interface with something resembling the coolness of the Mac. But I'm only hypothesizing here.
- pico303 4y ago
  I was in this boat. I used to call it "a Unix laptop that could run Photoshop." Also it didn't crash when I closed the lid.
  - knolan 4y ago
    For me it was a bit later in 2009 when I was giving a presentation for a position at Imperial College using my Dell laptop running Ubuntu and it crashed when plugging in the VGA cable for the projector. There was an iMac at the back of the room taunting me. Got the job via the EU in the end and bought a 2010 13” MBP which was rock solid for many years.
  - scythe 4y ago
    >Also it didn't crash when I closed the lid. For me it was this + small form factor + high pixel density. I always looked at System76 and the laptops were too big and the displays were disappointing. Other sellers seemed similar or were just refurbishing, except Dell briefly, but I never trusted them. Hardware integration is just very nice to have.
    - _carbyau_ 4y ago
      I don't like Apple in many ways but thank fuck they moved the market along in high resolution screens. 1920x1080 was the defacto standard for far too long and I was supremely agitated by the lack of progress. “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” When you KNOW the technology can do it sometimes you just need to give people the friggin' faster horses!
wruza 4y ago
In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world. True. But it wasn’t their accomplishment. Nobody dragged these DEs into an endless war against their own users and developers. DEs were just frontend frameworks of the day. Those skilled enough to apt-get install <lighter-de-or-wm-of-choice>, tick few checkboxes and fill menus with commands - were constantly perplexed by all the drama.
- modshatereality 4y ago
  >True False, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.
yrgulation 4y ago
I’ll go against the rules and say that unity makes my guts churn. Linux/gnome is one sleek ui design away from mass adoption and unity is the exact opposite. I hate it. I’d even contribute £ to a sustained effort of making gnome look good.
cogman10 4y ago
I'm sorry, but timelines don't match up here. Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Patents last 20 years. Gnome 3 development didn't really start in earnest until 2008 (2 years after the alleged reason for the change), a 2 year timeline before any patent MS could claim on position of the x button or start start button. Gnome 3 was finished in 2011, 1 year after any patent related to windows 3 or earlier would be dead and buried. And arguably, some of the design elements of mention in this post were present in windows 1.0, released in 1986. There are also other prior art examples such as Amiga released in 1985 which had similar "top right button closes the application" design elements. And then let's not forget, this is about enforcing patents. Not something that's really easy to do with FOSS, hence the reason projects like FFMPEG and x264 have stuck around even though they very clearly violate a bunch of patents (if someone distributes the binary). Heck, even projects like DeCSS2 were almost impossible to kill off with it's explicit flaunting of the DMCA.
- einr 4y ago
  > There are also other prior art examples such as Amiga released in 1985 which had similar "top right button closes the application" design elements. AmigaOS has the close widget on the top left, like Mac OS.
- stkdump 4y ago
  > The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood" Literally not a single one of these existed in Windows 3.0.
  - lproven 4y ago
    [Article author here] Thank you. Also, just for the record: Windows 1, 2 & 3 didn't even have an "X to close" button on their windows.
davesque 4y ago
I'm not sure if the author of the linked post was being sarcastic but, as one of the rare Macintosh users of the era, I feel like I have to jump in here and point out that a lot of those original features weren't particularly original. The old-school macOS of the time (System 7, which was not based on BSD) had a lot of similar features in its UI. Those included things like the desktop hard disk icon (called "Untitled" by default I think?), "Trash", the Apple icon menu, maximize buttons on windows, and others. Windows 95 definitely had some unique stuff and was a nice OS to use. But I remember at the time it seemed pretty derivative.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  None of the counterexamples you tried to give are actually in the article.
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    Well, the article was making the case that Windows 95 was some singularly unique UI, and the comment was suggesting that it really wasn't. Among Mac users at the time this wasn't exactly an uncommon belief; the joke "Windows 95 = Mac 89" was pretty prevalent, even making it to bumper stickers, IIRC. (Although former Apple engineer Erich Ringewald later observed, that while was largely true, the real problem was that Mac 95 = Mac 89 was also true.)
    - bitwize 4y ago
      I was at the 1995 MacWorld. I saw a lot of "Windows 95 = Mac '84" and "C:\ONGRTLNS.W95" T-shirts about. Then again, the first machine I saw actually running Windows 95 was a Mac, I believed equipped with SoftPC, at that same expo.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Yes they were... Apple Menu = Start Menu, Hard Disk Icon = My Computer, etc. You can't just not do the translations. Everything Microsoft did was stolen from other places, including Macs.
rdl 4y ago
I came from the vtwm/otherwise highly customized xwindows world and could never really understand Unity (also can’t really figure out TikTok or Snapchat UX, so maybe I’m a dumb dinosaur). Windows, Mac, Motif, etc all were pretty easy.
scrame 4y ago
> Ubuntu used Unity, alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops. Nonsense. It was alienating because it was slow and clunky, and for the people that choose Linux over OSX because they don't like OSX interfaces it was just being forced to use an inferior version of something they already didn't like. The usual OSS intransigence where they couldn't actually figure out what UI they were trying to implement, like the blue-yellow-red buttons on the upper right, but also a close box / menu on the upper left and then also the right click for optional behavior of the window was also just straight _bad_. That, and it was really slow and clunky. FWIW, I actually used fluxbox a lot for VNC installations and found it to be more pleasant and snappier (especially remotely) than Gnome. I recall the switchover and don't remember hearing _anything_ from _anyone_ about liking it, but the reason was never that it wasn't enough like Windows.
- smeagull 4y ago
  It wasn't just slow and clunky, it changed how to do basic things, split configuration between about three different places, and changed defaults (which they still frequently do, to the point that it is still on-going and my "go-back-to-sane-defaults" script is now pages long) The best UI is one the users already know. Changing to get more users only to lose your existing ones is a massive failure.
  - lproven 4y ago
    [Article author here] > it changed how to do basic things Which is the entire point of my article.
    - smeagull 4y ago
      And my point is, doing that is the worst UX thing you can do.
      - lproven 4y ago
        On the one hand: GNOME 3 did the same thing. That seems to be overlooked a lot. On the other hand: If you're a keyboard user, like me, then all the Windows keystrokes that worked in GNOME 2 still work in Unity, so it's much less jarring than KDE or something. As an example: the Windows Quick Launch toolbar, that came in with Win98 in 1998, lets you start the first 10 apps by pressing Win+0 to 9. Unity honours that. Most people didn't know it was there, but if you did, it still worked. That is what I consider good attention to detail. UI that you didn't even know was there was carefully preserved to make Unity less of a shock to the system. Yet all the mob bitch about is that it's Mac-like, which was because Ubuntu was under threat of prosecution for being too Windows-like. Be fair. Learn about this and consider it. Because currently it looks like you're not.
nigrioid 4y ago
Just take a look at GTK 3+. It has to be deliberate sabotage. By Microsoft? Who knows. I think it's funny how everyone is still trying to copy Apple. Apple gradually stopped being worth copying after Snow Leopard. After High Sierra, you'd have to be high to want to copy anything from it. I guess it's just inertia - people haven't realized it isn't good anymore.
jamesgeck0 4y ago
The sources this post links to support its primary claim don’t even mention the Windows 95 desktop. The only one that comes even close was written by the same author. It also doesn’t cite anything that would support its claim.
- lproven 4y ago
  I wrote it. What citations would you like? Tell me and I will see if I can find some. Microsoft cited how many patents were infringed, but only approximately: To CNN & the SJ Mercury, 235: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... To ComputerWorld, 283: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m... But AFAIK it never actually listed what the patents were.
  - jamesgeck0 4y ago
    I’d like to see something validating the claim that parents influenced Linux GUI design. The Fortune article printed by CNN only says that 65 patents apply to the Linux GUI. It’s so vague that I can’t see how it would be actionable information for FOSS developers. The SJ Mercury article says the same thing, but cites the Fortune article for its claim; it’s not a separate source. And the ComputerWorld article explicitly does not cover this claim, noting that they didn’t examine patent infringement risk for non-kernel components like KDE.
    - lproven 4y ago
      OK. I will see what I can do for some future piece, because I think this story has legs. It was the publicly stated intention of RH and Canonical at the time of the MS threats, but I need to find records of that.
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
This does not match any of what I remember from the time
zcbenz 4y ago
From my memory GNOME 3 and Unity were created because there was a trend to make all interfaces both desktop and mobile friendly, Ubuntu tried to ship a phone using Unity, and GNOME 3 was advertised for its tablet friendly interface. For Windows world there was Metro UI of Windows 8, Apple insisted on using different UIs for desktop and mobile and was laughed at.
keybuk 4y ago
I was the lead for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical. This is nonsense.
propter_hoc 4y ago
KDE 2 was such an incredible experience when it came out. I understand the GPL purism in GNU/Linux that hobbled Qt and by extension KDE, but I always felt that KDE from 2 onwards was by far the superior desktop environment. Ultimately despite Qt and KDE adopting GPL they never seemed to catch up in terms of corporate sponsorship or distro adoption. I thought it was a sort of bitter irony that Apple basically co-opted Konqueror into their core web platform... Shows the quality of engineering the KDE folks had.
fariszr 4y ago
Personally I like how gnome is no, especially after gnoem 40. It feels like a more advanced and more modular version of MacOs desktop, with a great feel and finish the IMO KDE lacks. Its great!
djbusby 4y ago
