11 ms·

Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022)

144 points by signa11 3y ago

lupusreal 3y ago
Forgot? I never knew, and I can't pass the #%@*ing captcha to read a blog post so I still don't know.
- pooper 3y ago
  Do you mean the cloud flare captcha thing? I will gladly email you the text of this article if you'd like it or you can try this archive link https://archive.ph/l3yX8 https://archive.ph/l3yX8
- firtoz 3y ago
  Spoiler alert: > The "why" part seems to be forgotten now: because Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    Which, last time this was posted on HN, was denied by a lot of the key people who were actually there.
    - lproven 3y ago
      Denied, but not shown wrong in any way. Reminder: anything other than denial means admission, and that exposes them and their employers to legal threats.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Feel lucky, it’s completely made up bullshit.
  - lproven 3y ago
    You are very hostile and keep calling me names, and I don't even know who you are. Why do you keep attacking a stranger? Do you hate me for some reason? Because it certainly feels like it.
    - bkor 3y ago
      > Why do you keep attacking a stranger? Do you hate me for some reason? Because it certainly feels like it. I do not see that person attacking you. He's saying the article is bs, that is about the article, not you as a person. > You are very hostile and keep calling me names I haven't seen one reply from that person that is about you as a person. I see loads of replies saying the article is bs. I see loads of replies from you saying that a claim is true unless proven otherwise. Not sure, but the aggression is not one-sided.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        Frankly, until I saw their replies, my impression was that the article was bad, and I'd have forgotten about it and who wrote it in minutes. If anyone gets a bad impression of this person over this, it will be because of their responses in this thread with the stubborn refusal to accept that they haven't provided any evidence for claims that are being contested by an increasing number of people who were directly involved.
u320 3y ago
Huh. Gnome happened way before Ubuntu was a thing. Ubuntu has never "needed a non windows-95 like desktop".
- vidarh 3y ago
  Indeed, Ubuntu arrived during the Windows XP era, and that part would've been nonsense in any case given that reconfiguring a Gnome setup to use menus in a different configuration e.g. matching elements from designs like RiscOS, AmigaOS, MacOS, NeXT predating Windows 95 and giving plenty of prior art to shut down any Microsoft threats would've been trivial. Any threats from MS over anything - that MS might have been sabre-rattling I can buy - would need to have gone deeper than that.
  - lproven 3y ago
    I wrote the article. I also wrote this nearly a decade earlier: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft... I find your response incoherent. Do please explain.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      There was nothing incoherent about it. There were two largely separate parts to it. 1. Ubuntu didn't exist until nearly a decade after Windows '95. If there was an issue relating to Windows '95, Ubuntu Separately, 2. Gnome was trivially modifiable in ways that mean that addressing the kind of superficial issues you bring up did not in any way require the drastic changes brought by subsequent versions of Unity. If MS patents had been an issue relating to the specific features you listed, stripping them out or replacing them without significant other changes would have been trivial. Indeed, MS own justification for the taskbar points out their perceived downsides of pre-existing iconification (and ironically massively overeggs it, by arguing the problem was double-clicks while ignoring that they could trivially solve that by allowing activation with the same single-click they did in the taskbar) Your description is simply wildly implausible, especially entirely absent evidence (patent numbers would be a start) and contradicting statements from people much better placed to know. I'll also note that I remember MS saber rattling about Linux, and it was not constrained to Gnome and KDE, or even directed at them, but at Linux in general. Meanwhile, the MS-SuSE/Novell patent agreement was not the agreement an MS that believed it had an actual case would make - it involved MS pre-paying Novel $440m for Linux support coupons, and Novell paying MS $40m for the patent pledge. Coming out $400m ahead when accused of patent infringement is pretty good. I'd like someone to make those kinds of patent accusations against me. Pretty please, anyone?
gtirloni 3y ago
https://archive.is/l3yX8 https://archive.is/l3yX8
Sakos 3y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257412 (2022)
- itronitron 3y ago
  gnome saying
- aktenlage 3y ago
  And what a great discussion. Apparently many people who were involved in the development and design of Unity and KDE debunk the claim of the article. Edit: E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325
  - lproven 3y ago
    They deny it. They didn't debunk it. Denial means saying "that is not true!" Debunking means showing something isn't true. Also, as the article of the piece, I want to point out 2 things: 1. I stand by it. Nobody's refuted it yet, including today. 2. I've rarely had so many ad-hominem attacks as for this, both last time and this time. Everyone making them, including some much bigger names than me, should feel ashamed for their poor behaviour around this. But calling out corporate BS and FUD often gets one attacked by fanboys. It still hurts, but it is important to do.
    - xtracto 3y ago
      This is funny. You say someone did something because of X reason. That someone is saying No, I did it because of Y reason" , and your reply is to ask them to prove it? Let's see, who would I choose to believe.... mhmmm
    - Vrondi 3y ago
      Why should anyone believe you, who is a third party on these things over the first-party primary sources? The primary sources disagree with you, and any Historian or Journalist worth their salt should value primary sources more.
thriftwy 3y ago
Sounds like a load of bull to me. They could have gone with any sensible approach and they choose an absolutely braindead one. Luckily I was always a KDE user so I believe anybody who refuses KDE switch also has no footing to complain. > So it went its own way with Unity instead: basically, a Mac OS X rip-off, only IMHO done better. Myself, I still use both Unity and macOS every day. Why write this post to complain then?
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  XFCE user checking in here. I use Plank/Docky to add a Mac-OS style hotbar at the bottom so I guess I've secretly wanted a Mac for a long time. I played with Compiz Fusion in 2008 so I've had plenty of cool graphical effect gimmicks to satisfy me for a while, so I tend toward something that just gets out of my way these days. XFCE does a pretty good job of that without overloading me like KDE can.
  - lproven 3y ago
    I wrote this and I use Xfce too. The Docky/Plank thing has always mystified me, so can I ask: why? An ordinary Xfce panel will do that and if you add the "docklike taskbar" plug in it integrates really well, without needing additional 3rd party tools and the extra RAM they use. So... just: why?
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      I should test to see if I can cycle through multiple terminal windows by scrolling up, that's the main reason I use it. However, I'm also not generally RAM limited in a way that I have to run too lean a system. I will give the native plugin a try though, thanks for the recommendation!
- lproven 3y ago
  > Sounds like a load of bull to me. Why? That's a harsh thing to say to me when all I'm trying to do is explain some history a lot of rich and influential people would prefer was forgotten. > Why write this post to complain then? I'm not complaining. I am trying to counter FUD that is obscuring documented history.
Deukhoofd 3y ago
I don't think this is really right. Windows did do legal bullshit, but that didn't cause GNOME 3 to happen. In fact, contributors were complaining that GNOME was stagnating years later, in 2008 [1]. GNOME 3 didn't really start development until late 2008. [1] 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-... Edit: Here's one of the founders of GNOME's opinion on the article from the last time this was posted: > This is nonsense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035
- lupusreal 3y ago
  > contributors were complaining that GNOME was stagnating Meanwhile users [me] were pleased as punch that GNOME was stable, useful and usable, just great all around and certainly not in need of major changes...
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
that explains the terrible UI but doesn’t explain why gnome and gdm developers are pigheaded enough to not implement highly requested features which could be hidden from sight via gconf.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  To this day it won't let you easily pick a solid color for the background. It blows my mind this was removed. Does macOS allow that? I haven't used it in ages. I'm asking because at some point it seemed all GNOME wanted was to follow Apple guidelines.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    > Does macOS allow that? Yes.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
There is always a simple reason - and when you hear it it is like a clear bell explaining why something always felt “off” - and this is one such example. Thank you. Not sure that it matters as the desktop that matters sits in our hands and is touch sensitive but it’s nice to know.
- jeltz 3y ago
  Both Miguel de Icaza and one of the core Unity developers have said tht the article is simply not true.
  - lproven 3y ago
    I wrote it, two years ago. I am still waiting for refutation rather than mere rebuttal. (To rebut: to say something is wrong. To refute: to prove something is wrong.) I want to see the receipts. I want evidence. I note that executives and project leaders from large companies and organisations subject to legal threats over intellectual property issues are required to deny infringement because to say anything else constitutes evidence: it could be construed as legal confession of the copying or other IP infringement of which they are being accused. Or, to put it more briefly: MRDA. Mandy Rice-Davies applies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_he_would,_wouldn%27t_he%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_he_would,_wouldn%27t_he%3...
