GNOME has an interesting progress history. - Initially, Miguel De Icaza started GNOME in 1997, he also created the Gnumeric spreadsheet for GNOME, and when .NE

GNOME has an interesting progress history. - Initially, Miguel De Icaza started GNOME in 1997, he also created the Gnumeric spreadsheet for GNOME, and when .NET was released, he together with Nat Friedman (CEO and Co-Founder of Github), started Helix Code which later become Ximian/Xamarin and Mono. Miguel De Icaza abandoned GNOME even before 2013, and finally left Linux in 2013. - Several default apps in GNOME were written in C# Mono, namely F-Spot and Tomboy Notes. - Nat Friedman also created the Beagle Desktop, which is a search-and-indexing tool for GNOME back in 2006. - Ximian Desktop developed the Evolution Groupware Suite, to allow GNOME to be used in office environments. Evolution had become GNOME's standard email client. - Eric Sink, which led the SpyGlass browser team that licensed the Mosaic browser, which had become the codebase for Internet Explorer, developed AbiWord, which is GNOME's standard word-processor. - In 1999, Andy Hertzfeld from Apple together with other Apple engineers, started Eazel, which created the Nautilus File Manager, which is had become the standard file manager for GNOME. - Novell Desktop introduces the Compiz compositor in 1999, also SLED10 has a new GNOME Main Menu, which become a standard menu for SuSE. - Novell also spearheaded the Tango Desktop project, which provides theming consistency for GNOME and it's apps. Later, Tango Desktop was adopted by other projects as well. - RedHat developed the NetworkManager layer, also, Robert Love from Xamarin (Now Google) contributed heavily to the project. NetworkManager, makes it easier to configure and switch WIFI networks in Gnome. Several underlying tech that build GNOME comes from: - GTK+ toolkit, that is the basis GNOME comes from GIMP Image Editor. - GNOME has several WM throughout the years, starting with Sawfish, then MetaCity and then Mutter. - Ubuntu having invested heavily on Compiz, tries to keep Compiz and GNOME 3, AFAIR, they have initially opposed the GNOME 3 direction of using Mutter and several GNOME 3 design principles, hence they have developed the Unity Desktop. I am not sure what mainline contribution that comes out from Unity, as I didn't follow after Unity. GNOME was actually a fun project, several changes had happened to GNOME, but IMHO, it's a masterpiece out of orchestrated chaos.