I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. This worry was never expressed at the time in significant terms. The FAT and SMB patents were much more of a worry than anything related to the desktop interface - only outright clones were being pursued.
At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. Linux usage was in ascendancy, money was being thrown around, and the FOSS world was starting to attract young designers who saw it as a cheap way to build professional credibility. And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. The core teams really thought they had a shot at redesigning how people interact with computers, "like Apple did with phones". Interaction targets moved from keyboard+mouse to touch screens, because "convergence" and the fact that the mobile sector was suddenly awash with cash.
It's sad that people try to justify their missteps in this way. Microsoft was (and is) a terrible company and a constant threat to the FOSS ecosystem, but defining some of the biggest design choices of the Linux desktop only in antagonistic or reflective terms does a real disservice to those projects and the people who worked in them.
If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing.
Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _never_ thrown around. At best, a handful of engineers from a few different companies (TrollTech/Nokia, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical) were hired to work full time and that was pretty much it. I don't think more than 10-15 engineers have done paid worked on KDE at any given time. Most of the contributions were volunteers.
There was a few attempts on KDE side to get paid by Intel to develop an office suite for mobile but it was also pretty small.
And to this date that is still the case with KDE. Very few engineers paid to work on it hired by entirely different set of companies like Blue Systems or Krita trying to make a living with very modest donations and contributions.
KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it.
Your main point is valid though. FAT and SMB patents were more serious threats.
The fact that money didn't necessarily reach people doing the work, doesn't mean money wasn't thrown around above their heads - which inevitably conditioned their choices. Novell didn't pay peanuts for SuSE, for example; nor did Ubuntu build a mobile OS for anything but to intercept money from mobile manufacturers. It was fairly plain to see that developers hired by those companies were given marching orders at various points; and because they inevitably were the core developers, projects steered accordingly.
(I would also add that, certainly in KDE circles, there was also a bit of a cultivated aura of rockstar developers around these fulltime hires, with folks making big calls without ever accepting they might be wrong... until several years (or decades) later.)
Even after FAT was cleared up, exFAT was under patents until, like, 2019 before Microsoft declared they wouldn't enforce them on Linux. That was kind of an issue for a while as exFAT is the mandatory file format of SDXC cards. If you had a SD card >=64GB before then, Linux wasn't mainlining support because the situation was too risky.
I feel like GNOME and KDE may have very different stories money-wise; as all the commercial "we'll sell you a support contract" players in the Linux space these days — meaning, in the last 20 years — ship GNOME-based distros.
> KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it.
I think people also forget the core of KDE is Qt. I think when you think of how capable and powerful Qt is, it kind of makes sense that KDE can thrive the way it does, now I don't want to take away from KDE because no doubt they build their own things on top of Qt, but I would assume a lot of the complex heavy lifting is done by Qt in aggregate.
so .. if there was no money why were KDE folk acting like Mozilla ppl? :o
I mean when Plasma came around it was so full of bugs, the useless activity thing, etc, and bug repors were just ignored (or all the response was get HEAD and reproduce on it otherwise no one cares.)
> KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc
Doesn't KDE use a monorepo to store each and every project under the sun whose name starts with a K?
I vaguely recalled from way way back that even the most basic of development tasks, such as building kmail, forced developers to checkout all other projects.
I agree MS is probably being scapegoated here. I was using Linux around this time and I don't remember hearing about this threat either.
> At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity.
But I don't agree with this.
I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of.
I used Gnome 2 at the time, but I also changed a lot. It's been a decade, so forgive me for forgetting most of the specific app names but: I used compiz then later beryl. I replaced the bottom bar with a dock. I removed the application launcher and instead used the dock plus a Spotlight clone. I switched apps with the Expose plugin provided by compiz/beryl. My top panel had a clock, system tray, and I don't think anything else.