    - vidarh 3y ago
      For anyone to have any reasons to offer up a stronger rebuttal, you'd need to have substantiated your claims with anything other than speculation first. > I want to see the receipts. I want evidence. Show us the receipts and evidence for your claims first. You're the one who started this without presenting a shred of evidence. To then imply the people contradicting you are lying when they present their description of their experience is at best wildly distasteful.
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      > I want to see the receipts. I want evidence. If the people who were involved are directly telling you "no, you're wrong, that's not why I did it" don't constitute evidence you'd accept then what would? > I note that executives and project leaders from large companies and organisations subject to legal threats over intellectual property issues are required to deny infringement because to say anything else constitutes evidence: it could be construed as legal confession of the copying or other IP infringement of which they are being accused. But saying "no, patent concerns were not involved in our decision" is not what people changing their product for patent concerns would do because that would be lying, and the lie would almost certainly be caught during discovery. Instead the magic formulation is along the lines of "no comment" or other variety of "shut up." Not to mention that it can be perfectly to make a change for legal concerns while still disagreeing with those legal concerns because litigation is fucking expensive. In any case, if the developers of GNOME 3 made the changes because they were afraid of patent threats from MS, coming out and saying "no, we didn't do it because of that" would be among the dumbest things they could do.
SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
I remember these days like they were yesterday because this was during the peak of me caring way too much about OpenSource disagreements. None of this stuff about needing to avoid a Windows 95 paradigm was being talked about in any of the circles I was in, or publications I was reading. I tentatively call bull, although it's possible that the most public facing narratives weren't the most urgent reasons I suppose.
- da02 3y ago
  What do you use today on a daily basis for an desktop OS?
  - SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
    At home it's almost entirely Linux (usually Arch btw), unless you count the occassional Windows VM. I'm using KDE for a desktop, funnily enough customised heavily to look like Windows 9x. I usually run something lighter like WindowMaker or IceWM though, but need Wayland for Waydroid atm, so KDE gives me a pretty nice Wayland experience out of the box. Did I mention I run Arch?
    - da02 3y ago
      Thanks for the info. The Arch OS, wiki, and community have been very impressive. I use mainly Void, but I still need to go back and read the Arch wiki for many things.
- herbst 3y ago
  I don't remember this as legal issue either. If windows 95 paradigms were to be avoided was because they were dated and deemed to be replaced with other concepts.
hasty_pudding 3y ago
Wild to me that you can patent a "taskbar".
- vidarh 3y ago
  Whatever part they patented, if anything of note, would have also been very narrow, given the history of interfaces with iconification of windows/"tasks" going back at least a decade prior to Windows '95. Maybe making them textual or organizing them into a bar? It'd in any case have been trivial to work around given the number of alternatives with prior art.
- dkarras 3y ago
  If there was no prior art, why not? I know nothing about the origins but whoever invented it, tested it on people and improved over it to make it shippable deserves some protection under laws which all inventions are protected.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    A 1980s car dashboard is prior art.
    - dkarras 3y ago
      yeah then my index finger is prior art for computer mouse. it doesn't work that way. if you can't see how the idea of putting a task bar where it is and making it usable in an operating system requires significant invention, don't know what to tell you. sure, today we are looking at all like it is the most obvious thing in the world, but back then it wasn't that obvious.
      - jojobas 3y ago
        More closely, taskbar is a close digital equivalent of bookmarks. 20 people in clean rooms faced with the task of figuring out a way to show all currently running applications in a small area of the screen would have come up with the same thing in 15 minutes. The fact that someone came up with it first shouldn't give him the same patent protection as say the blue LED.
jdub 3y ago
None of this is remotely true. I was there.
- eurekin 3y ago
  Please elaborate
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    Red Hat didn't "create" GNOME (although they were one of it's earliest and strongest supporters), SuSe didn't "save" KDE (in fact, them signing a license with Microsoft had more to do with their Novell deal), KDE isn't "German", and Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift considering it came out 5 years later. GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers and a desire to have a more cohesive/user friendly experience a la Mac OS.
    - asystole 3y ago
      >KDE isn't "German" Sure, its contributors are from all over, but * It was started by a German living in Germany while a student at a German university * Its current-day non-profit backing org[1] - which owns the KDE trademark and represents it in legal matters - is headquartered in Berlin. [1]: https://ev.kde.org https://ev.kde.org
      - deaddodo 3y ago
        > * It was started by a German living in Germany while a student at a German university Even at the time, he wasn't a sole contributor. He posted to a Usenet board and gathered interest of a multinational group before commencing. Today, it's even harder to make that argument considering the minority of KWin, Plasma, etc commits come from Germans (or even Western Europeans). > * Its current-day non-profit backing org[1] - which owns the KDE trademark and represents it in legal matters - is headquartered in Berlin. Sure, KDE EV is German. And both the Linux Foundation and FSF are headquartered in the US...yet you would probably take umbrage with GNU/Linux being called "American" for that reason. You have to incorporate somewhere and it's probably going to be somewhere in North America or the EU.
jraph 3y ago
Gnome happened because KDE, older, was based on Qt which was non free so the GNU project pushed for an actually free desktop. Actually, the GNU project followed two strategies at the same time: it pushed Gnome given Qt was not free, and pushed for Qt to be free [edit: initially by initiating a free replacement for Qt, Harmony] [1]. It succeeded in both. If Qt had been free from the start, maybe we wouldn't have Gnome at all. I think why GNOME eventually became more widespread than KDE with most major distros adopting it instead of KDE in recent years (at some point RHEL was KDE-based, SUSE always was, we had Mandrake too) is another question. [1] https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-kde-and-gnome/ https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-...
- lupusreal 3y ago
  KDE was probably continually stymied by "it's nonfree" FUD, but part of the problem must be them blowing their foot off by releasing an alpha quality release as "4.0". (And why did distro packagers switch to it? Because users would see the version number and demand the new thing... It wasn't fair to expect packagers to hold back.) Before then it seemed like KDE and Gnome were on roughly equal footing, but maybe that was just my perception.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    Oh, the memories. I was always excited about new releases at that time and KDE 4 really had me rethinking that. It was so bad.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yes but they really made up for it with Plasma, to be fair. They learned from their mistakes.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
      I really loved KDE 4, but then again, I'd just come from Vista.
jamesbfb 3y ago
I disagree with the sentiment of this article (I don’t remember Microsoft having anything to do with Gnome 3 being…uh…Gnome 3) although I thank it for it unintentionally introducing me to tiling window managers. I’ve been using i3 for over 10 years and every time I try gnome/kde again, I am scrambling back to the comfort that is a TWM.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The worst thing with Gnome now, is the amount of baggage the few Gnome applications I use bring with them. I keep replacing them step by step because they're so tied to Gnome it's really painful to have dependencies on them if you don't use Gnome.
  - k8svet 3y ago
    Networkmanager is a nightmare for this. So easy to pull in webkitgtk or gnome.online accounts. A travesty. And of course you need to use it if you need modemmanager, joy.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      On a lower level: Some Gnome apps will hang for up to tens of seconds with no UI or error messages if there is no dbus user session running unless DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is set to an empty string. Evince is a case in point. I get they're not written to run outside of Gnome (and that a lot distros will run dbus user sessions on non-Gnome setups too), but it's nevertheless infuriating. I don't particularly like dbus, but I also don't particularly dislike it. So it's not like I went out of my way to strip out a user session bus. My current setup just happens not to spawn a bus for the user session because nothing else I care to run actually cares whether one is running or not, until I ran into Evince. It mostly just annoys me the user hostility of hanging like that for a feature that the app can run just fine without - popping up a warning if a user happens to trigger something that is degraded without it would be far less user hostile.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, how do you do your i3 installation? I've become accustomed to starting with Ubuntu Server and then installing x, video drivers, i3, and eventually various system utilities by hand. It leads to a very lightweight and tidy setup, but it takes forever. I tried starting with a normal Ubuntu installation, but de-GNOMEing the system wasn't easier.
sph 3y ago
(2022)
alithk 3y ago
