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

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.