We were definitely loud, but maybe also a minority. Threads, blogs, newsites, etc constantly had discussion on new apps you could use to mod your Linux (mostly Gnome) desktop experience. I remember cycling thru several docks and several spotlight clones within a couple years. The people behind Gnome 3 and Unity very well could have seen all that buzz as an indicator that this is what people really wanted. So that's what they built.
But in retrospect saying that you find the defaults fine and there isn't a real need to change them doesn't make for a very interesting blog post. So the people who were just fine with Gnome 2 didn't get heard until Gnome 2 was gone.
I've also little doubt that Compiz/Beryl/Fusion envy was a major motivating factor for starting GNOME3 etc. Compiz gave desktop Linux a massive boost in popularity. Prior to this desktop rendering was primarily CPU bound and did not use compositing. If these projects were born from compiz-envy, then it was for the right reasons, and maybe they could've done a good job.
But then shortly after came the iPhone, and the developers felt like they had to copy design cues from Apple. It was no longer just about improving desktop rendering and enabling new kinds of visuals. They wanted a combined workspace for the desktop and phone, and they wanted a "pattern language" like Apple, so they limited the ways in which users could tinker with their tools, aiming towards uniformity. The GNOME3 designers/developers in particular had a very pretentious attitude and ignored complaints.
It might not have been so bad if they had succeeded right away, but the earliest releases of GNOME3 and KDE4 were heavily bug-ridden. The whole desktop would crash, or come out with strange glitches. Sometimes you would lose your desktop configuration and had to start from scratch. People who were using Linux for real work would have to revert back to something more stable, and the newer desktops had already left a sour taste.
> I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of.
Having seen this type of thing play out in several industries including other open source projects, it would have been more like follow the competition I would say.
Users sometimes get listened to. Often times that's only to retroactively justify decisions that already got made.
What gets attention is competition. Incumbents are watched like hawks by everyone for obvious reasons. And the incumbents themselves are paranoid of newcomers or new ideas.
I worked in software at a company that developed CPUs. "Intel is doing this" or "Intel is adding that instruction" was the quickest and easiest way to get the attention of CPU designers. Not "our customers want this" or "that instruction will speed up this software our customers run". Those things would be considered, but you would have to do a lot of work, modelling, and justification before they'd look at it.
There's actually good reasons for this. Intel having done something, you could assume they had already done that justification work. Them deploying it meant customers would become familiar with it and accept using it (or even expect to be able to use it). So it's not necessarily stupid or lazy to put a lot of weight on what competition is doing, it can be very efficient.
You can get into these death spirals of the blind leading the blind when everybody starts fixating on something if you're not careful, though. I'd say this is what happened with everybody trying to shoehorn smartphone UIs into the desktop back then.
GNOME 2 was my bread and butter. It's absolutely my perception that GNOME devs have gone "drunk on popularity" at the time (or perhaps more precisely, drunk on power), and still are.
GNOME 3 would absolutely have not been pushed as the future of GNOME so unilaterally if the lead devs showed any restraint or signs of listening to their users, given how much initial outcry there was. Given that they announced they may be dropping X11 support in GTK5 (!) [1], I argue they are still drunk to one extent or another. X11 is the GUI server that most desktop Linux users use as of 2022! Have an ounce of respect for your users, and at least ask if that's what people want / are comfortable dropping.
I get it, it's their project. But if a good chunk of the Linux userbase uses your software, then it's good to at least ask if people are OK with the direction being taken.
Ironically there's someone linking[1] today to someone with basically the same complaints about how Firefox has less customisation dialogs than it used to.
They literally post screenshots[2] showing less options (eg, the "Close it when downloads are finished" checkbox has gone! Oh no!!).
Does anybody remember Ubuntu from the early 2010s era, when I downloaded my first copy?
