5 ms·

None of this is remotely true. I was there.

by jdub 3y ago

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.
  - lproven 3y ago
    [Article author here] > Red Hat didn't "create" GNOME I didn't say they did. > SuSe didn't "save" KDE I never claimed they did. (And it was SuSE, now just SUSE. When attempting to rebut, attention to detail is paramount.) > Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift [[Citation needed]] > considering it came out 5 years later. How long do you think this stuff takes? > GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers [[Citation needed]] Or at least wanted. I'd like to know. I've met with the team, at their invitation and expense, and asked them personally, and I still didn't get a straight, coherent answer. > a desire to have a more cohesive/user friendly experience a la Mac OS. Well that failed then, didn't it?
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      > I didn't say they did. You sure as hell heavily implied it then: >> so Red Hat refused to bundle it or support it, and wrote its own environment instead. Unless by "wrote its own environment" you mean "packaged GNOME instead of KDE". > (And it was SuSE, now just SUSE. When attempting to rebut, attention to detail is paramount.) Got me. Except I'm not the "journalist". > How long do you think this stuff takes? Considering development on it didn't begin until late 2008, about two years after the supposed "drastic need to shift"? 2.5-3yrs, give or take. > Well that failed then, didn't it? And so did the Zune. Yet it was still designed as an iPod-killer. > [[Citation needed]] You're making the claims in your half-researched/personally-biased article. You cite them, ideally in the "article" itself.
    - bkor 3y ago
      > > Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift > > [[Citation needed]] You made that claim, it's on you to prove your claim. Instead, you claim something and pretend it is true unless someone provides proof about a claim that just isn't true. > > GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers > > [[Citation needed]] A release team member mentions that this is true. What more do you need? I was also a release team member for 10+ years. I've never heard of anything like what you claimed. I spoke to loads of people. Further, you're confusing GNOME 3 with gnome-shell. Also, GNOME 3 took ages to come out while you're pretending it was something quickly developed. Lastly, GNOME classic. As shipped with RHEL 7. GNOME 3 with a more classical interface. Meaning, pretty close to GNOME 3.
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    You could be right, and maybe that is one of the reasons. But I also thought it had to do with VFAT(?) being the default file system on Flash Drives and a patent M/S had. IIRC, RHEL and friends refused to sign because that M/S patent was working it way through the courts. But as others said, that article does not seem to reflect any kind of reality :)
    - vidarh 3y ago
      That was one of the few (only?) patents that MS actually admitted to. Balmer made a bunch of really vague public threats where he refused to be drawn on which patents Linux (not Gnome, or KDE, or Gnome or KDE using distros specifically) he implied were infringing, most of which never materialised into any court cases or patent deals. Did they enter any other deals than the Novell deal, which involved MS paying Novell 11x what Novell paid MS?
- jdahlin 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME does a reasonably good job explaining the history: GNOME was started on 15 August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena as a free software project to develop a desktop environment and applications for it. It was founded in part because the K Desktop Environment, which was growing in popularity, relied on the Qt widget toolkit which used a proprietary software license until version 2.0 (June 1999). In place of Qt, GTK (GNOME Toolkit, at that time called GIMP Toolkit) was chosen as the base of GNOME. GTK is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free software license that allows software linking to it to use a much wider set of licenses, including proprietary software licenses. GNOME itself is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries and the GNU General Public License (GPL) for its applications.
  - xrd 3y ago
    The irony of Icaza now working for M$ is thick. He's an amazing guy and I don't begrudge him at all.
    - xtracto 3y ago
      Ooh I 'member! /. Is filled with stories and comments of people badmouthing Miguel because of his stance of integration between Linux and the Microsoft world. His views appeared always "controversial " to the OpenSource world and the sentiment in /. Was that she was a M$ apologist and that he only wanted to be noticed by M$. I remember back in the day when he started Gnome with Federico, he got a place in a Time magazine 's list of influential people. I being a kid from the same country, wrote an email telling him I wanted to help building Gnome, and he replied to mee! To me he always appeared a pragmatic person.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      I mean, it's always kinda played off like he turned coat. But if you know the history it makes total sense. He started off with GNOME, got interested in .net and Mono (originally as a means to integrate them into GNOME/GTK) and shifted focused on those. He built a company around that (with others), which then got bought by Microsoft due to their obvious interest in .net (and probably internal talks about the future direction of .net Core). Since then until 2022, his work was mostly on .net and its open ecosystem. So it's neither contradictory nor counter to his roots, but is humorous when you say "the guy who created GNOME works for Microsoft". Despite the fact that he probably did some major work on bridging the two worlds together and leading to modern MS actively incubating and contributing to Open Source projects.
- jdub 3y ago
  It's difficult to elaborate on "nope", unless someone wanted to do a point-by-point takedown, which it doesn't deserve. I'll focus on one thing: the genesis of GNOME 3. Firstly, it felt like the right time. Many of us were looking around for ways to break out of the Windows 95 paradigm. New form-factors were both inspiring and challenging. One of my clearest memories of early ideas that became GNOME 3 was an ongoing conversation about a "chromeless desktop". How could we get as much "chrome" (user interface elements) off the screen as possible, to make every pixel available for what the user was doing? Some of us started from "what if there were nothing on the screen at all?" and added back only what was necessary. These ideas dovetailed with the form-factor challenges posed by early tablets (including the OLPC), beefier PDA devices (Nokia 770), and netbooks (tiny, cheap laptops, like the Eee PC). You can see how that led to GNOME 3's minimalist top bar (though we had tried even less "chrome"!) and modal approach between the app experience and the control experience.
