[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

[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.