Ubuntu was talking about scopes and lenses in your Dashboard (basically, internet content in your start menu, which they thought was revolutionary), Ubuntu TV (nobody adopted that), and later, Ubuntu on Phones and Tablets with a (to put it mildly) bastardized Ubuntu 16.04 install that some phones are still stuck on to this day in UBports, in part because they were actually a Ubuntu/Android hybrid system with some Android driver compatibility blended in for good measure because they couldn't get all the drivers running in GNU Linux, so you had a mess of Android and GNU Linux drivers simultaneously? And after all that, the headline feature, scopes again! Not better privacy, not features any user otherwise really cared about, just scopes and lenses again and "it's Linux, on phones, with a Qt interface!" Oh, and it will have convergence in the future.
Convergence, convergence, that was a buzzword for a while. A neat idea... but Microsoft had the same idea, tried it on Windows Phone, and then completely abandoned the idea, years after Ubuntu had the idea and years before Ubuntu cut their losses.
That was a completely unnecessary disaster. I love Ubuntu as much as anybody, but looking back, it 100% deserved to fail as much as I would have wanted it to succeed. It's just an example of how, sometimes, it doesn't take a evil competitor megacorporation trying to undermine us - sometimes we've got plenty of blame ourselves for not succeeding.
This is what I remember too. The author lays out a lot of the "why" detail on the business/legal side that I didn't know. But what I do remember is waking up one day in 2009 or whatever and discovering that everyone had drank the tablet/convergence Kool-aid and that Unity and GNOME3 were both going full modal/dock. At the time I actually just assumed they were doing it to stay relevant with the impending Windows 8 release (heh), which was shooting for all the same goals with mostly the same ideas.
I also recall being annoyed that they were ripping away something (GNOME2) stable that worked just fine, but also that Unity was an absolute cinch to learn and a true joy to use.
Back in 2004? they would ship CD's to Colombia, even if you put like 20 in the form you would get them a few months later and could share with friends.
And MS Windows 8 was horrific in the same vein as GNOME 3 and Unity. It looked at the time more like follow-the-leader from the most ambitious Linux vendors (Red Shat and Ubuntu.)
I've never had any issue with gnome 3 or unity or gnomeshell or whatever its called. I started out on linux with Slackware and windowmaker. It was beautiful! And fast! And copy and paste didn't work between applications. I grudgingly used kde for a while and GTK. I then went osx for a while, and when gnome 3 and unity came out it had all my favorite bits about osx without the clutter. I went online to find oodles of hate. I never have understood it.
This omits another IP-related issue of at least equal significance. KDE is based on the Qt UI toolkit library, which had an encumbered license at the time the GNOME project got started (1997) -- and the first free software license it was released under, the QPL, was not GPL-compatible. This was resolved in 2000 (with a GPLed release of Qt), but by then, GNOME had its own momentum.
We are talking about the era when GNOME 3 / KDE 4 / Unity were born, which was around 2007. By then, the QPL issue had long been resolved and nobody cared anymore.
> And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit.
Oh, I remember when I could go to Medium every week or so, and there were numerous useful (or somewhat useful) articles tagged with UX - and then it slowly died out.
> I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat.
Yup, the fact that many prominent desktop people from that era refute that here, that all the links in the article point to TheRegister, and that nobody else seems to remember it happening that way - it is probably safe to disregard it.
I work for the Register now. That's why I pick links to them: I have saved searches that make it quick and easy.
I wasn't working for them then. In fact I only started freelancing for them in 2009 and went full-time late last year.
Secondly, many other now-popular tech news sites weren't around 15 years ago, or the links have gone. The Reg is stable and doesn't delete or move old stories.
This was entirely factual, and if you go Googling you can find plenty of supporting evidence from other sites.
The first half is by Oscar Wilde, the second half from my brain - although I cannot state beyond doubt that I didn't pick it up somewhere else in my 40+ years of life.
Microsoft is the reason the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2022. At every step of the way for many years Microsoft has always done some psychotic ill-intentioned thing to monopolize the PC. Even in 2022.