Cheers to Xfce for ignoring most of this nonsense. I love having a stable daily driver.
guerrilla 4y ago
Okay, we all agree this is not what happened (and we have confirmation from project leads in this very thread) and I think we know what happened with GNOME but what happened with KDE? Did KDE just fail on accident, just completely coincidentally at the same time? I was always a GNOME fan myself, so I never really followed KDE. Does anyone know the story there?
- toyg 4y ago
  They had to move to Qt4, and took the chance to make some big changes - in the name of "convergence", which was a shared buzzword back then. They generated a lot of hype, then shipped a 4.0 release that was very half-baked. Whether that was always the plan or not, the public image of the project never fully recovered.
dvdsgl 4y ago
I was the lead designer of Unity. Unity was not a response to patent concerns, but rather the manifestation of a convoluted OEM strategy involving exclusive distribution of distinct design features, and a write-once-run-anywhere dream of running Ubuntu on any device from netbooks to big screens to automobiles.
- esoterae 4y ago
  Well, if nothing else hopefully someone else notices this witness statement exposing the above-linked revisionist history for what it is--a fabrication. On the topic of Unity: I, a linux user since the mid 90s, worked an actual linux job through the forced deprecation of GNOME 2.. I don't have much anything constructive to say about it. I even used fvwm2 for a while after gnome2 got yoinked.. it was a nice reminder of my halcyon days writing perl in xemacs, running fvwm on my sparc 2. It wasn't too long after that I landed on xfce. I still wonder what gnome2 could've been. All I ever wanted was a compositing, focus-follows-mouse, raise/lower window manager with a full-featured keyboard shortcut config. I still feel as though we were sold out. I don't think my mental representation of Canonical will ever recover. It just felt so blatantly anti-user during that period, and that impression has not been tempered with the passage of time.
  - lproven 4y ago
    I wrote the article. The legal threats I cited were not and are not a fabrication. I did not write these other articles covering it: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m...
    - ndhlms 4y ago
      The problem is you're still failing to demonstrate a causal link between threats of legal action and GNOME3 or Unity. I was around during this time and early adopter of GNOME Shell (i.e. 2.31.x); there was and is zero evidence indicating that legal issues were even a consideration. There is, on the other hand, mountain ranges of evidence indicating this was driven by everything but legal issues[1][2][3]. [1]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/FAQ#What_problems_does_GNOME_Shell_attempt_to_address.3F https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/FAQ#What_problems... [2]: http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-decadence http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-... [3]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Events/Summit/2008/GUIHackfest https://wiki.gnome.org/Events/Summit/2008/GUIHackfest
shmerl 4y ago
> In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world. KDE is still the most used Linux DE.
- lproven 4y ago
  [[citation needed]]
  - shmerl 4y ago
    https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
    - lproven 4y ago
      By under 12K respondents who are gamers. I am not confident that this is a representative sample.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Has RedHat ever made anything non-horrible? It popularized all of Poettering's abysmally overcomplicated designs (Systemd/Pulseaudio/etc), there was Ansible, GNOME, NetworkManager, OpenShift, RHEL kernels, they abandoned XOrg, killed off both CoreOS and CentOS. Podman is supposed to be good but I've never gotten it to work.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Not since they bundled an unrelease compiler in their distribution ( around RH7).
IE6 4y ago
The timing on this seems off to me - I am wondering why would gnome and unity releasing a different UI/UX ca. 2010 be a response to Windows 95?
- creatonez 4y ago
  The article is not saying GNOME 3/Unity is similar to Win95, it's saying that Steve Ballmer believed that GNOME 2 and KDE 3 (shipped by Red Hat, Ubuntu, SuSE at the time) were too similar to Win95-Win8, which Microsoft owned patents on. And therefore, because of rumblings from within Microsoft in 2006-2007, GNOME had to change as soon as possible, and KDE was fine staying the same because SuSE had been semi-blessed by Microsoft. (The premise of the article is factually wrong, I'm just explaining its thought process)
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] Because, as I have cited in about a dozen links up and down this comments page now, MS threatened to sue between 2004-2007, then companies started to settle or work on something different.
Nursie 4y ago
This is nonsense, revisionist and blames people who didn't like having their workflow yanked out from under them for only being able to use "windows-like" desktops. Linux (and the wider unix-ecosystem) had a variety of paradigms available, in the form of things like fvwm, gnustep, enlightenment etc. Gnome 1's default look is a hybrid of CDE and windows influences, and Gnome 2 with its default top bar took things in a different direction, if anything its default layout looks much more like earlier MacOS releases, which had had a top bar since, AFAICT, the 80s. Microsoft were certainly making a lot of noise, but with their SCO proxy war failing so badly, nobody was taking it seriously by then. Gnome 3 happened because the people who were behind Gnome 3 wanted to change everything and they were in a position to do so. The bad feeling came because not only did they change everything, they went from a "do things your way" to a "you must do things our way" model and they (apparently deliberately) killed the ability to run Gnome 2 and 3 on the same machine. They announced 2 was deprecated and abandoned as of right now, and that the users would basically just have to suck it up.
smeagull 4y ago
Contempt for the user.
stillbourne 4y ago
I've been using linux since '97, RH 5.1 that came on cd in the back of a linux tome I can't even recall the name of now was my first distro. The partitioning tool was called disk druid and the desktop? Fuck man the desktop was ugly, I don't even remember what it was called. Hahaha I just looked it up it was gnome, the beta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkD9jY8cxIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkD9jY8cxIY god I'm old.
- einr 4y ago
  On the topic of Windows 95 UI clones... If you go one minor version back from your experience, RedHat 5.0 actually shipped with FVWM95* as its default desktop and it was fugly: http://toastytech.com/guis/x.html http://toastytech.com/guis/x.html * FVWM, with an unholy patchset to drag it kicking and screaming into kinda-sorta resembling Windows 95
richardfey 4y ago
It would be interesting to make a study about users that do not consent to report metrics and the UIs they prefer. They might as well be a consistent slice of the user base but invisible when decisions are made.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Nobody gives a damn about those studies. They even don't need studies - they can look at bug reports. It's not that this issues are new. Just looking at MS there are bugs which are not fixed for years.
  - richardfey 4y ago
    Then I suggest you do read some studies about where incentives are in open source development: spoiler: they're not in closing bug reports ASAP.
theonemind 4y ago
Seconding/thirding/N-ing general consensus of those invested in the Linux desktop scene from the era that this wasn't the rhetoric or the feeling at that time. I think it'll take a stronger argument than this to convince anyone that lived through this era. Felt an apparent mania to shove mobile interfaces on to desktop computers for fear of missing the next big thing, usability and sense be damned.
foul 4y ago
The "classic" elements of Mac OS X were out in 2001 and then Apple made the UX more and more convergent to iPhones and iPads. Enterprise programming, including FOSS, from the '00s to our days got more and more hooked to Apple rigs. GNOME 3 and Unity, although bad resource-hoggers, were multi-year efforts toward abandoning Windows-ish dumberies (sticky keys for example) to approach similarity to devs' personal computers' perceived terseness. Some intel and microsoft employees and ex-employees were and are working on GTK and systemd, so this article looks very very, very bold in their statements.
ChrisRR 4y ago
We know why Unity happened. Because Canonical has a bad case of NIH
wink 4y ago
> Ubuntu used Unity, alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops, and that made Mint a huge success. This sounds disingenious or at least overly simplified. Most people I know don't like Unity. It doesn't matter if they were used to Windows, OSX, or enlightenment. "Don't like" still means it's tolerable, they don't hate it - but most prefer to use anything else.
Shorel 4y ago
> In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world. So true, and Miguel de Icaza, the architect of Gnome, later got his wish of working for Microsoft. I said at the time, he was working for Microsoft all along.
trasz 4y ago
>Before the threats, almost everyone used GNOME 2 No, not really. Early gnome was a joke compared to KDE, in that while KDE could be actually used as desktop, gnome was helloworldware.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] Early GNOME was GNOME 1.x. It was not great. GNOME 2 was not early. It was the 2nd version, it fixed the issues, it was very widely used, and it still exists today in the form of MATE.
- creatonez 4y ago
  Rather confused by this claim that GNOME 2 was helloworldware. GNOME 2 was one of the very few Linux desktops that saw widespread usage within large companies. Red Hat and Canonical had professional offerings based around it. It attracted a small chunk of home users who were pissed off by Windows Vista. So it definitely got UX tested quite a lot. Red Hat Linux actually still includes a builtin clone of the GNOME 2 design just to cater to people who have been using the same UI in a professional setting for decades. They only recently switched away from this classic clone layout being the default. KDE is the one that was way more community-focused, but it did see a bit of use for professional workstations. You may be thinking of GNOME 1 - it was incomplete garbage.
kristov 4y ago
Whatever the cause, I think what happened had a positive outcome. Being able to choose from a huge selection of window managers (or none at all) is something I really like about Linux. Thanks for all the hard work that people have put into WMs!
birdyrooster 4y ago
lmao author thinks unity is better than macOS, invalidates his opinions for me
0xfeba 4y ago
I still think Win95 is peak U, but it's what I grew up with, so that's probably expected. Minus some of the non-resizable windows, some newer UI elements that are clearly better, etc. I still run "it" via XFCE and Arch Linux: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
pachico 4y ago
Am I the only one enjoying and finding peace in this type of short sentence narrative? Is it maybe because English is not my native language?