  - lproven 3y ago
    [Blog post author here] > It's difficult to elaborate on "nope", unless someone wanted to do a point-by-point takedown I would love that, and I think given that I tried hard to give references for my assertions, countering it merits the same. > which it doesn't deserve. I am saddened to hear that. I tried to be professional and impersonal about this, and such scorn is hurtful. > GNOME 3's minimalist top bar Which is one of my personal primary objections to the environment: this colossal waste of precious vertical pixels, which is squandered to no point.
    - jeltz 3y ago
      Given how at least 5 people who actually were there in leading positions all have refuted your story I do not think you are professional anymore due to the total failure to admit that maybe you are wrong. Nobody except you seems to "remember" this. Yes, the patent threats were real but nobody has proof that they affected the direction of desktop Linux.
      - vidarh 3y ago
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  I was also there and jdub is correct. This retelling of history is nonsense. Especially this part: > SUSE, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, even Sun Solaris used GNOME 2. Everyone liked GNOME 2. The default DE on SUSE was KDE. If you wanted GNOME you had to request it explicitly at install time. But more importantly, GNOME 2 was enormously controversial. It split the Linux and GNOME communities, it was the systemd flamewars of its day. The developers had to constantly justify themselves and received endless flames and hate mail about it. In fact it went OK because, just like with systemd, it turned out that there was a silent majority who did like the new direction of GNOME and become enthusiastic adopters, but the idea that everyone liked it is just absurd. Also, GNOME 2 didn't have a Win95 style interface. GNOME 1 was Windows 95 inspired, GNOME 2 was clearly a reaction to macOS although it managed to establish a unique art style and personality as well. The drivers of the new direction for GNOME 2 were Havoc Pennington and Calum Benson at Sun (who did a usability study on GNOME 1). Pennington spent a lot of time explaining to Linux hackers that more options and preferences wasn't always better. For example in this essay: https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html Both GNOME1 and KDE were basically direct mappings of the Linux CLI experience to widgets; it was common to have checkboxes in apps with labels like "Use Xrender", no further explanation provided. Pennington revolutionized the Linux DE space by arguing that the GUI should reflect what tasks people wanted to do, should try to automatically configure itself and that adding settings had a cost as well as a benefit. Some people saw this new direction as undermining the reason they liked Linux in the first place, as something endlessly tinkerable and tweakable for technical people. They didn't particularly want Linux to be approachable by non-hackers.
  - jzb 3y ago
    "The default DE on SUSE was KDE. If you wanted GNOME you had to request it explicitly at install time." Depends on the time frame and which SUSE you refer to, to be clear. When Novell bought Ximian it made GNOME the default for SLED and KDE continued to be the default for openSUSE.
_fw 3y ago
Please elaborate
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491119
asystole 3y ago
Many of us were "there" in the sense that we were interested in FOSS desktops at the time. What does "there" mean in your case, and would you like to share a bit more?
- jdub 3y ago
  I was the release manager of GNOME 2, a very early employee at Canonical, and continued to be involved with GNOME during the GNOME 3 efforts.
  - asystole 3y ago
    OK, fair.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Thank you so much for your work! Unfortunately the project is so often dragged in mud by some loud minority, but I absolutely love it and use it every day, and I’m sure we are more numerous than the other group.
    - christophilus 3y ago
      I also love Gnome. It’s my favorite DE. It gets out of the way, has a consistent UI, and is beautiful out of the box with no fiddling. Thank you, Gnome designers and devs! (Also, I love PaperWM, and am looking forward to the tiling project y’all are brainstorming about.)
    - logicprog 3y ago
      Same here, I loved gnome 3 when it came out and I still love the modern versions of gnome, and use them almost entirely stock, with just a tiling window management extension and an extension to move the overviews search function into a spotlight like pop up in the middle of the screen. I'll never be able to happily use any other window manager then modern gnome to be honest, I've tried to switch to all sorts of tiling window managers, tried to switch to xfce, and none of it felt as good and worked as well for my style of workflow and just got out of the way as easily as gnome does. And I can't even stand looking at kde, because all of its paddings and alignments and font sizes and stuff are just so awkwardly chosen, and no theme can easily fix that.
rubenv 3y ago
Hope you're doing well Jeff! Those were good days!
DonHopkins 3y ago
Do you have any insight into why the Gnome desktop never officially adopted pie menus? I know there were a few early implementations of pie menu widgets for Gnome many years ago, but as far as I know the window manager and desktop never adopted them. Was it because of NIH? Was it because Gnome only aspired to imitating other mainstream desktops and not innovating? Was it because the Gnome developers were tricked by Alias's FUD about their illegitimate patents? Or some other reason? Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptions-be8afc49d870 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception... Simon Schneegans eventually implemented his own pie menus for Gnome, but they were never adopted into any mainstream Gnome desktop user interface: https://schneegans.github.io/news/2015/04/18/gnome-pie-061 https://schneegans.github.io/news/2015/04/18/gnome-pie-061 He later made Fly-Pie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs And he's currently making cross platform pie menus with Kando: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966