- OpenGL is crossplatform, we could have crossplatform games... but no. Microsoft didn't like that. So they made sure nobody used OpenGL so that Windows became the de-facto platform for PC games: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an...
- Regulators demanded Microsoft to define an open format for Office documents. They did, by creating the most complicated standard they could in a 6000 page document, and then decided to not use it by default in MS Office so that they could keep an advantage over competitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
- Internet Explorer for many years was the standard browser and internet browsing experience on non-Windows platforms had compatibility problems. They didn't pass Web Standards Compliance Acid Tests, so that a website that respected standards didn't render properly on Internet Explorer. Sometimes Microsoft websites would deliberately send broken CSS stylesheets to non-IE browsers.
- They have bought every major PC game publisher: Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard, Mojang, and countless others.
But there's hope...
- Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, and there is an open source Direct3D implementation on top of Vulkan. Wine/Proton uses this to run Windows games with a very low performance overhead.
- There are Open source office suites other than OpenOffice/LibreOffice with a proper UI that do not look like developer art. There are also cloud office suites like Google docs you can use for free.
- Internet Explorer is dead and their successors are dead.
- Nobody uses Bing and it will likely never be the top search engine.
OpenGL is such a pain in the ass. You'd know if you tried it.
I'll just repost my desktop linux rant from last year since nothing's changed:
---
1. Update glibc and everything breaks
2. Update Nvidia drivers and everything breaks
3. 99% of laptops have at least one device with missing or broken drivers. 802.11ac is very old in 2021, but the most popular ac chips still need an out-of-tree driver which will break when you update your kernel. Have fun copying kernel patches from random forums
4. Even the smallest of changes (ex: set display scaling to something that's not a multiple of 100%) require dicking around with config files. Windows 10's neutered control panel is still leagues ahead of Ubuntu's settings app. (Why are the default settings so bad? High DPI 4K monitors have been out for a decade now. Maybe they've fixed this since I've last checked. Or maybe all the devs use 10 year old Thinkpads)
5. Every config file is its own special snowflake with its own syntax, keywords, and escape characters
6. Every distro is its own special snowflake so it takes forever to help someone unfuck their computer if you're not familiar with their distro. Releasing software on Linux is painful for a related reason: The kennel has a stable ABI, but distros don't. You have to ship half the distro with every app if you want it to work out of the box. Using Docker for GUI apps is insane, but sometimes that's that you gotta do.
7. The desktop Linux community seems to only care about performance on old crappy hardware.
8. Audio input and output latency is really high out of the box. That's one of many things that require tweaking just to get acceptable performance.
Linux desktop hasn't been a thing because running anything other than FOSS on linux is an absolute nightmare. If SOMEONE hasn't compiled your gui for your specific linux flavor, you're in for a bad time.
Heck, if you are looking to distribute a binary, it is often EASIER to target windows and use WINE instead of trying to get binaries working for the 5 million platforms on linux.
There's a reason 30 different containerization package distribution systems (flatpak, snap, et all) have cropped up.
In addition to all that, there's simply the fact that the Linux GFX backend is a complicated mess. XFree86? X11? Xorg? Wayland? Y11?
All of those + the fact that windows management is a DIFFERENT problem from the actual rendering so now you have concepts like "Window" strewn across 20 different systems.
The Linux desktop is a lovable freakshow. The reason it hasn't caught on is because it's far too common to need to grab the man pages, pull up vim, and tweak 30 config files to get it just right for your specific set of hardware.
That isn't to say that OSes like Ubuntu, Redhat, or Debian haven't made herculean efforts to make things appear simple. However, it's far from "Well, microsoft bad therefore this didn't happen."
The fragmentation, the inconsistency, the need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things, and the difficulty of dealing with driver problems for inexperienced users all do more damage than anything Microsoft attempted to do.
Microsoft's OOXML spec was so much larger than ODF for at least 3 reasons.
