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'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.