There was animosity between Redhat engineers and Canonical engineers. The Redhat engineers were not particularly thrilled that Ubuntu was the hottest Linux distro. They themselves did all the work on GNOME. The theme was that Canonical was not sponsoring as many engineers to work on GNOME and other essential projects. I think Canonical had trouble getting UI design changes pass through GNOME. Canonical wanted to pursue a different UI with Unity. It was supposed to be the UI even for mobile devices. They spent a lot of money.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - acdha 3y ago
    You appear to be describing an alternate universe where that comment is heavily downvoted, not to mention leaving out things like the popularity of ranting about systemd. Maybe try to clarify what you’re talking about and have an example?
    - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
      It was at the time i posted ;), and obviously, we all know it's an alternate universe, an universe where the apocalypse is happening It's no wonder civilizations never last forever ;)
devmor 3y ago
The legitimacy of this information seems very suspect - all based on guesses from public statements, not any real source. My own memory of ~20 years ago wasn’t great but I recall the only big legal issue regarding a windows UI was the distro called “Lindows”, aimed at making the transition to limix easier for users, which had to be renamed Linspire.
- lproven 3y ago
  I wrote it. I stand by it. If you can refute my points, please do so, with evidence and citations.
  - Vrondi 3y ago
    You're an idiot who doesn't understand that primary sources trump other citations.
  - arp242 3y ago
    You made your claims without any "evidence and citations". Even when you provide links they mostly don't back up the assertions in the article.[1] At any rate, demanding extensive "evidence and citations" to "prove you wrong" when you haven't done the same yourself is profoundly hypocritical. Surely as a self-professed "atheist skeptic" – according to your profile here – you must know how this works? You can't just claim all sorts of controversial things with no evidence and shout "prove me wrong!" when people object. Also, there ARE "evidence and citations" right here in this thread. Several people who were directly involved with the projects at the time are saying "that was not a consideration, you are wrong". Are they all misremembering something so large? Unlikely. Are they all lying? Even less likely – why would they? So why do you disbelieve them? [1]: e.g. "Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops" isn't at all substantiated with the provided link, which just talks about generic threats to sue. It's been a long time, but IIRC one of the criticisms was that Microsoft would claim "Linux is illegal; we'll sue you!" without ever specifically claiming what exactly was illegal. Classic Balmer-era Micrsoft FUD. AFAIK there was never any specific threat to sue "start menu like" environments, and I don't recall it ever being brought up as a concern. A good citation to prove this claim would be a discussion on the Gnome or KDE developer list discussing these concerns, or something along those lines.
_fw 3y ago
Why did forking GNOME 2 as MATE make it safe from M$? I understand why GNOME had to change, but how did were others not in similar danger of litigation?
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Smaller Linux distros could claim plausible deniability. They could just move the MATE into some 3rd party repository and claim their primary DE is MWM or the like, but they also don't mind users trying 3rd party GNOME at their own risk. This wasn't an option for Red Hat whose contributions were all over GNOME.
damieng 3y ago
"The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", all that: all original, patented Microsoft designs. There was nothing like it before. " Apart from, you know, NextStep which had a dock for system tray/start menu as well as my computer and network neighbourhood. You can find screenshots of NextStep 3.3 showing this such as https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/3x https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/3x from 1992 and it's possible they're also in earlier versions - NextStep 1.0 was released in 1989.
- lproven 3y ago
  Not the same thing at all, as I deconstructed in some detail nearly a decade before: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft...
  - damieng 3y ago
    "NeXTStep had its Dock, but that doesn't have menus or a status icon." NeXTStep not only had menus but tear-off dockable menus/sub-menus that are superior to any menus we have in apps today. It's clearly present in the screenshot I linked to.
    - damieng 3y ago
      https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?feature=shared&t=542 https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?feature=shared&t=542 has a demonstration of NextStep 3 (released September 1992) that clearly shows a computer icon that Steve refers to as "My Computer" and then moves into hitting the "Network" icon globe that shows other computers on his local network.
jaypatelani 3y ago
If this was true. What about Cinnamon and budgie desktop?
- jeltz 3y ago
  The simple answer is that this is most likely not true at all. Nobody who actually was there remembers this.
  - lproven 3y ago
    Go on then, show that to be the case. I was. I do. Were you?
- lproven 3y ago
  That is rather silly. Cinnamon is based on GNOME 3. So, logically, it could not have been affected, because it did not exist at the time. It is based on something that happened following these legal threats. Budgie came along after that. Legal threats: 2006-2007. GNOME 3 and Unity: 2011. Cinnamon: 2012. Budgie: 2014.
barrkel 3y ago
> alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops This is needlessly inflamatory. Many people simply don't like macOS style desktops. In particular I like my menus attached to my windows because I don't run apps maximized.
- SonOfLilit 3y ago
  (You probably know this, but just in case: the rationale for having the menu on the top is specifically for apps that are not maximized, because the mouse movement to get to the top is much faster than that for accurately clicking a hotspot in the middle of the screen)
  - mrob 3y ago
    True when you're using a 512x342 resolution screen and a mechanical ball mouse like the original Macintosh, but less certain with modern hardware.
    - acdha 3y ago
      It’s always easier not to make fine grained control motions. Even with a touchpad not having to stop precisely means the motion requires less thought.
    - MR4D 3y ago
      Technically it’s always true. On a Mac the menu bar is always at the top. Because of that, the menu bar is at the logical end of mouse movement (it’s like a virtual wall, which the mouse can’t go beyond). Because of this design, you can “slam” the mouse against that invisible barrier and it will stop where you need it (at least in the Y axis). “Slamming” the mouse is always faster than trying to move it to an arbitrary point on the screen because there is no need to slow down the pointer on the screen. It just stops immediately.
      - mrob 3y ago
        That's only true for the corners. For the edge you're only constraining one axis of motion. And modern screens generally have wider aspect ratio than the original Macintosh, exacerbating the problem of unconstrained X-axis motion.
adrian_b 3y ago
> So, both needed non Windows like desktops, ASAP, without a Start menu, without a taskbar For me these two were the only improvements in the user interface of Windows 95, but they were indeed very important. There has been no other user interface element of Windows 95 that I have considered useful and which I had not already used earlier. The Start menu offered a much more convenient alternative for starting programs than starting them by clicking icons, like in the previous versions of Windows. Nevertheless, I cannot understand how it was possible to patent a "Start menu" when it had only trivial content modifications in comparison with the menu used in twm, some 8 years earlier. The second improvement was the auto-hidden taskbar, due to which the minimized windows no longer wasted screen space. This is the only user interface element that I had not seen before using Windows 95, so perhaps it was patentable, even if it is a pretty obvious solution that could be found by anyone in the instant when it was recognized that the screen space occupied by minimized windows is a problem. This is a general problem that affects many patents which are the obvious solutions for some problems and they do not require any kind of ingenuity for their discovery. The only reason why they are novel, is because those problems have not been encountered earlier, so nobody had thought to patent solutions for them. So I believe that with the possible exception of the auto-hidden taskbar, it should have been easy to fight any claims of patent infringement by other graphic desktops, because for all features the differences from prior art were trivial. If the story from the parent article is true, then perhaps RedHat and al. have been scared by the legal expenses so they have chosen a workaround even if most Microsoft claims should have been invalid.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > I cannot understand how it was possible to patent a "Start menu" It isn’t, this “article” is just bad-intentioned bullshit.
  - lproven 3y ago
    So prove me wrong, and when you do it, stop calling my work insulting names and accusing me of things I do not have or do, such as calling me bad-intentioned. This is ad hom, and it is bad and wrong, it is hurtful, it is mean, and it is against the spirit of HN.
talkingtab 3y ago
And let us also not forget also to praise Microsoft for their role in Linux. See http://www.groklaw.net/index.php http://www.groklaw.net/index.php if you don't know about that part. Or their anti trust actions as listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... But any Microsoft/big tech apologist will tell you all that is in the past. Except then there is the $28.9 billion they owe in taxes which they refuse to pay. We don't care, we don't have to care we are {Microsoft, Apple, Google, FaceBook, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, AT&T, et al}
dantondwa 3y ago
This is crap. What happened was a change of paradigm inspired by the iPhone. Windows a few releases later followed exactly the same trends that GNOME and Unity spearheaded. Same thing with macOS.
- lproven 3y ago
  So you are claiming that your argument of "inspiration" in some way proves my list of dates, legal threats, and corporate decisions? Really?