1. OOXML is an XML-ization of a descendent of earlier binary office formats. You can do things in binary formats that don't map efficiently to XML. That resulted in OOXML having uglier and more verbose XML. If I recall correctly this was only a small part of the size difference.
2. OOXML was way more complete. This was a big part of the size difference.
The first approved standard for ODF for example gave no details on how formulas worked in spreadsheets. All you could get from the standard was that you should support formulas.
The OOXML spec on the other hand described in detail the format of formulas and gave detailed specs for a large number of functions. There were often 2 or 3 pages for a single function.
3. When IBM and Sun were touting that 6000 page number for the draft OOXML spec, they were using a printing that has something like half as many lines per page as the printing of ODF they were comparing with.
Microsoft phylosophy is the reason. KDE and GNOME at the beginning (1.x) were quiet good. If developers would have fixed the bugs linux would have been better. But fixing bugs sucks, do they release every couple of years a new version, incompatible with the old one and the circle is closed. The sane users had given up a long time ago.
My 15 years old fvwm config still works today.
This is just confirmation bias. Let me present an alternate view: Microsoft is a corporation that wants to make $$$.
1. Making OpenGL a compatibility layer on top of DirectX simplifies the stack, and helps Microsoft save $$$. (Apple doesn't support OpenGL 4.4+, is that "psychotic ill-intentioned"?)
2. Giving things away for free costs $$$. (If the EU demanded that IBM provide an open interface to its mainframes, do you think they would comply eagerly? Would it be "psychotic ill-intentioned" if they didn't?)
3. Standards are almost never followed by the company with a dominant position. Standards benefit companies that are not dominant in the market. Adhering to standards as the dominant player in the market = wasted $$$.
4. Trusted computing puts PCs on the same footing as Playstation/Xbox and allows content to be streamed without risk of piracy. That's the simplest explanation. A lot of people would like to stream 4k netflix on their PCs, but they can't because piracy is too great a concern. More popular features = more $$$.
5. This has nothing to do with Windows vs Linux. Regardless, plagiarizing your competitor makes you more $$$.
6. It should come as a surprise to no one, owning property makes you more $$$. (If Nintendo buys a game studio, is that also "psychotic"?!)
Apple's "Look and Feel" lawsuits had failed by then, and it was clear there was no way Microsoft would succeed. As you say, they were only pursuing exact copies.
The real problem was the KDE/Gnome split.
KDE came first (1996), but used the non-free Qt. Gnome was started (1997) to be entirely free, and so developers split like that.
Subsequent splits were for a bunch of reasons, but none were really related to MS threats.
I remember at the time the FOSS community found a bunch of prior art that would have most likely invalidate the Microsoft claims. There were plenty of graphical UI in existence that Microsoft probably copied. I do not have links to the epic /. flame-fests on the topic, but perhaps somebody else can find them. Lots of people were sharing links on slashdot with evidence showing how Microsoft would lose.
Yeah I don’t buy it either. If there were Windows 95 design patents they were more than 11 years old by 2006 and had only a couple more years of life left.
No legal action was taken in the end, partly because they couldn't work out who to sue, and partly because of the legal principle of laches. I cover this in the last article I linked to, which I wrote, a decade ago.
It is generally not of interest if you buy something or not.
For other readers it would be interesting to read evidence about the original article being wrong / right or more details that helps to better understand the situation.
There was a time when Ubuntu or Fedora, I don't remember which, but it had Gnome 3 from its earlier days, had a fancier concept of multiple desktops to where I could be on any desktop and if I had Pidgin (or some similar IM application... idr which) open and got a message, it would "zoom out" on my desktop view just slightly enough and on the border show an overlay of my chat convos, so I could be on any desktop and talk to anyone, kind of like how you can answer a text on iOS from a notification if you hold tap on it or whatever. I thought that was next level, then I never saw it again, nor could I figure out how to make it happen again. I think they really were close to making some amazing UIs but due to the nature of Linux neck-beards being slow and repugnant to change (looking at Devuan, Trinity Desktop Environment, MATE, and so on...) I'm sure they opted to remove it.