418 points by JetSpiegel 4y ago

Unity was really good in saving vertical screen space. Invaluable on notebooks with 1366*768 screens that were typical on the notebooks of the day. Gnome3, on the other hand, wastes it like the user have nothing better to look at but panels, upon panels, upon panels.

easytiger 4y ago

The mention of solaris is interesting. The Gnome 2 based Java Desktop was part of what would be used to sell commercial institutions that had regulatory requirements for things like Accessibility (e.g. banks, government) - and it did win customers. This meant Sun put a lot of fixes into G2 upstream that helped stability and viability. I used it natively on solaris 10 on a desktop for several years with few limitations or issues. You could even use it on a SunRay but the performance would never compete with the dolphins Then, at a critical time it just kind of stopped being. Sad day indeed

rzzzt 4y ago
Project Looking Glass was also a Sun/Java thing that led the OSS 3D window effect bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
- easytiger 4y ago
  Yea i ran looking glass at the time to see it in operation. Sadly on commodity hardware the compositor was incredibly slow. But another project that just stopped. I too then got into the compiz craze of a fire animation when one minimised windows and a cube to change desktop. What happened to us. We used to have fun. The modern day linux/unix desktop is no better than it was 15 years ago

xiaomai 4y ago

I vaguely remember the Microsoft/SuSe deal but never linked that to GNOME3. I really love gnome-shell, but one thing I always have to tweak is putting the minimize/maximize buttons back in the toolbar (couldn't ever figure out why they would get rid of those... now i know?).

kmeisthax 4y ago
I assumed that it either had something to do with filesystem patents[0] or the vague patent claims they made on early Android vendors. UI design didn't even cross my mind - I didn't even know those were patentable, and Apple's foray into "look and feel" lawsuits was something Microsoft adamantly fought against. Hell, if I've heard correctly[1], Microsoft was the reason why those early UI design flourishes like faux-3D highlights made their way into CDE and Motif. Given that Miguel de Icaza already is calling BS on this I'm starting to doubt the veracity of any of this. [0] Microsoft still claims ownership over ExFAT, for example [1] It was vaguely mentioned somewhere in NCommander's very, very long "Installing every version of IBM OS/2" stream
- toyg 4y ago
  The SuSe agreement was really about networking and filesystems. At the time, SuSe had been bought by Novell - a networking company. They saw Linux as the future of their business, but the risks around Windows interop as a real threat to that business. They did not have an adversarial relationship with MS (actually the opposite), so they moved to mitigate those risks with a friendly agreement. Other companies did not share those interests. This post is bad revisionism. (As an aside, what MS did or did not do in the '90s really has no bearing on what they did in the '00s or later. 90s MS was a hustling startup, '00s MS was a corporate behemoth. Like Apple pre- and post-iPhone, they changed behavior and (declared) values once they became the top dog.)

linguae 4y ago

This is news to me. I remember that the Linux desktop seemed to be on the ascendancy back in 2006. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were very nice desktops; while they weren’t Mac OS X Tiger (which still holds up as an amazing desktop), they were solid contenders to Windows XP. But then came GNOME 3 and KDE 4, which were major fumbles that set back the Linux desktop for years. If it’s true that GNOME’s radical direction beginning with version 3 is the result of threats from Microsoft to change its desktop to avoid influences from Windows, then that definitely changes my assessment of the era, and my distaste for Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior only deepens (this is the same Microsoft that complained about Apple’s look-and-feel lawsuits).

dijit 4y ago
This is my impression to, as a person deep into the Linux desktop ecosystem from back then. I even managed to give gnome2 to my mum at one point and she remarked how nice everything was and easy to find. I had more difficulty than she did since I was much more into computers and had learned all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Windows. Then gnome3 came and was a huge regression in terms of flexibility, ease of use, aesthetics and performance. Plasma was the same, though, subjectively it looked better and was a lot less antagonising than gnomes radical redesign, it was still really heavy and buggy compared to kde3 (or whatever the predecessor was, I think 3). Plasma/KDE was also very windows-like, so I don’t buy the argument that Microsoft was the cause, it was mostly gnome devs thinking that they could get a radical touch-first redesign in before anyone else. This is a very long way of saying: the parent is correct in my opinion.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  > Plasma/KDE was also very windows-like, so I don’t buy the argument that Microsoft was the cause, it was mostly gnome devs thinking that they could get a radical touch-first redesign in before anyone else. The article does touch on that, apparently Suse signed a patent deal with MS which sidestepped the issues so they could continue the design as usual. Gnome and Redhat refused. If this is true it kinda reinforces my feeling that Gnome 3 was a redesign for the sake of it. I hate almost everything about it though I'm not married to the windows concept. But everything about it just feels wrong. The huge "touch-friendly" title bars, the menus hidden in hamburger buttons, the lack of configuration options like macOS. And I really tried to like it. When I moved back to FOSS from Mac it was my first choice. I love KDE though only recently, I thought KDE 3 was too cluttery. It feels like it only came into its own right with Plasma. And I don't find it all that Windows-like though the taskbar certainly is more Windows-like than other DE's. But a taskbar doth not a windows make. Overall I find it distinctly different from Windows. The control panel is definitely a lot better than that mashup of different styles in Windows.