  - dantondwa 3y ago
    You are making connections that are not there. For example, Novell, which owned SUSE, made that deal with Microsoft. But SUSE, the corporate distro, at that point was not using KDE as a default desktop, but GNOME. This stemmed from the fact that Novell had also incorporated Ximian previously and was deeply involved with GNOME (and Mono and .NET). Corporate SUSE used GNOME, and they still do. KDE and SUSE have no relationship of that type, not even today. How could KDE be protected by a deal that did not involve them at all?
Jedd 3y ago
The fact 'troll' is not found on that page suggests they're missing some of the history. 'Debian' is mentioned twice, in quick succession, including a suggestion that Debian 'adopted GNOME 3 and systemd' (at the same time).
lproven 3y ago
I wondered why a 2YO blog post of mine got 2 comments in an hour. Now I know.
ydlr 3y ago
My impression was that Gnome 3, Unity, and Windows 8 were all a part of the "convergence" craze to use the same OS on mobile, tablet, and desktop. KDE also introduced convergence features around this time, but without destroying the default experience users expected.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  I think you're right, and that phenomenon extended well beyond desktop environments, too. The same thing happened to many existing web sites, with "responsive web design" and "mobile-first design" starting to be heavily hyped at the time. The usability of such web sites in desktop browsers was typically severely degraded, and the mobile and tablet experiences were also often still pretty bad, as well. I see the Slashdot redesign of that era as being a good example of that happening. That web site became unusable with every device I had at the time. Even today, I find web sites like that to be awkward and unpleasant to use. It was a much better user experience when separate desktop and mobile versions of a given web site were more common.
t43562 3y ago
I do remember GNOME3 being presented as "the future" and those of us who liked GNOME2 being told roughly that we were hopeless old duffers who didn't understand modern UI/UX design and to essentially @#$#$k off to XFCE if we didn't like it. IMO it was the desire to put Linux on mobile devices and tablets that seemed to be driving it all - something commercial in other words. Those of us "just using GNOME2" were evicted like the squatters we were. This is why I like the fragmentation of Linux - really what's the problem? Those who want uniformity can go to windows and enjoy having everything dictated to them. I did #$%#$ off to XFCE and I am using it now very happily. Later MATE and Cinnamon came out to save the rest of us "luddites" and I realised then that I wasn't alone in my chagrin which was quite cheering. Nobody explained the hit on GNOME2 by talking about "threats from Microsoft" and I can't understand how copying the Mac made Linux desktop safer legally since Apple isn't known for refraining from legal action either. I always thought GNOME AND Windows copied the Motif style of menus in windows which I didn't like because I was weaned on GEM on the Atari and on DOS. I don't know though.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > I do remember GNOME3 being presented as "the future" and those of us who liked GNOME2 being told roughly that we were hopeless old duffers who didn't understand modern UI/UX design and to essentially @#$#$k off to XFCE if we didn't like it. IMO it was the desire to put Linux on mobile devices and tablets that seemed to be driving it all - something commercial in other words. Those of us "just using GNOME2" were evicted like the squatters we were. Me too! And this mindset persists today, every time I needed something I googled it and found it was already declared "wontfix" by the devs because it's something us lowly users should not need nor want.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Avamander 3y ago
I miss Unity. I still have an old slow as hell PC that has an Ubuntu install with Unity that runs incredibly well. The global menu bar also conserves quite a bit of screen space, which I love. KDE is close enough (and menu bars have mostly disappeared), but it's just not the same.
29athrowaway 3y ago
Qt had licensing terms that were less compatible with open source.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
markhahn 3y ago
Why does anyone actually give a damn about desktop trivia? I can sort of understand getting uptight if you're a huge fan of tiling, for instance.
konart 3y ago
>So it went its own way with Unity instead: basically, a Mac OS X rip-off, only IMHO done better >They are like twins, and switching between them is very easy. >Unity, alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops Unity alienate a lot of people because it was a mess. It was not nearly as poilished as macOS counterpart and at the same time failed to provide the old experience and you couldn't do much about it. But obvsiously this is just one "IMHO" vs another one.
awill 3y ago
This is fascinating. I was a Gnome/Linux user at the time, and just remember everyone hating Gnome 3. I don't remember ever hearing anything about the background. Had more people known about this, it would have at least helped users sympathize.
ponderings 3y ago
On the vic 20 and the Commodore 64 we had 4 function keys (f keys)[0] The order was a bit weird and the usability was not optimal. Without pressing shift you had F1 F3 F5 F7 If you designed a menu with just 4 options it would look something like. [F1] - new game [F3] - high scores [F5] - settings [F7] - credits After seeing it just once reading wasn't really required. You would just hammer F1 twice for [F1] new game > [F1] easy mode You might see the second menu flash for a frame or not at all. If the menu got more complicated you could chose to use the shift+F key for options used less regularly or you could move the option under a sub menu, or a sub sub sub sub sub menu. The weird thing was that if you accessed a sub sub sub sub sub menu a few times it would get mapped into muscle memory. I remember hammering out something like [F3][F3][F5][F7][F1] you press the second button twice then the one below, then the bottom one below and end with the top one. If there was any hesitation the visual menu would show up and trigger the memory before even parsing the text. It would almost instantly get me to the correct action out of a seemingly unlimited number of options. Not counting the unusual even options, if the menus have 4 options each 4x4x4x4x4 is 1024 things!?! I remember the awe seeing other people instantly plop things onto the screen. Of course with such a limited computer there was not much need for such elaborate navigation but it was truly fantastic. My hands would navigate menus I didn't even know I knew. Trying to navigate windows with the keyboard was a big disappointment by comparison. I now had to repeatedly think how to do things which on C64 was almost never the case. After finding something my mind had to noticeably get back to what I was actually doing. [0] - https://www.nightfallcrew.com/wp-content/gallery/c64_brown_functionkey/img_0649.jpg?81e99d https://www.nightfallcrew.com/wp-content/gallery/c64_brown_f...
creatonez 3y ago
Here are several comments from last time this was posted that completely dispute the characterization this article makes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325 (lead designer of Unity) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259074 (lead of Ubuntu Desktop product) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 (founder of GNOME) This article really shouldn't be allowed to be posted to Hacker News anymore. Anything with this many errors, and is essentially a mickey mouse investigation, isn't worth discussing again.
kkfx 3y ago
Well... For me "modern desktops UIs" happen for few reasons: - the classic desktop design is simply ridiculous. Let's start with icons: they are launchers organized mostly in a free form, so they can't be many, but they also get covered anytime you open a windows. Like desktop backgrounds they are an absurdity coming from the idea that the digital desktop must resemble a physical desktop where icons are "tools laid out on the desktop"; - menus, another absurd coming from the paper era where people know labels and hierarchies of suspended folders; - generic "bars" not different than physical desktop pens, paper clips, ... small containers of "many small stuff" to work with. This as a simple first timid step toward a less absurd design. The the floating windows model, born clearly to resemble paper stuff you can move and laid out on a desktop, that's why tiling WM have become popular again after decades. IT standard users at the time of Unity/first Gnome SHell (the double capital is not a typo) have already tried various launchers bar on the left or right side simply because screens from 4:3, 16:10 than 16:9 and now the start of 21:9 makes standard users in need of more vertical space, while the horizontal one start to be abundant. For similar reasons someone have made "sidebars" in apps and some have started the concept of vertically stacked tabs that remain readable even when are many and do not waste vertical screen space. Most standard users back than was already inhabited to "quick launchers" mimicking a CLI as a launcher with some extra/adopted completion, that's why menus disappear substituted by "dashes" and Ubuntu rightly and ignored by many have pushed the HUD for in-app menus as a quick search&narrow. But most are reactionary, at first they fear to "loose something" in a search&narrow setup, while they have already ditched "web directories" for search engines a decade or more before. So the evolution is terribly slow. Do you want to know the desktop of the future than? Well active documents, like org-mode where you can click links that can execute code (elisp:) or specific actions (ol-* link types). Something we have partially had in the past, like with PostScript GUIs or even before with Smalltalk-based workstations and at a slightly limited extent with LispM UI and Plan9 UI where you can just compose menus, buttons etc typing a name in the right place. The modern web winning other widgets-based UIs is the proof we need docs-UIs, but modern web means docsUI in hands of someone else, org-mode is local, the future will be trying to bring back some local aspects in the modern web style and the desktop will be more and more a 2D REPL. The commercial gimmick of Windows that copy Kde and before have tried to patent some GUIs elements to deter FLOSS devs does not really count much in the evolution timeline IMVHO.