I really would love to see someone just take Ubuntu kind of like how Budgie was inspired by Material Design from Android, and just work on something new that really makes your software a little nicer in terms of being integrated with the Desktop Environment, something I would argue Mobile gets well, and would be a boost for multi-tasking. I really do like Ubuntu Budgie, but it feels kind of incomplete. The most decently integrated DE I can think of is probably KDE since a lot of the apps are made with KDE libraries, and they integrate nicely, you can expect the same behavior out of all of them.
I know I kind of went all over the place, I guess my pipedream is to see some companies invest into R&D on Desktop Environments to see what we can do better. I'm really getting sick of Windows again, with all its telemetry but it is a nightmare to get Linux going due to the GPU driver situation, plus I don't want to spend a fortune on a GPU.
I was the lead designer of Unity. Unity was not a response to patent concerns, but rather the manifestation of a convoluted OEM strategy involving exclusive distribution of distinct design features, and a write-once-run-anywhere dream of running Ubuntu on any device from netbooks to big screens to automobiles.
When Ubuntu first switched to Unity I hated it.
But over time it got better and I got used to its concepts and I'm daily driving it to this day.
Now I even fear the day Compiz and therefore Unity stop working - it has become my DE of choice.
I love its space efficiency: the global menu bar and the local window menus (I have it configured to show the window menu when I hover the title bar) and the "task bar" on the left: I use my displays in landscape mode, so width is abundant but height is at a premium.
The grid layout shortcuts just work, something that Gnome 3 couldn't really do when I last tried it a couple of years ago.
I don't often use the HUD to activate menu entries, but it can be very nice for programs like GIMP when you remember the name of an entry but can't find it in all those submenus.
I wish Canonical would still maintain it, over the years it seems to have regressed a bit. Nowadays some (I think mostly SDL2) applications tend to slow down the whole UI and window transitions "take forever". But apart from that it has served me well. So thank you and everyone who was involved with Unity!
So true! I loved Unity in the late 2010s. Unfortunately, now where it is no more maintained and GNOME3 does not really provide the same features, I switched to KDE. What I miss most is the space efficiency and the global menu bar / searchable HUD. I miss so much time digging in menus instead of just typing and hitting enter.
Well, if nothing else hopefully someone else notices this witness statement exposing the above-linked revisionist history for what it is--a fabrication.
On the topic of Unity: I, a linux user since the mid 90s, worked an actual linux job through the forced deprecation of GNOME 2.. I don't have much anything constructive to say about it. I even used fvwm2 for a while after gnome2 got yoinked.. it was a nice reminder of my halcyon days writing perl in xemacs, running fvwm on my sparc 2. It wasn't too long after that I landed on xfce. I still wonder what gnome2 could've been.
All I ever wanted was a compositing, focus-follows-mouse, raise/lower window manager with a full-featured keyboard shortcut config. I still feel as though we were sold out. I don't think my mental representation of Canonical will ever recover. It just felt so blatantly anti-user during that period, and that impression has not been tempered with the passage of time.
Thank you, I appreciate the behind-the-scenes context here. Unity ran well on my low-spec low-res hardware that choked on Gnome Shell almost instantly. It was great for making full use of a small screen and hand-me-down computer; meanwhile Gnome was throwing blank space and memory around like they were nothing. My impression at the time was that Unity was designed to be able to run on embedded devices and netbooks while Gnome was expecting a fairly new desktop or laptop.
I think that’s just polish that was missing at a time for Gnome. Check out gnome now, it is very fast on even low-end laptops, and has better input latency than a goddamn mac.
The idea of having a UI that works is any device messed up not just Ubuntu but the entire industry. Windows 8 and up is also a victim, and even Apple couldn't resist.