None of this is remotely true. I was there.

by 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.
- lproven 3y ago
  [Article author here] > Red Hat didn't "create" GNOME I didn't say they did. > SuSe didn't "save" KDE I never claimed they did. (And it was SuSE, now just SUSE. When attempting to rebut, attention to detail is paramount.) > Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift [[Citation needed]] > considering it came out 5 years later. How long do you think this stuff takes? > GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers [[Citation needed]] Or at least wanted. I'd like to know. I've met with the team, at their invitation and expense, and asked them personally, and I still didn't get a straight, coherent answer. > a desire to have a more cohesive/user friendly experience a la Mac OS. Well that failed then, didn't it?
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > I didn't say they did. You sure as hell heavily implied it then: >> so Red Hat refused to bundle it or support it, and wrote its own environment instead. Unless by "wrote its own environment" you mean "packaged GNOME instead of KDE". > (And it was SuSE, now just SUSE. When attempting to rebut, attention to detail is paramount.) Got me. Except I'm not the "journalist". > How long do you think this stuff takes? Considering development on it didn't begin until late 2008, about two years after the supposed "drastic need to shift"? 2.5-3yrs, give or take. > Well that failed then, didn't it? And so did the Zune. Yet it was still designed as an iPod-killer. > [[Citation needed]] You're making the claims in your half-researched/personally-biased article. You cite them, ideally in the "article" itself.
  - bkor 3y ago
    > > Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift > > [[Citation needed]] You made that claim, it's on you to prove your claim. Instead, you claim something and pretend it is true unless someone provides proof about a claim that just isn't true. > > GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers > > [[Citation needed]] A release team member mentions that this is true. What more do you need? I was also a release team member for 10+ years. I've never heard of anything like what you claimed. I spoke to loads of people. Further, you're confusing GNOME 3 with gnome-shell. Also, GNOME 3 took ages to come out while you're pretending it was something quickly developed. Lastly, GNOME classic. As shipped with RHEL 7. GNOME 3 with a more classical interface. Meaning, pretty close to GNOME 3.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  You could be right, and maybe that is one of the reasons. But I also thought it had to do with VFAT(?) being the default file system on Flash Drives and a patent M/S had. IIRC, RHEL and friends refused to sign because that M/S patent was working it way through the courts. But as others said, that article does not seem to reflect any kind of reality :)
  - vidarh 3y ago
    That was one of the few (only?) patents that MS actually admitted to. Balmer made a bunch of really vague public threats where he refused to be drawn on which patents Linux (not Gnome, or KDE, or Gnome or KDE using distros specifically) he implied were infringing, most of which never materialised into any court cases or patent deals. Did they enter any other deals than the Novell deal, which involved MS paying Novell 11x what Novell paid MS?
jdahlin 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME does a reasonably good job explaining the history: GNOME was started on 15 August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena as a free software project to develop a desktop environment and applications for it. It was founded in part because the K Desktop Environment, which was growing in popularity, relied on the Qt widget toolkit which used a proprietary software license until version 2.0 (June 1999). In place of Qt, GTK (GNOME Toolkit, at that time called GIMP Toolkit) was chosen as the base of GNOME. GTK is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free software license that allows software linking to it to use a much wider set of licenses, including proprietary software licenses. GNOME itself is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries and the GNU General Public License (GPL) for its applications.
- xrd 3y ago
  The irony of Icaza now working for M$ is thick. He's an amazing guy and I don't begrudge him at all.
  - xtracto 3y ago