144 points by signa11 3y ago

lupusreal 3y ago

Forgot? I never knew, and I can't pass the #%@*ing captcha to read a blog post so I still don't know.

pooper 3y ago
Do you mean the cloud flare captcha thing? I will gladly email you the text of this article if you'd like it or you can try this archive link https://archive.ph/l3yX8 https://archive.ph/l3yX8
firtoz 3y ago
Spoiler alert: > The "why" part seems to be forgotten now: because Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops.
- jeltz 3y ago
  Which, last time this was posted on HN, was denied by a lot of the key people who were actually there.
  - lproven 3y ago
    Denied, but not shown wrong in any way. Reminder: anything other than denial means admission, and that exposes them and their employers to legal threats.
kaba0 3y ago
Feel lucky, it’s completely made up bullshit.
- lproven 3y ago
  You are very hostile and keep calling me names, and I don't even know who you are. Why do you keep attacking a stranger? Do you hate me for some reason? Because it certainly feels like it.
  - bkor 3y ago
    > Why do you keep attacking a stranger? Do you hate me for some reason? Because it certainly feels like it. I do not see that person attacking you. He's saying the article is bs, that is about the article, not you as a person. > You are very hostile and keep calling me names I haven't seen one reply from that person that is about you as a person. I see loads of replies saying the article is bs. I see loads of replies from you saying that a claim is true unless proven otherwise. Not sure, but the aggression is not one-sided.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Frankly, until I saw their replies, my impression was that the article was bad, and I'd have forgotten about it and who wrote it in minutes. If anyone gets a bad impression of this person over this, it will be because of their responses in this thread with the stubborn refusal to accept that they haven't provided any evidence for claims that are being contested by an increasing number of people who were directly involved.

u320 3y ago

Huh. Gnome happened way before Ubuntu was a thing. Ubuntu has never "needed a non windows-95 like desktop".

vidarh 3y ago
Indeed, Ubuntu arrived during the Windows XP era, and that part would've been nonsense in any case given that reconfiguring a Gnome setup to use menus in a different configuration e.g. matching elements from designs like RiscOS, AmigaOS, MacOS, NeXT predating Windows 95 and giving plenty of prior art to shut down any Microsoft threats would've been trivial. Any threats from MS over anything - that MS might have been sabre-rattling I can buy - would need to have gone deeper than that.
- lproven 3y ago
  I wrote the article. I also wrote this nearly a decade earlier: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft... I find your response incoherent. Do please explain.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    There was nothing incoherent about it. There were two largely separate parts to it. 1. Ubuntu didn't exist until nearly a decade after Windows '95. If there was an issue relating to Windows '95, Ubuntu Separately, 2. Gnome was trivially modifiable in ways that mean that addressing the kind of superficial issues you bring up did not in any way require the drastic changes brought by subsequent versions of Unity. If MS patents had been an issue relating to the specific features you listed, stripping them out or replacing them without significant other changes would have been trivial. Indeed, MS own justification for the taskbar points out their perceived downsides of pre-existing iconification (and ironically massively overeggs it, by arguing the problem was double-clicks while ignoring that they could trivially solve that by allowing activation with the same single-click they did in the taskbar) Your description is simply wildly implausible, especially entirely absent evidence (patent numbers would be a start) and contradicting statements from people much better placed to know. I'll also note that I remember MS saber rattling about Linux, and it was not constrained to Gnome and KDE, or even directed at them, but at Linux in general. Meanwhile, the MS-SuSE/Novell patent agreement was not the agreement an MS that believed it had an actual case would make - it involved MS pre-paying Novel $440m for Linux support coupons, and Novell paying MS $40m for the patent pledge. Coming out $400m ahead when accused of patent infringement is pretty good. I'd like someone to make those kinds of patent accusations against me. Pretty please, anyone?

gtirloni 3y ago

https://archive.is/l3yX8 https://archive.is/l3yX8

Sakos 3y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257412 (2022)

itronitron 3y ago
gnome saying
aktenlage 3y ago
And what a great discussion. Apparently many people who were involved in the development and design of Unity and KDE debunk the claim of the article. Edit: E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325
- lproven 3y ago
  They deny it. They didn't debunk it. Denial means saying "that is not true!" Debunking means showing something isn't true. Also, as the article of the piece, I want to point out 2 things: 1. I stand by it. Nobody's refuted it yet, including today. 2. I've rarely had so many ad-hominem attacks as for this, both last time and this time. Everyone making them, including some much bigger names than me, should feel ashamed for their poor behaviour around this. But calling out corporate BS and FUD often gets one attacked by fanboys. It still hurts, but it is important to do.
  - xtracto 3y ago
    This is funny. You say someone did something because of X reason. That someone is saying No, I did it because of Y reason" , and your reply is to ask them to prove it? Let's see, who would I choose to believe.... mhmmm
  - Vrondi 3y ago
    Why should anyone believe you, who is a third party on these things over the first-party primary sources? The primary sources disagree with you, and any Historian or Journalist worth their salt should value primary sources more.

thriftwy 3y ago

Sounds like a load of bull to me. They could have gone with any sensible approach and they choose an absolutely braindead one. Luckily I was always a KDE user so I believe anybody who refuses KDE switch also has no footing to complain. > So it went its own way with Unity instead: basically, a Mac OS X rip-off, only IMHO done better. Myself, I still use both Unity and macOS every day. Why write this post to complain then?

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
XFCE user checking in here. I use Plank/Docky to add a Mac-OS style hotbar at the bottom so I guess I've secretly wanted a Mac for a long time. I played with Compiz Fusion in 2008 so I've had plenty of cool graphical effect gimmicks to satisfy me for a while, so I tend toward something that just gets out of my way these days. XFCE does a pretty good job of that without overloading me like KDE can.
- lproven 3y ago
  I wrote this and I use Xfce too. The Docky/Plank thing has always mystified me, so can I ask: why? An ordinary Xfce panel will do that and if you add the "docklike taskbar" plug in it integrates really well, without needing additional 3rd party tools and the extra RAM they use. So... just: why?
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    I should test to see if I can cycle through multiple terminal windows by scrolling up, that's the main reason I use it. However, I'm also not generally RAM limited in a way that I have to run too lean a system. I will give the native plugin a try though, thanks for the recommendation!
lproven 3y ago
> Sounds like a load of bull to me. Why? That's a harsh thing to say to me when all I'm trying to do is explain some history a lot of rich and influential people would prefer was forgotten. > Why write this post to complain then? I'm not complaining. I am trying to counter FUD that is obscuring documented history.

Deukhoofd 3y ago

I don't think this is really right. Windows did do legal bullshit, but that didn't cause GNOME 3 to happen. In fact, contributors were complaining that GNOME was stagnating years later, in 2008 [1]. GNOME 3 didn't really start development until late 2008. [1] 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-... Edit: Here's one of the founders of GNOME's opinion on the article from the last time this was posted: > This is nonsense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035

lupusreal 3y ago
> contributors were complaining that GNOME was stagnating Meanwhile users [me] were pleased as punch that GNOME was stable, useful and usable, just great all around and certainly not in need of major changes...

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago

that explains the terrible UI but doesn’t explain why gnome and gdm developers are pigheaded enough to not implement highly requested features which could be hidden from sight via gconf.

gtirloni 3y ago
To this day it won't let you easily pick a solid color for the background. It blows my mind this was removed. Does macOS allow that? I haven't used it in ages. I'm asking because at some point it seemed all GNOME wanted was to follow Apple guidelines.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  > Does macOS allow that? Yes.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

There is always a simple reason - and when you hear it it is like a clear bell explaining why something always felt “off” - and this is one such example. Thank you. Not sure that it matters as the desktop that matters sits in our hands and is touch sensitive but it’s nice to know.