Gualdrapo 4y ago

I still think the Applications/Places/System triple menu was absolutely superb in terms of usability. You had three clear and coherent categories where all the GUI software in your system was placed, which made all that stuff easily scanneable by anyone even if they have never used it before. It shouldn't have been ditched, if you ask me. That clever way to separate and categorize that stuff was and is superior to any 'start' menu Windows (and any other desktop environment) has ever had.

marcodiego 4y ago
The Applications/Places/System is not a good idea: it doesn't scale. It worked relatively well at the time because people had something in the order of tens of megabytes of free space, allowing only a few programs installed. Nobody does that with smartphones for a reason.
- int_19h 4y ago
  But we're not talking about smartphones with their dozens of tiny apps. We're talking about desktops. How much desktop software does a typical user run?
  - marcodiego 4y ago
    Enough to make the lists on the start submenus to become very long. People don't remember it so much because nobody uses it anymore and nobody uses it anymore because it just doesn't work. With WinME MS started hiding option that weren't used frequently, in XP and 7 MS start bringing the most frequently used options to the first page. After 7 the start menu and submenus were killed because they didn't work anymore with normal computer usage.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Historically, Windows didn't really have the grouping by application type that GNOME did - any grouping in the Start Menu was down to whatever folders any given app would create when installed. It did have some standard folders like "Accessories", but I don't recall any third-party app using those. The common practice was (and still is) for every app to create its own top-level folder, then put its shortcuts underneath. So it ended up as a linear list of apps, which of course doesn't scale well - but it's also not how GNOME did it. I will also note that, 1) the start menu is still very much there in Win11, including folders, and 2) the fact that hacks like Start8 exist and sell enough copies to be profitable indicates that quite a lot of users do prefer it to the newer arrangements.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I'm pretty happy with i3/sway and can't believe how much Microsoft spent on case studies when tiling window managers do appear more productive

Pakdef 4y ago
I like tiling window managers but I've hit too many problems/bugs... I just use XFCE now with an add-on that let's me snap windows to 1/4, 1/2 or full screen depending on where on the edge of the screen I move them and that's good enough for me.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
If they did any research into tiling, I think a lot of their case studies would be about how to get the users to adopt and learn it. Learning a good timing WM can be very productive but you only see the benefit of it after you've already put in the work. It's not instant gratification. Though on the other hand, MS has a habit of dumping bad UI design on the user and then having to scramble to revert amid all the commotion. Windows 8 being a prime example. So perhaps they don't do this.
- int_19h 4y ago
  There were plenty of UX studies showing that Win8 was awesome. Same story for VS 2012, another famous (at least among VS users) example - you can read the original blog post announcing it for explanations of why they thought it a good idea: http://web.archive.org/web/20140813025825/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/introducing-the-new-developer-experience.aspx http://web.archive.org/web/20140813025825/http://blogs.msdn.... It just turns out that it's very easy to bend such studies into showing what you want to see.
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davidthewatson 4y ago

gjsman-1000 4y ago

This is one of the biggest problems to Linux on the desktop that hasn't been addressed with all the work. If it gets large enough, Patents. Design patents by Microsoft, Design patents by Apple, Design patents by Google, Design patents by third parties, software patents on algorithms, and countless codec patents that Linux users violate every time they download an H.264, H.265, or AAC, or AptX encoder or decoder, and DMCA laws they violate every time they play a DVD. To this day, Fluendo sells $20-$30 Gstreamer Codec Packs that are legally licensed in the US for businesses who notice and care. However, so few care at this point Fluendo discontinued the legal DVD player, leaving basically no legal equivalent on Linux. It's easy to ignore when the companies that own most of them don't feel threatened. But if GNU/Linux was on 40% of PC Desktops, Microsoft would be absolutely eyeing those patents, and MPEG LA + Access Advance would be figuring out how to launch codec lawsuits, and the DVD CCA with the MPA would be running after anyone with a copy of VLC, Adobe might be hunting for patents in the printing stack that could be construed as PostScript-related, and on and on.

guerrilla 4y ago
Except none of this happened. Multiple project leads from the projects in question are in this very thread denying this made up version of events, which none of us, even those of us deep into it at the time seem to remember.

migueldeicaza 4y ago

This is nonsense.

gwd 4y ago
I appreciate that in the heat of the moment, you want to correct the record quickly; but this adds very little to the discussion. I look forward to your longer comment / blog post setting the record straight.
- goulor 4y ago
  I don't think that Miguel needs to waste time trying to prove a negative. He was there at the time of the supposed events. If he says it didn't happen then we can take him at his word imho.
  - notRobot 4y ago
    For others who didn't know: > Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican-American programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      (Also Midnight Commander, which was surprising to learn. I can’t actually say why, in retrospect, but it really was.)
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I hadn't read the username and took the comment as a typical low effort HN troll but coming from Miguel, "This is nonsense" is a complete statement that stands on its own.
    - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
      "Famous person who worked on the project disagrees and does not explain why" does not meaningfully contribute to a discussion. We're left to throw random hypotheses at a wall with no evidence.

haunter 4y ago

GNOME 2 was perfect. I use the spiritual sucessor MATE wherever it’s possible. It’s not perfect and arguably “boring” but there is really something to it https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/ On a side note a similar project exist for KDE 3. Trinity Desktop https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ And on a second mildly related side note: /r/linux had a thread about a modern (2009) OpenSuse spin with KDE 2 a few months ago. It was released as an april’s fools joke but the ISO file totally disappeared from the internet. Or at least the sub couldn’t find it (and the archive.org mirror is corrupted) https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-brings-back-desktop-functionality https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-bri... Maybe someone here have it? :)

nequo 4y ago
> GNOME 2 was perfect. … MATE … It’s not perfect … Is MATE worse than GNOME 2 used to be? I just switched to MATE and I have run into all sorts of odd bugs. 1. If I position an external monitor above the primary, I can’t put any windows in the overlapping portion along the x axis. 2. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, maximized windows return to their original monitor but half-maximized windows don’t. 3. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, the background becomes tiled instead of zoomed with Marco + compositing and it blacks out and the desktop flickers with Compiz. 4. With Compiz, I can constrain the window switcher across all windows to the current workspace but I cannot constrain the window switcher within app group to the current workspace. 5. With Marco + compositing, due to a regression, taking a screenshot of a single window includes the boundary around it that contains the window’s shadow. There was something else too but I forget. Quite dispiriting but I have given up on finding the perfect desktop.
- aklemm 4y ago
  Gnome 2 was peak for me too.
- ghoul_fazer21 4y ago
  Really?
- 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago

If gnome's menu is a "start menu", then surely macOS classic's apple menu also counts as a start menu ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.p...

icedchai 4y ago
It's been a while, but if I recall, the classic Mac OS Apple menu was not a general purpose "start menu." IIRC, it provided access to limited functionality, like desk accessories and recent documents.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  It had everything in it and you could put anything in it[1]. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/MacOS8AppleMenu.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/MacOS8AppleMe... 2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Mac_OS_7.6.1_emulated_inside_of_SheepShaver.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Mac_OS_7.6.1_...
  - icedchai 4y ago
    ok! you are right. It has been a while...
lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] No. The Apple menu wasn't originally hierarchical, it was flat in the first 6 major version of classic MacOS; and it wasn't originally an app launcher. It held the control panel and things but no launchers. It became customisable in MacOS 7, which introduced aliases (symlinks in xNix terms, shortcuts in Win9x terms). Then you could put aliases in the "Apple menu" folder inside the System folder, and make it into an app-launch menu, but that was not its purpose and MacOS did not ship with it configured like that. Whereas the Start menu was always hierarchical, and was always an app-launch menu; in Win95 it did little else.

