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" deskt

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.