    Ooh I 'member! /. Is filled with stories and comments of people badmouthing Miguel because of his stance of integration between Linux and the Microsoft world. His views appeared always "controversial " to the OpenSource world and the sentiment in /. Was that she was a M$ apologist and that he only wanted to be noticed by M$. I remember back in the day when he started Gnome with Federico, he got a place in a Time magazine 's list of influential people. I being a kid from the same country, wrote an email telling him I wanted to help building Gnome, and he replied to mee! To me he always appeared a pragmatic person.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    I mean, it's always kinda played off like he turned coat. But if you know the history it makes total sense. He started off with GNOME, got interested in .net and Mono (originally as a means to integrate them into GNOME/GTK) and shifted focused on those. He built a company around that (with others), which then got bought by Microsoft due to their obvious interest in .net (and probably internal talks about the future direction of .net Core). Since then until 2022, his work was mostly on .net and its open ecosystem. So it's neither contradictory nor counter to his roots, but is humorous when you say "the guy who created GNOME works for Microsoft". Despite the fact that he probably did some major work on bridging the two worlds together and leading to modern MS actively incubating and contributing to Open Source projects.
jdub 3y ago
It's difficult to elaborate on "nope", unless someone wanted to do a point-by-point takedown, which it doesn't deserve. I'll focus on one thing: the genesis of GNOME 3. Firstly, it felt like the right time. Many of us were looking around for ways to break out of the Windows 95 paradigm. New form-factors were both inspiring and challenging. One of my clearest memories of early ideas that became GNOME 3 was an ongoing conversation about a "chromeless desktop". How could we get as much "chrome" (user interface elements) off the screen as possible, to make every pixel available for what the user was doing? Some of us started from "what if there were nothing on the screen at all?" and added back only what was necessary. These ideas dovetailed with the form-factor challenges posed by early tablets (including the OLPC), beefier PDA devices (Nokia 770), and netbooks (tiny, cheap laptops, like the Eee PC). You can see how that led to GNOME 3's minimalist top bar (though we had tried even less "chrome"!) and modal approach between the app experience and the control experience.
- lproven 3y ago
  [Blog post author here] > It's difficult to elaborate on "nope", unless someone wanted to do a point-by-point takedown I would love that, and I think given that I tried hard to give references for my assertions, countering it merits the same. > which it doesn't deserve. I am saddened to hear that. I tried to be professional and impersonal about this, and such scorn is hurtful. > GNOME 3's minimalist top bar Which is one of my personal primary objections to the environment: this colossal waste of precious vertical pixels, which is squandered to no point.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    Given how at least 5 people who actually were there in leading positions all have refuted your story I do not think you are professional anymore due to the total failure to admit that maybe you are wrong. Nobody except you seems to "remember" this. Yes, the patent threats were real but nobody has proof that they affected the direction of desktop Linux.
    - vidarh 3y ago
mike_hearn 3y ago
I was also there and jdub is correct. This retelling of history is nonsense. Especially this part: > SUSE, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, even Sun Solaris used GNOME 2. Everyone liked GNOME 2. The default DE on SUSE was KDE. If you wanted GNOME you had to request it explicitly at install time. But more importantly, GNOME 2 was enormously controversial. It split the Linux and GNOME communities, it was the systemd flamewars of its day. The developers had to constantly justify themselves and received endless flames and hate mail about it. In fact it went OK because, just like with systemd, it turned out that there was a silent majority who did like the new direction of GNOME and become enthusiastic adopters, but the idea that everyone liked it is just absurd. Also, GNOME 2 didn't have a Win95 style interface. GNOME 1 was Windows 95 inspired, GNOME 2 was clearly a reaction to macOS although it managed to establish a unique art style and personality as well. The drivers of the new direction for GNOME 2 were Havoc Pennington and Calum Benson at Sun (who did a usability study on GNOME 1). Pennington spent a lot of time explaining to Linux hackers that more options and preferences wasn't always better. For example in this essay: https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html Both GNOME1 and KDE were basically direct mappings of the Linux CLI experience to widgets; it was common to have checkboxes in apps with labels like "Use Xrender", no further explanation provided. Pennington revolutionized the Linux DE space by arguing that the GUI should reflect what tasks people wanted to do, should try to automatically configure itself and that adding settings had a cost as well as a benefit. Some people saw this new direction as undermining the reason they liked Linux in the first place, as something endlessly tinkerable and tweakable for technical people. They didn't particularly want Linux to be approachable by non-hackers.
- jzb 3y ago
  "The default DE on SUSE was KDE. If you wanted GNOME you had to request it explicitly at install time." Depends on the time frame and which SUSE you refer to, to be clear. When Novell bought Ximian it made GNOME the default for SLED and KDE continued to be the default for openSUSE.