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

The bar at the left of the desktop on Unity is very much like the Windows 7 taskbar, which can optionally be placed at the left. This doesn't seem credible to me.

hulitu 4y ago
You could place the taskbar on win ( at least 98) in every edge of the screen. The same in fvwm.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] This was a feature in Win95, even in beta in 1994 or so.
lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] I think that is wildly misrepresentative. I covered the differences in my 2013 (ish) article which I linked at the end of my blogpost. I don't think you've read it, from what you're saying. I suggest that you do. Win7 revamped the taskbar specifically to make it look more like a dock, but it wasn't like that before (which I suspect you haven't used) and there are salient differences between docks and taskbars.

toyg 4y ago

I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. This worry was never expressed at the time in significant terms. The FAT and SMB patents were much more of a worry than anything related to the desktop interface - only outright clones were being pursued. At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. Linux usage was in ascendancy, money was being thrown around, and the FOSS world was starting to attract young designers who saw it as a cheap way to build professional credibility. And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. The core teams really thought they had a shot at redesigning how people interact with computers, "like Apple did with phones". Interaction targets moved from keyboard+mouse to touch screens, because "convergence" and the fact that the mobile sector was suddenly awash with cash. It's sad that people try to justify their missteps in this way. Microsoft was (and is) a terrible company and a constant threat to the FOSS ecosystem, but defining some of the biggest design choices of the Linux desktop only in antagonistic or reflective terms does a real disservice to those projects and the people who worked in them. If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing.

RicoElectrico 4y ago
> And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. Oh, I remember when I could go to Medium every week or so, and there were numerous useful (or somewhat useful) articles tagged with UX - and then it slowly died out.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  And it's quite sad. Over the years it feels like UX has become stagnant and rather sterile.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    UX? I would be even happy with more UI variety. I remember jobs and gates being asked at a d8 conference in 2008 how they imagined desktops in 10/15 years. Gates spoke about voice and motion as controls, while jobs argued that on desktop there wasn't much to change because customers were probably already used to things in certain way and any disruption without a net advantage was just not gonna happen. He also said that the only chance for a ux change were mobile devices as they were a fresh start for everyone.

smm11 4y ago

Nextstep 1.0, 1989, with a dock.

masswerk 4y ago
However, RISC OS (Acorn), 1987, with an icon bar. :-) Project lead Paul Fellows is quoted in this article [1] as follows ("Arthur" being the code name for one of two competing projects, which became RISC OS), > "I found this page I was very pleased by: 'Apple acquired the Dock from Steve Jobs' NeXTstep OS which stole it from Acorn's Arthur Operating System of 1987.'" and, > "There was a guy at Colton Software with us… who joined Microsoft in Seattle, and it was shortly after that that Windows acquired an icon bar. I know how that idea got there." And on the rationale behind it, > "In case anyone ever asked where it came from, we were sat in a room thinking 'how do we design this to be different, so we don't get sued by Apple?' The Mac had a menu bar of text across the top, so we thought 'we can't go across the top, we'll have to go across the bottom – and we can't use text, so we'll have to use icons.' That's why it's like that," [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ Edit: That said, Xerox PARC had the Cedar development environment in the 1980s and this featured sort of a task/icon bar already. Notably, the second, long ongoing project for an Acorn operating system, written in Modula 2, was conducted at ARC (Acorn Research Center) in Palo Alto, next to PARC. There may have been some exchange (and inspiration) involved. [2] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-11_The_Cedar_Programming_Environment_A_Midterm_Report_and_Examination.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-1... [3] Video, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar", CHM YT channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

marcodiego 4y ago

TLDR: > SUSE signed a patent-sharing deal: https://www.theregister.com/2006/11/03/microsoft_novell_suse_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2006/11/03/microsoft_novell_suse... > Note: SUSE is the biggest German Linux company. (Source: I worked for them until last year.) KDE is a German project. SUSE developers did a lot of the work on KDE. > So, when SUSE signed up, KDE was safe. > Red Hat and Ubuntu refused to sign. > So, both needed non Windows like desktops, ASAP, without a Start menu, without a taskbar, without a window menu at top left and minimize/maximize/close at top right, and so on. I remember Unity was born because GNOME (Red Hat) wouldn't accept Canonical changes. I remember GNOME 3 was born like a long term project that could adapt better for the future (nascent adaptive UI's) just like KDE4. It was known to be slow in its first iterations to get better over time. Of course, if the described reasons really make sense, it is not something that would be discussed in the open, but is not what I felt at the time. I even vaguely remember the "genie" effect in Compiz needed two curves when minimizing a window to be "different enough" from apple, but that was all. I also remember you couldn't play a DVD or an MP3 out of the box because of DRM and patents. Everything else... never had the vision the author described. Disclaimer: around 2010-2013 I was a sporadic contributor to Compiz and GNOME.

Conan_Kudo 4y ago
At the time, both Novell/SUSE and Red Hat were significant contributors to GNOME. Novell acquired Ximian around the same time they bought SUSE and merged the two. That effectively made SUSE into a GNOME shop rather than a KDE one, though it didn't last as SUSE bled out all of their GNOME developers...

lloydde 4y ago

I don’t doubt it, but the post does not lay out the timeline. Those events likely aligned the business interests to what the designers were already wanting to make happen. From what I recall, by 2004, Linux on Desktop designers were already looking to move on from mimic and displace Windows to win on their own terms. There seemed to be a lot of energy do something new and different by 2005. It seemed like there was a lot of wireframes and prototypes in both GNOME and KDE camps. Also around 2005, touchscreen tablets were also having a moment. I think I remember a popular Nokia model. 2006 had Sugar UI for interactive learning on OLPC XO.

lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] I provided citations for my claims. Can we see some for yours, please?
- lloydde 4y ago
  I am going from memory. I can anchor the memories as September 2005 till early 2006 as it was a memorable time for me. I spent that time working out of a Palo Alto garage working on a "web 2.0" web browser, Flock, with a small group of people that included a few who had previously been at Eazel and were still passionate GNOME participants. Thinking further on it now, unrelated to that work, Jeff Waugh @jdub would be person I'd go to for receipts. If I was searching the web, I'd be looking for references to Gnome ToPaZ with topaz being a play on ThreePointZero: "When the prospect of GNOME 3 was first discussed by developers in 2005, the concept took on a life of its own among the users who imagined that it would be an audacious reinvention of the desktop with completely new interaction paradigms and a new kind of user interface. This pie-in-the-sky vision was referred to as ToPaZ, word play on the phrase three-point-zero. " https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/07/gnome-3-0-officially-announced-and-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/07/gnome...
  - lloydde 4y ago
    December 2005 article: "So, the GNOME people have started to focus on questions such as universal access, so if you have motor difficulties or other disabilities, software still should be usable. Likewise, it shouldn't matter what language you use or character set you need, software should be usable. Part of Galago and Telepathy comes from getting beyond questions of windows, menus, icons and pointers and focusing on the things people really care about. In Jeff's view, these things are people, events, documents and sex. When questions of when GNOME 3.0 will be released arose, people have suggested it was a stupid idea. So Jeff came up with TOPAZ, taking the first letters from Three Point Zero and inserting some vowels. TOPAZ is not planned for release at this time." An Evening with Jeff Waugh Linux Journal by Colin McGregor on December 27, 2005 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8752 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8752

0xbadc0de5 4y ago

Regardless of the reasons, I'm quite happy with Gnome 3 as my daily driver. Once I understood the design philosophy of the /Shell/ aspect of /Gnome Shell/, the friction disappeared. The idea is that Gnome 3 can (should) be a keyboard-centric UI for most tasks whereas Gnome 2 and other similar UI's were/are arguably mouse-centric. For me, it's much faster to navigate using hotkeys and shortcuts than mouse/trackpad movements.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Traditional desktops supported keyboards heavily; they were born at a time when mice were optional. Original Mac as well. Gnome3 has removed most menus, which can't help it in that area, although I'm guessing they added a few others.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dopeboy 4y ago

Ubuntu user since 2005. I was one of those users who flew to Mint. I loved MATE and eventually Cinnamon. Over the years, some of my work habits changed + Cinnamon slowed down my system. So I went back to unity but I still prefer windows like DEs...

tannhaeuser 4y ago

I'm still using gnome 2 with Unity on Ubuntu 16 ESM while Gnome 3+ has no future on my notebooks. Never thought that Gnome 2's LaF is Windows-y; if anything, it looks more like Mac Os, with global menu and minimal window decorations. I always thought Gnome devs wanted to jump onto the tablet bandwagon (or simply wanted to try out something different and non-WIMPy), but failed hard.

