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.
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.
The patent threats I remember from that era was Balmer making a wooly claim that all Linux users were likely infringing. Not just Gnome users and KDE users. And at the same time refusing to elaborate about which specific patents that would be.
And MS making a $440m payment to Novell/SuSE for Linux support to get Novell to make a $40m payment to MS for "patents", which seems a rather lopsided agreement to announce as a combined deal if the patent threats had been anything but MS trying to scare people.
"I tried to be professional and impersonal about this, and such scorn is hurtful."
You've asserted that "everyone seems to forget" why something happened when a whole bunch of people who were there while it happened, and made it happen do not agree with your version of events. People tend to react badly to that sort of thing - especially when things land on HN and threaten to become accepted fact by a lot of folks who weren't there.
Microsoft rattled its patent sabers in the direction of Linux, true enough. But those patent allegations were believed to cover [1] the kernel, OpenOffice.org, the "Linux GUI", and an assortment of "other" things.
I won't claim to have been "there" myself - but I was "there"-adjacent: either working for one of the vendors (Novell), or writing about GNOME, doing an (admittedly small) amount of volunteering for GNOME around marketing/PR, attending GUADECs, and so forth.
My memories are, at this point, admittedly hazy -- but I cannot recall a single conversation or suggestion that the direction of GNOME 3 or Unity were prompted by, inspired by, caused by, or otherwise motivated in any way by Microsoft patents. Not officially in public, not behind closed doors while working at Novell, not in the hallways of SUSE's office in Germany, not during my tenure at Red Hat, not over a beer with any of the GNOME developers, nor any people I talked with between the early whispers of GNOME 3 planning to today.
It seems deeply odd that, had GNOME 3 been a "oh shit, Redmond's gonna sue us" action, nobody in all that time would've let spill. Odder still that those vendors wouldn't have simply pivoted to KDE, CDE, Xfce, or any of the other available environments. Nor did Red Hat jettison FVWM-95 IIRC from any and all repos they'd have been liable for -- given that Red Hat has no love for allowing risky things into RHEL or Fedora, I find it odd that they'd have puttered along with GNOME 2 under threat of patent suits until GNOME 3 was ready.
If you can cite anyone who was involved in GNOME development who says differently, who says "yes, we had to change desktop design due to patents," I'd be curious to hear that story. But when folks like Jeff chime in to say "nope," I'd put the burden on you for proof.
What I recall was that desktop folks were trying to make the desktop enticing enough to move people from Windows. They'd heard time and again how Linux was too difficult to use and went in a direction they thought was more user-friendly.
You also assert that Red Hat wrote GNOME in reaction to Qt not being GPL. Some Red Hatters were involved in the early creation of GNOME but that's not really correct either. Red Hat provided sponsorship early on, but claiming "Red Hat wrote GNOME" is over-simplification to the point of falsification. The real history is much more complicated and more interesting.
I’m curious what you mean by this. I daily drive Fedora + Gnome. My foot terminal + neovim fills the screen entirely, except for the top bar which I can disable / hide if I wish.
Are you talking about the fat window titlebars? Those are too big, imo, but I have removed them from foot, Firefox, and Brave. I don’t use anything else often enough for it to bother me.
On Linux it's specifically a problem of the default GNOME window chrome and standard applications, yeah.
For instance look at the settings app screenshots here, everything is surrounded by at least twice as much empty space then actually needed for no obvious reason (except maybe to prevent fat-finger-syndrome on touch displays, but I use a mouse cursor, thank you very much):
Look how few settings actually fit on one page before scrolling is necessary (and since there's no scrollbar it's not even clear in some cases that more settings are hiding below). It looks less a settings application but more like an example application for UI design mistakes.
I have the same beef with modern macOS and Windows UIs though (but GNOME definitely takes the crown of most weird desktop UI).
It's some sort of modern UI designer brain virus to waste valuable screen real estate with empty pixels (but not wasting space doesn't mean to fall into the other extreme to fill everything with clutter, UI design is a fine art of balancing functionality with aesthetics - currently the pendulum has been swinging way too much into the aesthetics direction, ignoring that UIs should be functional first, and pretty only second.
Counter-counterpoint: it’s not so beautiful (rather middling, IMO) that a well-considered denser design couldn’t achieve both nicer aesthetics and better usability (so much scrolling, ugh).
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:
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.
"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.
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.
> * 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.
(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.
> > 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.
Either way, it doesn't really matter. RHEL 6 was released in 2010 with a traditional menu for starting applications, long after the alleged cutoff date that, according to the article, should have made this impossible.
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?
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.
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.
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.