Desktop computers and smartphones and TVs and cars are entirely different. Desktop computers (and laptops) have keyboards, a large screen and an accurate pointing device, smartphones have small screens and fingers are inaccurate, calling for big buttons, gestures and minimalist interfaces, TVs have a large screen but seen from far away, so not that much information can be shown, and are typically operated from handheld remote controls with limited pointing capacity, cars displays should be operatable without looking at the display, in an environment with lots of vibrations, so we need very big buttons, predictable, static interfaces, physical controls and limited gestures.
Many contradictions here, and for me, trying to unify all that requires too many compromises.
This is news to me. I remember that the Linux desktop seemed to be on the ascendancy back in 2006. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were very nice desktops; while they weren’t Mac OS X Tiger (which still holds up as an amazing desktop), they were solid contenders to Windows XP. But then came GNOME 3 and KDE 4, which were major fumbles that set back the Linux desktop for years.
If it’s true that GNOME’s radical direction beginning with version 3 is the result of threats from Microsoft to change its desktop to avoid influences from Windows, then that definitely changes my assessment of the era, and my distaste for Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior only deepens (this is the same Microsoft that complained about Apple’s look-and-feel lawsuits).
This is my impression to, as a person deep into the Linux desktop ecosystem from back then.
I even managed to give gnome2 to my mum at one point and she remarked how nice everything was and easy to find. I had more difficulty than she did since I was much more into computers and had learned all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Windows.
Then gnome3 came and was a huge regression in terms of flexibility, ease of use, aesthetics and performance.
Plasma was the same, though, subjectively it looked better and was a lot less antagonising than gnomes radical redesign, it was still really heavy and buggy compared to kde3 (or whatever the predecessor was, I think 3).
Plasma/KDE was also very windows-like, so I don’t buy the argument that Microsoft was the cause, it was mostly gnome devs thinking that they could get a radical touch-first redesign in before anyone else.
This is a very long way of saying: the parent is correct in my opinion.
> Plasma/KDE was also very windows-like, so I don’t buy the argument that Microsoft was the cause, it was mostly gnome devs thinking that they could get a radical touch-first redesign in before anyone else.
The article does touch on that, apparently Suse signed a patent deal with MS which sidestepped the issues so they could continue the design as usual. Gnome and Redhat refused.
If this is true it kinda reinforces my feeling that Gnome 3 was a redesign for the sake of it. I hate almost everything about it though I'm not married to the windows concept. But everything about it just feels wrong. The huge "touch-friendly" title bars, the menus hidden in hamburger buttons, the lack of configuration options like macOS. And I really tried to like it. When I moved back to FOSS from Mac it was my first choice.
I love KDE though only recently, I thought KDE 3 was too cluttery. It feels like it only came into its own right with Plasma. And I don't find it all that Windows-like though the taskbar certainly is more Windows-like than other DE's. But a taskbar doth not a windows make. Overall I find it distinctly different from Windows. The control panel is definitely a lot better than that mashup of different styles in Windows.
AFAIK, Gnome2 was the only foss desktop to receive extensive user testing. (Sun dogfooded it with their employees.) Lots of little workflow issues were identified and resolved.
Same experience, so this history must be told from a very specific perspective. I've had over two decades of Linux use on the desktop and remember something similar to you guys.
At the time I remember the discussions seemed to be "this how the GNOME team have decided things will be, it's better, deal with it"
There was no discussion I saw that they doing all this under the threat of legal action, although maybe they didn't want to paint an even larger target on their backs by naming Microsoft or be seen trying to change things just enough to avoid the patents.
Plenty of stuff in the Linux world was done naming Microsoft in adversarial terms - that was definitely not the case on the desktop. All three main groups (GNOME, KDE, and Unity) always, always stated they were making bold design choices for practical reasons related to UX. To claim otherwise, today, seems very disingenuous.
GNOME already changed direction rather radically between v1 and v2. I specifically remember many people complaining about all the simplifications and removal of various configurable options, and blaming GNOME for drinking too much Apple kool-aid.