lproven 4y ago
I wrote the article. I do not understand your points here. GNOME 2 does not have global menus. GNOME 2 did not have minimal window decorations, with separate min./max/close/menu buttons. GNOME 2 (and MATE) does have: * a taskbar with iconic buttons for windows (a Win95 innovation); * a hierarchical app-launch menu (a Win95 innovation); * a system tray with the clock and status icons at the opposite end of the panel from the app-launch menus (a Win95 refinement of a MacOS feature). And so on. I think you're remembering wrongly or are confusing different GNOME versions.

psalminen 4y ago

It's always interesting for me to see that I'm so alone in loving Gnome 3. As a keyboard heavy user, it has always matched my workflow. I never appreciated a start menu. It leaves essentially the full screen for my program. The settings drop-downs are intuitive. Granted I use the Material Shell tiling extension now, but vanilla gnome 3 will always have a place in my heart.

uneekname 4y ago
I love it too. It works so well on my machines. I hope it sticks around
JoshTriplett 4y ago
> It's always interesting for me to see that I'm so alone in loving Gnome 3. You're not alone. Complaints always get projected louder and wider than happiness. GNOME 2 was the same way. So many users treating it as the end of the world, and it took a few versions to improve and fix initial issues, but after those first couple of versions it was a great upgrade. GNOME 3 likewise took a couple of versions to find its feet, and then it was a great upgrade.
- psalminen 4y ago
  Interesting, I never saw (or knew) that Gnome 2 received the same treatment. It's heyday was before my time though.
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    Massive blowback for "removing configuration options". GNOME 1 had an absurd about of configuration, including many of what the GNOME 2 designers described as "unbreak me" options: options where only one answer could possibly make sense ("make X work"), and worse, some of them were off by default. GNOME 2 removed those, in favor of better autodetection, better defaults, and similar. However, in doing so, they ended up removing some that were actually important to people, for use cases that weren't as well known. Some of those were added back, or better replacements provided, in the first few versions; as a result, GNOME 2.4 or so was much better than 2.0.

stormking 4y ago

That's a historical misrepresentation. There were no treads against the "traditional" Linux desktops from Microsoft. There were, however, a lot of mediocre designers who wanted to "be like Apple".

AreYouSirius 4y ago
lproven 4y ago
How many citations would you require before you believe it? https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m... https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/ https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuit... https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/patent-suit-against-red-hat-novell-threatens-open-source-world-59806.html https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/patent-suit-against-red-h... https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240057754/Open-source-is-a-threat-admits-Microsoft https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240057754/Open-source-i...
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I don't think commenters are denying there was a legal threat; I think they seem to be denying that threat was the motivation for Unity.
- meragrin_ 4y ago
  I was into really into Linux and had M$ derangement syndrome at the time. Nothing in those really relate to GNOME and Unity. Who are you going to believe? People trying to stoke fear or an important GNOME project member? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035

ineedasername 4y ago

I don't remember MS being all that threatening, though certainly there may have been less public pressure. The author worked for SUSE which signed an agreement w/ MS to sidestep any issue, so maybe that closeness made it seem a much larger issue than it was. I don't even see much of a real change in the ecosystem: A single command or a few clicks in the GUI will get you LXDE on a fresh Ubuntu install. I certainly don't see any hurdles here that would have been a major set back for desktop Linux. Desktop Linux was (is?) always just around the corner, but never quite got there for reasons unrelated to MS's actions. Maybe MS would have taken more aggressive action if it ever looked closer to mainstream? I'd rather hear from Unity and Gnome devs though, what motivated them at the time? That would determine if MS threats were a significant factor. From what I remember of those times it seemed more like UI folks wanted to explore other options in general, especially after a very nice looking and usable non-MS example came along in the form of OS X. There is also now a major commercial distro that does use an MS-like desktop: SteamOS. Around May I saw analyst estimates of about 1.5M units sold of the Deck. If the author's claim is still part of MS's playbook then SteamOS will be an interesting test for it. Especially because Valve's Proton development has in some cases improved performance above native Windows. SteamOS with wider hardware support to drive gamer's primary systems would be a larger threat of desktop Linux than I think has really ever been present in the past.

chungy 4y ago

Not sure I really buy it. The patent suits seemed more related to VFAT than anything else, especially not as vague as desktop metaphors (remember, Microsoft succeeded against Apple trying to come after them in the mid-1980s on similar notions; they'd be fools to think that precedent would not hold on yet another competitor). It's also the same time that Microsoft seemed to want to abandon Windows 95 paradigms as quickly as possible, with the release of Windows 8. It did seem like everyone just went crazy at about the same time.

jmmv 4y ago

Interesting theory, but I don't recall this happening. As other commenters are saying, there were indeed patent-related issues around FAT and the like, and huge interoperability problems with NTFS (to name one, but that's irrelevant here)... but I don't remember anything around patents and the desktop style -- which may exist, but they were not the problem here. From my recollection, the real issue was Mac OS X (as it was spelled at the time) gaining territory by being a real Unix with a good interface, thus attracting a lot of Unix/Linux users into the Mac. I'd even bet that many old-timers abandoned Linux on the desktop to move to the Mac, which in turn left room for the newcomers to replace the interface with something resembling the coolness of the Mac. But I'm only hypothesizing here.

pico303 4y ago
I was in this boat. I used to call it "a Unix laptop that could run Photoshop." Also it didn't crash when I closed the lid.
- knolan 4y ago
  For me it was a bit later in 2009 when I was giving a presentation for a position at Imperial College using my Dell laptop running Ubuntu and it crashed when plugging in the VGA cable for the projector. There was an iMac at the back of the room taunting me. Got the job via the EU in the end and bought a 2010 13” MBP which was rock solid for many years.
- scythe 4y ago
  >Also it didn't crash when I closed the lid. For me it was this + small form factor + high pixel density. I always looked at System76 and the laptops were too big and the displays were disappointing. Other sellers seemed similar or were just refurbishing, except Dell briefly, but I never trusted them. Hardware integration is just very nice to have.
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    I don't like Apple in many ways but thank fuck they moved the market along in high resolution screens. 1920x1080 was the defacto standard for far too long and I was supremely agitated by the lack of progress. “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” When you KNOW the technology can do it sometimes you just need to give people the friggin' faster horses!

wruza 4y ago

In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world. True. But it wasn’t their accomplishment. Nobody dragged these DEs into an endless war against their own users and developers. DEs were just frontend frameworks of the day. Those skilled enough to apt-get install <lighter-de-or-wm-of-choice>, tick few checkboxes and fill menus with commands - were constantly perplexed by all the drama.

modshatereality 4y ago
>True False, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.

yrgulation 4y ago

I’ll go against the rules and say that unity makes my guts churn. Linux/gnome is one sleek ui design away from mass adoption and unity is the exact opposite. I hate it. I’d even contribute £ to a sustained effort of making gnome look good.

cogman10 4y ago

I'm sorry, but timelines don't match up here. Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Patents last 20 years. Gnome 3 development didn't really start in earnest until 2008 (2 years after the alleged reason for the change), a 2 year timeline before any patent MS could claim on position of the x button or start start button. Gnome 3 was finished in 2011, 1 year after any patent related to windows 3 or earlier would be dead and buried. And arguably, some of the design elements of mention in this post were present in windows 1.0, released in 1986. There are also other prior art examples such as Amiga released in 1985 which had similar "top right button closes the application" design elements. And then let's not forget, this is about enforcing patents. Not something that's really easy to do with FOSS, hence the reason projects like FFMPEG and x264 have stuck around even though they very clearly violate a bunch of patents (if someone distributes the binary). Heck, even projects like DeCSS2 were almost impossible to kill off with it's explicit flaunting of the DMCA.