jeltz 3y ago
Both Miguel de Icaza and one of the core Unity developers have said tht the article is simply not true.
- lproven 3y ago
  I wrote it, two years ago. I am still waiting for refutation rather than mere rebuttal. (To rebut: to say something is wrong. To refute: to prove something is wrong.) I want to see the receipts. I want evidence. I note that executives and project leaders from large companies and organisations subject to legal threats over intellectual property issues are required to deny infringement because to say anything else constitutes evidence: it could be construed as legal confession of the copying or other IP infringement of which they are being accused. Or, to put it more briefly: MRDA. Mandy Rice-Davies applies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_he_would,_wouldn%27t_he%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_he_would,_wouldn%27t_he%3...
  - vidarh 3y ago
    For anyone to have any reasons to offer up a stronger rebuttal, you'd need to have substantiated your claims with anything other than speculation first. > I want to see the receipts. I want evidence. Show us the receipts and evidence for your claims first. You're the one who started this without presenting a shred of evidence. To then imply the people contradicting you are lying when they present their description of their experience is at best wildly distasteful.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    > I want to see the receipts. I want evidence. If the people who were involved are directly telling you "no, you're wrong, that's not why I did it" don't constitute evidence you'd accept then what would? > I note that executives and project leaders from large companies and organisations subject to legal threats over intellectual property issues are required to deny infringement because to say anything else constitutes evidence: it could be construed as legal confession of the copying or other IP infringement of which they are being accused. But saying "no, patent concerns were not involved in our decision" is not what people changing their product for patent concerns would do because that would be lying, and the lie would almost certainly be caught during discovery. Instead the magic formulation is along the lines of "no comment" or other variety of "shut up." Not to mention that it can be perfectly to make a change for legal concerns while still disagreeing with those legal concerns because litigation is fucking expensive. In any case, if the developers of GNOME 3 made the changes because they were afraid of patent threats from MS, coming out and saying "no, we didn't do it because of that" would be among the dumbest things they could do.

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago

I remember these days like they were yesterday because this was during the peak of me caring way too much about OpenSource disagreements. None of this stuff about needing to avoid a Windows 95 paradigm was being talked about in any of the circles I was in, or publications I was reading. I tentatively call bull, although it's possible that the most public facing narratives weren't the most urgent reasons I suppose.

da02 3y ago
What do you use today on a daily basis for an desktop OS?
- SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
  At home it's almost entirely Linux (usually Arch btw), unless you count the occassional Windows VM. I'm using KDE for a desktop, funnily enough customised heavily to look like Windows 9x. I usually run something lighter like WindowMaker or IceWM though, but need Wayland for Waydroid atm, so KDE gives me a pretty nice Wayland experience out of the box. Did I mention I run Arch?
  - da02 3y ago
    Thanks for the info. The Arch OS, wiki, and community have been very impressive. I use mainly Void, but I still need to go back and read the Arch wiki for many things.
herbst 3y ago
I don't remember this as legal issue either. If windows 95 paradigms were to be avoided was because they were dated and deemed to be replaced with other concepts.

hasty_pudding 3y ago

Wild to me that you can patent a "taskbar".

vidarh 3y ago
Whatever part they patented, if anything of note, would have also been very narrow, given the history of interfaces with iconification of windows/"tasks" going back at least a decade prior to Windows '95. Maybe making them textual or organizing them into a bar? It'd in any case have been trivial to work around given the number of alternatives with prior art.
dkarras 3y ago
If there was no prior art, why not? I know nothing about the origins but whoever invented it, tested it on people and improved over it to make it shippable deserves some protection under laws which all inventions are protected.
- jojobas 3y ago
  A 1980s car dashboard is prior art.
  - dkarras 3y ago
    yeah then my index finger is prior art for computer mouse. it doesn't work that way. if you can't see how the idea of putting a task bar where it is and making it usable in an operating system requires significant invention, don't know what to tell you. sure, today we are looking at all like it is the most obvious thing in the world, but back then it wasn't that obvious.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      More closely, taskbar is a close digital equivalent of bookmarks. 20 people in clean rooms faced with the task of figuring out a way to show all currently running applications in a small area of the screen would have come up with the same thing in 15 minutes. The fact that someone came up with it first shouldn't give him the same patent protection as say the blue LED.

jdub 3y ago

None of this is remotely true. I was there.

eurekin 3y ago
Please elaborate
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Red Hat didn't "create" GNOME (although they were one of it's earliest and strongest supporters), SuSe didn't "save" KDE (in fact, them signing a license with Microsoft had more to do with their Novell deal), KDE isn't "German", and Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift considering it came out 5 years later. GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers and a desire to have a more cohesive/user friendly experience a la Mac OS.
  - asystole 3y ago
    >KDE isn't "German" Sure, its contributors are from all over, but * It was started by a German living in Germany while a student at a German university * Its current-day non-profit backing org[1] - which owns the KDE trademark and represents it in legal matters - is headquartered in Berlin. [1]: https://ev.kde.org https://ev.kde.org
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      > * It was started by a German living in Germany while a student at a German university Even at the time, he wasn't a sole contributor. He posted to a Usenet board and gathered interest of a multinational group before commencing. Today, it's even harder to make that argument considering the minority of KWin, Plasma, etc commits come from Germans (or even Western Europeans). > * Its current-day non-profit backing org[1] - which owns the KDE trademark and represents it in legal matters - is headquartered in Berlin. Sure, KDE EV is German. And both the Linux Foundation and FSF are headquartered in the US...yet you would probably take umbrage with GNU/Linux being called "American" for that reason. You have to incorporate somewhere and it's probably going to be somewhere in North America or the EU.

jraph 3y ago

Gnome happened because KDE, older, was based on Qt which was non free so the GNU project pushed for an actually free desktop. Actually, the GNU project followed two strategies at the same time: it pushed Gnome given Qt was not free, and pushed for Qt to be free [edit: initially by initiating a free replacement for Qt, Harmony] [1]. It succeeded in both. If Qt had been free from the start, maybe we wouldn't have Gnome at all. I think why GNOME eventually became more widespread than KDE with most major distros adopting it instead of KDE in recent years (at some point RHEL was KDE-based, SUSE always was, we had Mandrake too) is another question. [1] https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-kde-and-gnome/ https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-...

lupusreal 3y ago
KDE was probably continually stymied by "it's nonfree" FUD, but part of the problem must be them blowing their foot off by releasing an alpha quality release as "4.0". (And why did distro packagers switch to it? Because users would see the version number and demand the new thing... It wasn't fair to expect packagers to hold back.) Before then it seemed like KDE and Gnome were on roughly equal footing, but maybe that was just my perception.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  Oh, the memories. I was always excited about new releases at that time and KDE 4 really had me rethinking that. It was so bad.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yes but they really made up for it with Plasma, to be fair. They learned from their mistakes.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
    I really loved KDE 4, but then again, I'd just come from Vista.

jamesbfb 3y ago

I disagree with the sentiment of this article (I don’t remember Microsoft having anything to do with Gnome 3 being…uh…Gnome 3) although I thank it for it unintentionally introducing me to tiling window managers. I’ve been using i3 for over 10 years and every time I try gnome/kde again, I am scrambling back to the comfort that is a TWM.

vidarh 3y ago
The worst thing with Gnome now, is the amount of baggage the few Gnome applications I use bring with them. I keep replacing them step by step because they're so tied to Gnome it's really painful to have dependencies on them if you don't use Gnome.
- k8svet 3y ago
  Networkmanager is a nightmare for this. So easy to pull in webkitgtk or gnome.online accounts. A travesty. And of course you need to use it if you need modemmanager, joy.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    On a lower level: Some Gnome apps will hang for up to tens of seconds with no UI or error messages if there is no dbus user session running unless DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is set to an empty string. Evince is a case in point. I get they're not written to run outside of Gnome (and that a lot distros will run dbus user sessions on non-Gnome setups too), but it's nevertheless infuriating. I don't particularly like dbus, but I also don't particularly dislike it. So it's not like I went out of my way to strip out a user session bus. My current setup just happens not to spawn a bus for the user session because nothing else I care to run actually cares whether one is running or not, until I ran into Evince. It mostly just annoys me the user hostility of hanging like that for a feature that the app can run just fine without - popping up a warning if a user happens to trigger something that is degraded without it would be far less user hostile.
ryukoposting 3y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you do your i3 installation? I've become accustomed to starting with Ubuntu Server and then installing x, video drivers, i3, and eventually various system utilities by hand. It leads to a very lightweight and tidy setup, but it takes forever. I tried starting with a normal Ubuntu installation, but de-GNOMEing the system wasn't easier.