_fw 3y ago

Please elaborate

deaddodo 3y ago
Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491119

asystole 3y ago

Many of us were "there" in the sense that we were interested in FOSS desktops at the time. What does "there" mean in your case, and would you like to share a bit more?

jdub 3y ago
I was the release manager of GNOME 2, a very early employee at Canonical, and continued to be involved with GNOME during the GNOME 3 efforts.
- asystole 3y ago
  OK, fair.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Thank you so much for your work! Unfortunately the project is so often dragged in mud by some loud minority, but I absolutely love it and use it every day, and I’m sure we are more numerous than the other group.
  - christophilus 3y ago
    I also love Gnome. It’s my favorite DE. It gets out of the way, has a consistent UI, and is beautiful out of the box with no fiddling. Thank you, Gnome designers and devs! (Also, I love PaperWM, and am looking forward to the tiling project y’all are brainstorming about.)
  - logicprog 3y ago
    Same here, I loved gnome 3 when it came out and I still love the modern versions of gnome, and use them almost entirely stock, with just a tiling window management extension and an extension to move the overviews search function into a spotlight like pop up in the middle of the screen. I'll never be able to happily use any other window manager then modern gnome to be honest, I've tried to switch to all sorts of tiling window managers, tried to switch to xfce, and none of it felt as good and worked as well for my style of workflow and just got out of the way as easily as gnome does. And I can't even stand looking at kde, because all of its paddings and alignments and font sizes and stuff are just so awkwardly chosen, and no theme can easily fix that.

rubenv 3y ago

Hope you're doing well Jeff! Those were good days!

DonHopkins 3y ago

Do you have any insight into why the Gnome desktop never officially adopted pie menus? I know there were a few early implementations of pie menu widgets for Gnome many years ago, but as far as I know the window manager and desktop never adopted them. Was it because of NIH? Was it because Gnome only aspired to imitating other mainstream desktops and not innovating? Was it because the Gnome developers were tricked by Alias's FUD about their illegitimate patents? Or some other reason? Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptions-be8afc49d870 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception... Simon Schneegans eventually implemented his own pie menus for Gnome, but they were never adopted into any mainstream Gnome desktop user interface: https://schneegans.github.io/news/2015/04/18/gnome-pie-061 https://schneegans.github.io/news/2015/04/18/gnome-pie-061 He later made Fly-Pie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs And he's currently making cross platform pie menus with Kando: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966