einr 4y ago
> There are also other prior art examples such as Amiga released in 1985 which had similar "top right button closes the application" design elements. AmigaOS has the close widget on the top left, like Mac OS.
stkdump 4y ago
> The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood" Literally not a single one of these existed in Windows 3.0.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] Thank you. Also, just for the record: Windows 1, 2 & 3 didn't even have an "X to close" button on their windows.

davesque 4y ago

I'm not sure if the author of the linked post was being sarcastic but, as one of the rare Macintosh users of the era, I feel like I have to jump in here and point out that a lot of those original features weren't particularly original. The old-school macOS of the time (System 7, which was not based on BSD) had a lot of similar features in its UI. Those included things like the desktop hard disk icon (called "Untitled" by default I think?), "Trash", the Apple icon menu, maximize buttons on windows, and others. Windows 95 definitely had some unique stuff and was a nice OS to use. But I remember at the time it seemed pretty derivative.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago
None of the counterexamples you tried to give are actually in the article.
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  Well, the article was making the case that Windows 95 was some singularly unique UI, and the comment was suggesting that it really wasn't. Among Mac users at the time this wasn't exactly an uncommon belief; the joke "Windows 95 = Mac 89" was pretty prevalent, even making it to bumper stickers, IIRC. (Although former Apple engineer Erich Ringewald later observed, that while was largely true, the real problem was that Mac 95 = Mac 89 was also true.)
  - bitwize 4y ago
    I was at the 1995 MacWorld. I saw a lot of "Windows 95 = Mac '84" and "C:\ONGRTLNS.W95" T-shirts about. Then again, the first machine I saw actually running Windows 95 was a Mac, I believed equipped with SoftPC, at that same expo.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Yes they were... Apple Menu = Start Menu, Hard Disk Icon = My Computer, etc. You can't just not do the translations. Everything Microsoft did was stolen from other places, including Macs.

rdl 4y ago

I came from the vtwm/otherwise highly customized xwindows world and could never really understand Unity (also can’t really figure out TikTok or Snapchat UX, so maybe I’m a dumb dinosaur). Windows, Mac, Motif, etc all were pretty easy.

scrame 4y ago

> Ubuntu used Unity, alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops. Nonsense. It was alienating because it was slow and clunky, and for the people that choose Linux over OSX because they don't like OSX interfaces it was just being forced to use an inferior version of something they already didn't like. The usual OSS intransigence where they couldn't actually figure out what UI they were trying to implement, like the blue-yellow-red buttons on the upper right, but also a close box / menu on the upper left and then also the right click for optional behavior of the window was also just straight _bad_. That, and it was really slow and clunky. FWIW, I actually used fluxbox a lot for VNC installations and found it to be more pleasant and snappier (especially remotely) than Gnome. I recall the switchover and don't remember hearing _anything_ from _anyone_ about liking it, but the reason was never that it wasn't enough like Windows.

smeagull 4y ago
It wasn't just slow and clunky, it changed how to do basic things, split configuration between about three different places, and changed defaults (which they still frequently do, to the point that it is still on-going and my "go-back-to-sane-defaults" script is now pages long) The best UI is one the users already know. Changing to get more users only to lose your existing ones is a massive failure.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] > it changed how to do basic things Which is the entire point of my article.
  - smeagull 4y ago
    And my point is, doing that is the worst UX thing you can do.
    - lproven 4y ago
      On the one hand: GNOME 3 did the same thing. That seems to be overlooked a lot. On the other hand: If you're a keyboard user, like me, then all the Windows keystrokes that worked in GNOME 2 still work in Unity, so it's much less jarring than KDE or something. As an example: the Windows Quick Launch toolbar, that came in with Win98 in 1998, lets you start the first 10 apps by pressing Win+0 to 9. Unity honours that. Most people didn't know it was there, but if you did, it still worked. That is what I consider good attention to detail. UI that you didn't even know was there was carefully preserved to make Unity less of a shock to the system. Yet all the mob bitch about is that it's Mac-like, which was because Ubuntu was under threat of prosecution for being too Windows-like. Be fair. Learn about this and consider it. Because currently it looks like you're not.

nigrioid 4y ago

Just take a look at GTK 3+. It has to be deliberate sabotage. By Microsoft? Who knows. I think it's funny how everyone is still trying to copy Apple. Apple gradually stopped being worth copying after Snow Leopard. After High Sierra, you'd have to be high to want to copy anything from it. I guess it's just inertia - people haven't realized it isn't good anymore.

jamesgeck0 4y ago

The sources this post links to support its primary claim don’t even mention the Windows 95 desktop. The only one that comes even close was written by the same author. It also doesn’t cite anything that would support its claim.

lproven 4y ago
I wrote it. What citations would you like? Tell me and I will see if I can find some. Microsoft cited how many patents were infringed, but only approximately: To CNN & the SJ Mercury, 235: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... To ComputerWorld, 283: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m... But AFAIK it never actually listed what the patents were.
- jamesgeck0 4y ago
  I’d like to see something validating the claim that parents influenced Linux GUI design. The Fortune article printed by CNN only says that 65 patents apply to the Linux GUI. It’s so vague that I can’t see how it would be actionable information for FOSS developers. The SJ Mercury article says the same thing, but cites the Fortune article for its claim; it’s not a separate source. And the ComputerWorld article explicitly does not cover this claim, noting that they didn’t examine patent infringement risk for non-kernel components like KDE.
  - lproven 4y ago
    OK. I will see what I can do for some future piece, because I think this story has legs. It was the publicly stated intention of RH and Canonical at the time of the MS threats, but I need to find records of that.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago

This does not match any of what I remember from the time

zcbenz 4y ago

From my memory GNOME 3 and Unity were created because there was a trend to make all interfaces both desktop and mobile friendly, Ubuntu tried to ship a phone using Unity, and GNOME 3 was advertised for its tablet friendly interface. For Windows world there was Metro UI of Windows 8, Apple insisted on using different UIs for desktop and mobile and was laughed at.

keybuk 4y ago

I was the lead for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical. This is nonsense.

propter_hoc 4y ago

KDE 2 was such an incredible experience when it came out. I understand the GPL purism in GNU/Linux that hobbled Qt and by extension KDE, but I always felt that KDE from 2 onwards was by far the superior desktop environment. Ultimately despite Qt and KDE adopting GPL they never seemed to catch up in terms of corporate sponsorship or distro adoption. I thought it was a sort of bitter irony that Apple basically co-opted Konqueror into their core web platform... Shows the quality of engineering the KDE folks had.

fariszr 4y ago

Personally I like how gnome is no, especially after gnoem 40. It feels like a more advanced and more modular version of MacOs desktop, with a great feel and finish the IMO KDE lacks. Its great!

djbusby 4y ago

Cheers to Xfce for ignoring most of this nonsense. I love having a stable daily driver.

guerrilla 4y ago

Okay, we all agree this is not what happened (and we have confirmation from project leads in this very thread) and I think we know what happened with GNOME but what happened with KDE? Did KDE just fail on accident, just completely coincidentally at the same time? I was always a GNOME fan myself, so I never really followed KDE. Does anyone know the story there?

toyg 4y ago
They had to move to Qt4, and took the chance to make some big changes - in the name of "convergence", which was a shared buzzword back then. They generated a lot of hype, then shipped a 4.0 release that was very half-baked. Whether that was always the plan or not, the public image of the project never fully recovered.

dvdsgl 4y ago

I was the lead designer of Unity. Unity was not a response to patent concerns, but rather the manifestation of a convoluted OEM strategy involving exclusive distribution of distinct design features, and a write-once-run-anywhere dream of running Ubuntu on any device from netbooks to big screens to automobiles.