sph 3y ago

(2022)

alithk 3y ago

There was animosity between Redhat engineers and Canonical engineers. The Redhat engineers were not particularly thrilled that Ubuntu was the hottest Linux distro. They themselves did all the work on GNOME. The theme was that Canonical was not sponsoring as many engineers to work on GNOME and other essential projects. I think Canonical had trouble getting UI design changes pass through GNOME. Canonical wanted to pursue a different UI with Unity. It was supposed to be the UI even for mobile devices. They spent a lot of money.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
[flagged]
- acdha 3y ago
  You appear to be describing an alternate universe where that comment is heavily downvoted, not to mention leaving out things like the popularity of ranting about systemd. Maybe try to clarify what you’re talking about and have an example?
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    It was at the time i posted ;), and obviously, we all know it's an alternate universe, an universe where the apocalypse is happening It's no wonder civilizations never last forever ;)

devmor 3y ago

The legitimacy of this information seems very suspect - all based on guesses from public statements, not any real source. My own memory of ~20 years ago wasn’t great but I recall the only big legal issue regarding a windows UI was the distro called “Lindows”, aimed at making the transition to limix easier for users, which had to be renamed Linspire.

lproven 3y ago
I wrote it. I stand by it. If you can refute my points, please do so, with evidence and citations.
- Vrondi 3y ago
  You're an idiot who doesn't understand that primary sources trump other citations.
- arp242 3y ago
  You made your claims without any "evidence and citations". Even when you provide links they mostly don't back up the assertions in the article.[1] At any rate, demanding extensive "evidence and citations" to "prove you wrong" when you haven't done the same yourself is profoundly hypocritical. Surely as a self-professed "atheist skeptic" – according to your profile here – you must know how this works? You can't just claim all sorts of controversial things with no evidence and shout "prove me wrong!" when people object. Also, there ARE "evidence and citations" right here in this thread. Several people who were directly involved with the projects at the time are saying "that was not a consideration, you are wrong". Are they all misremembering something so large? Unlikely. Are they all lying? Even less likely – why would they? So why do you disbelieve them? [1]: e.g. "Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops" isn't at all substantiated with the provided link, which just talks about generic threats to sue. It's been a long time, but IIRC one of the criticisms was that Microsoft would claim "Linux is illegal; we'll sue you!" without ever specifically claiming what exactly was illegal. Classic Balmer-era Micrsoft FUD. AFAIK there was never any specific threat to sue "start menu like" environments, and I don't recall it ever being brought up as a concern. A good citation to prove this claim would be a discussion on the Gnome or KDE developer list discussing these concerns, or something along those lines.

_fw 3y ago

Why did forking GNOME 2 as MATE make it safe from M$? I understand why GNOME had to change, but how did were others not in similar danger of litigation?

thriftwy 3y ago
Smaller Linux distros could claim plausible deniability. They could just move the MATE into some 3rd party repository and claim their primary DE is MWM or the like, but they also don't mind users trying 3rd party GNOME at their own risk. This wasn't an option for Red Hat whose contributions were all over GNOME.

damieng 3y ago

"The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", all that: all original, patented Microsoft designs. There was nothing like it before. " Apart from, you know, NextStep which had a dock for system tray/start menu as well as my computer and network neighbourhood. You can find screenshots of NextStep 3.3 showing this such as https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/3x https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/3x from 1992 and it's possible they're also in earlier versions - NextStep 1.0 was released in 1989.

lproven 3y ago
Not the same thing at all, as I deconstructed in some detail nearly a decade before: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft...
- damieng 3y ago
  "NeXTStep had its Dock, but that doesn't have menus or a status icon." NeXTStep not only had menus but tear-off dockable menus/sub-menus that are superior to any menus we have in apps today. It's clearly present in the screenshot I linked to.
  - damieng 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?feature=shared&t=542 https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?feature=shared&t=542 has a demonstration of NextStep 3 (released September 1992) that clearly shows a computer icon that Steve refers to as "My Computer" and then moves into hitting the "Network" icon globe that shows other computers on his local network.

jaypatelani 3y ago

If this was true. What about Cinnamon and budgie desktop?

jeltz 3y ago
The simple answer is that this is most likely not true at all. Nobody who actually was there remembers this.
- lproven 3y ago
  Go on then, show that to be the case. I was. I do. Were you?
lproven 3y ago
That is rather silly. Cinnamon is based on GNOME 3. So, logically, it could not have been affected, because it did not exist at the time. It is based on something that happened following these legal threats. Budgie came along after that. Legal threats: 2006-2007. GNOME 3 and Unity: 2011. Cinnamon: 2012. Budgie: 2014.

barrkel 3y ago

> alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops This is needlessly inflamatory. Many people simply don't like macOS style desktops. In particular I like my menus attached to my windows because I don't run apps maximized.

SonOfLilit 3y ago
(You probably know this, but just in case: the rationale for having the menu on the top is specifically for apps that are not maximized, because the mouse movement to get to the top is much faster than that for accurately clicking a hotspot in the middle of the screen)
- mrob 3y ago
  True when you're using a 512x342 resolution screen and a mechanical ball mouse like the original Macintosh, but less certain with modern hardware.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s always easier not to make fine grained control motions. Even with a touchpad not having to stop precisely means the motion requires less thought.
  - MR4D 3y ago
    Technically it’s always true. On a Mac the menu bar is always at the top. Because of that, the menu bar is at the logical end of mouse movement (it’s like a virtual wall, which the mouse can’t go beyond). Because of this design, you can “slam” the mouse against that invisible barrier and it will stop where you need it (at least in the Y axis). “Slamming” the mouse is always faster than trying to move it to an arbitrary point on the screen because there is no need to slow down the pointer on the screen. It just stops immediately.
    - mrob 3y ago
      That's only true for the corners. For the edge you're only constraining one axis of motion. And modern screens generally have wider aspect ratio than the original Macintosh, exacerbating the problem of unconstrained X-axis motion.

adrian_b 3y ago

> So, both needed non Windows like desktops, ASAP, without a Start menu, without a taskbar For me these two were the only improvements in the user interface of Windows 95, but they were indeed very important. There has been no other user interface element of Windows 95 that I have considered useful and which I had not already used earlier. The Start menu offered a much more convenient alternative for starting programs than starting them by clicking icons, like in the previous versions of Windows. Nevertheless, I cannot understand how it was possible to patent a "Start menu" when it had only trivial content modifications in comparison with the menu used in twm, some 8 years earlier. The second improvement was the auto-hidden taskbar, due to which the minimized windows no longer wasted screen space. This is the only user interface element that I had not seen before using Windows 95, so perhaps it was patentable, even if it is a pretty obvious solution that could be found by anyone in the instant when it was recognized that the screen space occupied by minimized windows is a problem. This is a general problem that affects many patents which are the obvious solutions for some problems and they do not require any kind of ingenuity for their discovery. The only reason why they are novel, is because those problems have not been encountered earlier, so nobody had thought to patent solutions for them. So I believe that with the possible exception of the auto-hidden taskbar, it should have been easy to fight any claims of patent infringement by other graphic desktops, because for all features the differences from prior art were trivial. If the story from the parent article is true, then perhaps RedHat and al. have been scared by the legal expenses so they have chosen a workaround even if most Microsoft claims should have been invalid.

kaba0 3y ago
> I cannot understand how it was possible to patent a "Start menu" It isn’t, this “article” is just bad-intentioned bullshit.
- lproven 3y ago
  So prove me wrong, and when you do it, stop calling my work insulting names and accusing me of things I do not have or do, such as calling me bad-intentioned. This is ad hom, and it is bad and wrong, it is hurtful, it is mean, and it is against the spirit of HN.

talkingtab 3y ago

And let us also not forget also to praise Microsoft for their role in Linux. See http://www.groklaw.net/index.php http://www.groklaw.net/index.php if you don't know about that part. Or their anti trust actions as listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... But any Microsoft/big tech apologist will tell you all that is in the past. Except then there is the $28.9 billion they owe in taxes which they refuse to pay. We don't care, we don't have to care we are {Microsoft, Apple, Google, FaceBook, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, AT&T, et al}

dantondwa 3y ago

This is crap. What happened was a change of paradigm inspired by the iPhone. Windows a few releases later followed exactly the same trends that GNOME and Unity spearheaded. Same thing with macOS.

lproven 3y ago
So you are claiming that your argument of "inspiration" in some way proves my list of dates, legal threats, and corporate decisions? Really?
- dantondwa 3y ago
  You are making connections that are not there. For example, Novell, which owned SUSE, made that deal with Microsoft. But SUSE, the corporate distro, at that point was not using KDE as a default desktop, but GNOME. This stemmed from the fact that Novell had also incorporated Ximian previously and was deeply involved with GNOME (and Mono and .NET). Corporate SUSE used GNOME, and they still do. KDE and SUSE have no relationship of that type, not even today. How could KDE be protected by a deal that did not involve them at all?

