Bullshit. As if no one else could have created a linux desktop? There were already plenty of window managers at the time. The distance between a window manager

Bullshit. As if no one else could have created a linux desktop? There were already plenty of window managers at the time. The distance between a window manager and a "linux desktop" is pretty slim. There were plenty of Linux WMs but they didn't aspire to do anything more than what (fv)wm was doing and it was considered fancy to support ICCCM. X was big and bulky and it had to be accepted for what it was. Actually, most Linux users were happy with FWVM2 and other stuff, OpenLook and CDE were frowned upon as a corporate kludge, perhaps in sour grapes. The genius of GNOME was not just the delivery of a full Free desktop, first, but also the ballsy withdrawal from everything X. GNOME said we're gonna bring our own libraries and we're gonna supplant and supersede X. They brought in a display manager, session manager, input translator, etc. They didn't stop there but they also brought unorthodox, at least to unix, computing models: they brought a component object model with CORBA/Orbit. GNOME kept pushing the boundaries and for once defining what Linux should look like, not a poor man's SysV-clone, but a new desktop OS to be judged on its own. So much so that an early port to Solaris was the hottest thing on Sunfreeware.