esoterae 4y ago
Well, if nothing else hopefully someone else notices this witness statement exposing the above-linked revisionist history for what it is--a fabrication. On the topic of Unity: I, a linux user since the mid 90s, worked an actual linux job through the forced deprecation of GNOME 2.. I don't have much anything constructive to say about it. I even used fvwm2 for a while after gnome2 got yoinked.. it was a nice reminder of my halcyon days writing perl in xemacs, running fvwm on my sparc 2. It wasn't too long after that I landed on xfce. I still wonder what gnome2 could've been. All I ever wanted was a compositing, focus-follows-mouse, raise/lower window manager with a full-featured keyboard shortcut config. I still feel as though we were sold out. I don't think my mental representation of Canonical will ever recover. It just felt so blatantly anti-user during that period, and that impression has not been tempered with the passage of time.
- lproven 4y ago
  I wrote the article. The legal threats I cited were not and are not a fabrication. I did not write these other articles covering it: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m...
  - ndhlms 4y ago
    The problem is you're still failing to demonstrate a causal link between threats of legal action and GNOME3 or Unity. I was around during this time and early adopter of GNOME Shell (i.e. 2.31.x); there was and is zero evidence indicating that legal issues were even a consideration. There is, on the other hand, mountain ranges of evidence indicating this was driven by everything but legal issues[1][2][3]. [1]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/FAQ#What_problems_does_GNOME_Shell_attempt_to_address.3F https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/FAQ#What_problems... [2]: http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-decadence http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-... [3]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Events/Summit/2008/GUIHackfest https://wiki.gnome.org/Events/Summit/2008/GUIHackfest

shmerl 4y ago

> In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world. KDE is still the most used Linux DE.

lproven 4y ago
[[citation needed]]
- shmerl 4y ago
  https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
  - lproven 4y ago
    By under 12K respondents who are gamers. I am not confident that this is a representative sample.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

Has RedHat ever made anything non-horrible? It popularized all of Poettering's abysmally overcomplicated designs (Systemd/Pulseaudio/etc), there was Ansible, GNOME, NetworkManager, OpenShift, RHEL kernels, they abandoned XOrg, killed off both CoreOS and CentOS. Podman is supposed to be good but I've never gotten it to work.

hulitu 4y ago
Not since they bundled an unrelease compiler in their distribution ( around RH7).

IE6 4y ago

The timing on this seems off to me - I am wondering why would gnome and unity releasing a different UI/UX ca. 2010 be a response to Windows 95?

creatonez 4y ago
The article is not saying GNOME 3/Unity is similar to Win95, it's saying that Steve Ballmer believed that GNOME 2 and KDE 3 (shipped by Red Hat, Ubuntu, SuSE at the time) were too similar to Win95-Win8, which Microsoft owned patents on. And therefore, because of rumblings from within Microsoft in 2006-2007, GNOME had to change as soon as possible, and KDE was fine staying the same because SuSE had been semi-blessed by Microsoft. (The premise of the article is factually wrong, I'm just explaining its thought process)
lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] Because, as I have cited in about a dozen links up and down this comments page now, MS threatened to sue between 2004-2007, then companies started to settle or work on something different.

Nursie 4y ago

This is nonsense, revisionist and blames people who didn't like having their workflow yanked out from under them for only being able to use "windows-like" desktops. Linux (and the wider unix-ecosystem) had a variety of paradigms available, in the form of things like fvwm, gnustep, enlightenment etc. Gnome 1's default look is a hybrid of CDE and windows influences, and Gnome 2 with its default top bar took things in a different direction, if anything its default layout looks much more like earlier MacOS releases, which had had a top bar since, AFAICT, the 80s. Microsoft were certainly making a lot of noise, but with their SCO proxy war failing so badly, nobody was taking it seriously by then. Gnome 3 happened because the people who were behind Gnome 3 wanted to change everything and they were in a position to do so. The bad feeling came because not only did they change everything, they went from a "do things your way" to a "you must do things our way" model and they (apparently deliberately) killed the ability to run Gnome 2 and 3 on the same machine. They announced 2 was deprecated and abandoned as of right now, and that the users would basically just have to suck it up.

smeagull 4y ago

Contempt for the user.

stillbourne 4y ago

I've been using linux since '97, RH 5.1 that came on cd in the back of a linux tome I can't even recall the name of now was my first distro. The partitioning tool was called disk druid and the desktop? Fuck man the desktop was ugly, I don't even remember what it was called. Hahaha I just looked it up it was gnome, the beta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkD9jY8cxIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkD9jY8cxIY god I'm old.

einr 4y ago
On the topic of Windows 95 UI clones... If you go one minor version back from your experience, RedHat 5.0 actually shipped with FVWM95* as its default desktop and it was fugly: http://toastytech.com/guis/x.html http://toastytech.com/guis/x.html * FVWM, with an unholy patchset to drag it kicking and screaming into kinda-sorta resembling Windows 95

richardfey 4y ago

It would be interesting to make a study about users that do not consent to report metrics and the UIs they prefer. They might as well be a consistent slice of the user base but invisible when decisions are made.

hulitu 4y ago
Nobody gives a damn about those studies. They even don't need studies - they can look at bug reports. It's not that this issues are new. Just looking at MS there are bugs which are not fixed for years.
- richardfey 4y ago
  Then I suggest you do read some studies about where incentives are in open source development: spoiler: they're not in closing bug reports ASAP.

theonemind 4y ago

Seconding/thirding/N-ing general consensus of those invested in the Linux desktop scene from the era that this wasn't the rhetoric or the feeling at that time. I think it'll take a stronger argument than this to convince anyone that lived through this era. Felt an apparent mania to shove mobile interfaces on to desktop computers for fear of missing the next big thing, usability and sense be damned.

foul 4y ago

The "classic" elements of Mac OS X were out in 2001 and then Apple made the UX more and more convergent to iPhones and iPads. Enterprise programming, including FOSS, from the '00s to our days got more and more hooked to Apple rigs. GNOME 3 and Unity, although bad resource-hoggers, were multi-year efforts toward abandoning Windows-ish dumberies (sticky keys for example) to approach similarity to devs' personal computers' perceived terseness. Some intel and microsoft employees and ex-employees were and are working on GTK and systemd, so this article looks very very, very bold in their statements.

ChrisRR 4y ago

We know why Unity happened. Because Canonical has a bad case of NIH

wink 4y ago

> Ubuntu used Unity, alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops, and that made Mint a huge success. This sounds disingenious or at least overly simplified. Most people I know don't like Unity. It doesn't matter if they were used to Windows, OSX, or enlightenment. "Don't like" still means it's tolerable, they don't hate it - but most prefer to use anything else.

Shorel 4y ago

> In the end MS did not sue anyone... but it got what it wanted: total chaos in the Linux desktop world. So true, and Miguel de Icaza, the architect of Gnome, later got his wish of working for Microsoft. I said at the time, he was working for Microsoft all along.

trasz 4y ago

>Before the threats, almost everyone used GNOME 2 No, not really. Early gnome was a joke compared to KDE, in that while KDE could be actually used as desktop, gnome was helloworldware.

lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] Early GNOME was GNOME 1.x. It was not great. GNOME 2 was not early. It was the 2nd version, it fixed the issues, it was very widely used, and it still exists today in the form of MATE.
creatonez 4y ago
Rather confused by this claim that GNOME 2 was helloworldware. GNOME 2 was one of the very few Linux desktops that saw widespread usage within large companies. Red Hat and Canonical had professional offerings based around it. It attracted a small chunk of home users who were pissed off by Windows Vista. So it definitely got UX tested quite a lot. Red Hat Linux actually still includes a builtin clone of the GNOME 2 design just to cater to people who have been using the same UI in a professional setting for decades. They only recently switched away from this classic clone layout being the default. KDE is the one that was way more community-focused, but it did see a bit of use for professional workstations. You may be thinking of GNOME 1 - it was incomplete garbage.

kristov 4y ago

Whatever the cause, I think what happened had a positive outcome. Being able to choose from a huge selection of window managers (or none at all) is something I really like about Linux. Thanks for all the hard work that people have put into WMs!

birdyrooster 4y ago

lmao author thinks unity is better than macOS, invalidates his opinions for me

0xfeba 4y ago

I still think Win95 is peak U, but it's what I grew up with, so that's probably expected. Minus some of the non-resizable windows, some newer UI elements that are clearly better, etc. I still run "it" via XFCE and Arch Linux: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

pachico 4y ago

Am I the only one enjoying and finding peace in this type of short sentence narrative? Is it maybe because English is not my native language?