Jedd 3y ago

The fact 'troll' is not found on that page suggests they're missing some of the history. 'Debian' is mentioned twice, in quick succession, including a suggestion that Debian 'adopted GNOME 3 and systemd' (at the same time).

lproven 3y ago

I wondered why a 2YO blog post of mine got 2 comments in an hour. Now I know.

ydlr 3y ago

My impression was that Gnome 3, Unity, and Windows 8 were all a part of the "convergence" craze to use the same OS on mobile, tablet, and desktop. KDE also introduced convergence features around this time, but without destroying the default experience users expected.

VancouverMan 3y ago
I think you're right, and that phenomenon extended well beyond desktop environments, too. The same thing happened to many existing web sites, with "responsive web design" and "mobile-first design" starting to be heavily hyped at the time. The usability of such web sites in desktop browsers was typically severely degraded, and the mobile and tablet experiences were also often still pretty bad, as well. I see the Slashdot redesign of that era as being a good example of that happening. That web site became unusable with every device I had at the time. Even today, I find web sites like that to be awkward and unpleasant to use. It was a much better user experience when separate desktop and mobile versions of a given web site were more common.

t43562 3y ago

I do remember GNOME3 being presented as "the future" and those of us who liked GNOME2 being told roughly that we were hopeless old duffers who didn't understand modern UI/UX design and to essentially @#$#$k off to XFCE if we didn't like it. IMO it was the desire to put Linux on mobile devices and tablets that seemed to be driving it all - something commercial in other words. Those of us "just using GNOME2" were evicted like the squatters we were. This is why I like the fragmentation of Linux - really what's the problem? Those who want uniformity can go to windows and enjoy having everything dictated to them. I did #$%#$ off to XFCE and I am using it now very happily. Later MATE and Cinnamon came out to save the rest of us "luddites" and I realised then that I wasn't alone in my chagrin which was quite cheering. Nobody explained the hit on GNOME2 by talking about "threats from Microsoft" and I can't understand how copying the Mac made Linux desktop safer legally since Apple isn't known for refraining from legal action either. I always thought GNOME AND Windows copied the Motif style of menus in windows which I didn't like because I was weaned on GEM on the Atari and on DOS. I don't know though.

wkat4242 3y ago
> I do remember GNOME3 being presented as "the future" and those of us who liked GNOME2 being told roughly that we were hopeless old duffers who didn't understand modern UI/UX design and to essentially @#$#$k off to XFCE if we didn't like it. IMO it was the desire to put Linux on mobile devices and tablets that seemed to be driving it all - something commercial in other words. Those of us "just using GNOME2" were evicted like the squatters we were. Me too! And this mindset persists today, every time I needed something I googled it and found it was already declared "wontfix" by the devs because it's something us lowly users should not need nor want.

deleted 3y ago

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Avamander 3y ago

I miss Unity. I still have an old slow as hell PC that has an Ubuntu install with Unity that runs incredibly well. The global menu bar also conserves quite a bit of screen space, which I love. KDE is close enough (and menu bars have mostly disappeared), but it's just not the same.

29athrowaway 3y ago

Qt had licensing terms that were less compatible with open source.

deleted 3y ago

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markhahn 3y ago

Why does anyone actually give a damn about desktop trivia? I can sort of understand getting uptight if you're a huge fan of tiling, for instance.

konart 3y ago

>So it went its own way with Unity instead: basically, a Mac OS X rip-off, only IMHO done better >They are like twins, and switching between them is very easy. >Unity, alienated a lot of people who only knew how to use Windows-like desktops Unity alienate a lot of people because it was a mess. It was not nearly as poilished as macOS counterpart and at the same time failed to provide the old experience and you couldn't do much about it. But obvsiously this is just one "IMHO" vs another one.

awill 3y ago

This is fascinating. I was a Gnome/Linux user at the time, and just remember everyone hating Gnome 3. I don't remember ever hearing anything about the background. Had more people known about this, it would have at least helped users sympathize.

ponderings 3y ago

On the vic 20 and the Commodore 64 we had 4 function keys (f keys)[0] The order was a bit weird and the usability was not optimal. Without pressing shift you had F1 F3 F5 F7 If you designed a menu with just 4 options it would look something like. [F1] - new game [F3] - high scores [F5] - settings [F7] - credits After seeing it just once reading wasn't really required. You would just hammer F1 twice for [F1] new game > [F1] easy mode You might see the second menu flash for a frame or not at all. If the menu got more complicated you could chose to use the shift+F key for options used less regularly or you could move the option under a sub menu, or a sub sub sub sub sub menu. The weird thing was that if you accessed a sub sub sub sub sub menu a few times it would get mapped into muscle memory. I remember hammering out something like [F3][F3][F5][F7][F1] you press the second button twice then the one below, then the bottom one below and end with the top one. If there was any hesitation the visual menu would show up and trigger the memory before even parsing the text. It would almost instantly get me to the correct action out of a seemingly unlimited number of options. Not counting the unusual even options, if the menus have 4 options each 4x4x4x4x4 is 1024 things!?! I remember the awe seeing other people instantly plop things onto the screen. Of course with such a limited computer there was not much need for such elaborate navigation but it was truly fantastic. My hands would navigate menus I didn't even know I knew. Trying to navigate windows with the keyboard was a big disappointment by comparison. I now had to repeatedly think how to do things which on C64 was almost never the case. After finding something my mind had to noticeably get back to what I was actually doing. [0] - https://www.nightfallcrew.com/wp-content/gallery/c64_brown_functionkey/img_0649.jpg?81e99d https://www.nightfallcrew.com/wp-content/gallery/c64_brown_f...

creatonez 3y ago

Here are several comments from last time this was posted that completely dispute the characterization this article makes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325 (lead designer of Unity) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259074 (lead of Ubuntu Desktop product) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 (founder of GNOME) This article really shouldn't be allowed to be posted to Hacker News anymore. Anything with this many errors, and is essentially a mickey mouse investigation, isn't worth discussing again.

kkfx 3y ago

Well... For me "modern desktops UIs" happen for few reasons: - the classic desktop design is simply ridiculous. Let's start with icons: they are launchers organized mostly in a free form, so they can't be many, but they also get covered anytime you open a windows. Like desktop backgrounds they are an absurdity coming from the idea that the digital desktop must resemble a physical desktop where icons are "tools laid out on the desktop"; - menus, another absurd coming from the paper era where people know labels and hierarchies of suspended folders; - generic "bars" not different than physical desktop pens, paper clips, ... small containers of "many small stuff" to work with. This as a simple first timid step toward a less absurd design. The the floating windows model, born clearly to resemble paper stuff you can move and laid out on a desktop, that's why tiling WM have become popular again after decades. IT standard users at the time of Unity/first Gnome SHell (the double capital is not a typo) have already tried various launchers bar on the left or right side simply because screens from 4:3, 16:10 than 16:9 and now the start of 21:9 makes standard users in need of more vertical space, while the horizontal one start to be abundant. For similar reasons someone have made "sidebars" in apps and some have started the concept of vertically stacked tabs that remain readable even when are many and do not waste vertical screen space. Most standard users back than was already inhabited to "quick launchers" mimicking a CLI as a launcher with some extra/adopted completion, that's why menus disappear substituted by "dashes" and Ubuntu rightly and ignored by many have pushed the HUD for in-app menus as a quick search&narrow. But most are reactionary, at first they fear to "loose something" in a search&narrow setup, while they have already ditched "web directories" for search engines a decade or more before. So the evolution is terribly slow. Do you want to know the desktop of the future than? Well active documents, like org-mode where you can click links that can execute code (elisp:) or specific actions (ol-* link types). Something we have partially had in the past, like with PostScript GUIs or even before with Smalltalk-based workstations and at a slightly limited extent with LispM UI and Plan9 UI where you can just compose menus, buttons etc typing a name in the right place. The modern web winning other widgets-based UIs is the proof we need docs-UIs, but modern web means docsUI in hands of someone else, org-mode is local, the future will be trying to bring back some local aspects in the modern web style and the desktop will be more and more a 2D REPL. The commercial gimmick of Windows that copy Kde and before have tried to patent some GUIs elements to deter FLOSS devs does not really count much in the evolution timeline IMVHO.