I don't think GNOME's radical redirection was necessarily a product of threats from Microsoft. This is me reaching back into the old memory bank. I remember a justification for GNOME 3's design was to be touch friendly. I don't think that is necessarily a Microsoft fault. Touch screens were coming to laptops and at the time it felt like every hardware maker was throwing touch screens on laptops. And well, it turned out not to pan out very well for anyone. Here we are and yes, some people may buy laptops with touch screen, but I have yet to run into someone who owns one and uses the touch screen. The exception would something like the Microsoft surfaces.
What everyone else said: if this is true, that would mean that every developer involved was willing to take the secret to their grave. It would mean they preferred to take the massive PR hit of issuing public statements saying "why can't you idiots just accept our superior aesthetic sensibilities" than to blame their incredibly unpopular choices on threats from Microsoft.
Interesting theory, but I don't recall this happening. As other commenters are saying, there were indeed patent-related issues around FAT and the like, and huge interoperability problems with NTFS (to name one, but that's irrelevant here)... but I don't remember anything around patents and the desktop style -- which may exist, but they were not the problem here.
From my recollection, the real issue was Mac OS X (as it was spelled at the time) gaining territory by being a real Unix with a good interface, thus attracting a lot of Unix/Linux users into the Mac. I'd even bet that many old-timers abandoned Linux on the desktop to move to the Mac, which in turn left room for the newcomers to replace the interface with something resembling the coolness of the Mac. But I'm only hypothesizing here.
For me it was a bit later in 2009 when I was giving a presentation for a position at Imperial College using my Dell laptop running Ubuntu and it crashed when plugging in the VGA cable for the projector. There was an iMac at the back of the room taunting me.
Got the job via the EU in the end and bought a 2010 13” MBP which was rock solid for many years.
For me it was this + small form factor + high pixel density. I always looked at System76 and the laptops were too big and the displays were disappointing. Other sellers seemed similar or were just refurbishing, except Dell briefly, but I never trusted them. Hardware integration is just very nice to have.
GNOME 2 was perfect. I use the spiritual sucessor MATE wherever it’s possible. It’s not perfect and arguably “boring” but there is really something to it https://mate-desktop.org/
And on a second mildly related side note: /r/linux had a thread about a modern (2009) OpenSuse spin with KDE 2 a few months ago. It was released as an april’s fools joke but the ISO file totally disappeared from the internet. Or at least the sub couldn’t find it (and the archive.org mirror is corrupted) https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-bri... Maybe someone here have it? :)
I'm one of those rare people that like Gnome 3 way better than Gnome 2 or any other "windows 95" or "traditional-style" desktop. Other than command-line apps, I run like 5 main pieces of software regularly (IDE, browser, etc.) and probably 20 pieces of gui software total over the lifetime of my PC. I want something that:
1. Makes it easy to launch my main 5 apps (under 1 second)
2. Makes it fairly easy to run the 15 apps I run less often (couple secs max)
3. Looks pretty out of the box w/o customization so I can just get stuff done
The only environments I've used that tick all my boxes (subjectively of course) are Gnome 3 and macOS.
I think Gnome 3 especially does this extremely well. I flick to my upper right hot corner to expose my dock with my 5 apps - instant launch. If I want one of the other 15 I'm happy to type it in the resulting app search box. Done. I never understood why I would want to click and navigate for like 10 seconds (much less have to remember WHERE it is and WHY it is under a certain 'category') to launch one program from a Windows 95 style start menu. To each their own I guess.
EDIT: I should add a #4: Minimal customization. Gone are my days tweaking me DE exactly how I want it. While I do _some_ customization - it is very little (1 or 2 extensions)
I don't think it's rare to prefer GNOME 3 over GNOME 2; in fact, I would wager that that is the majority opinion.
By the way, I find it even faster to launch apps by pressing the Super (Windows) key and typing the app name. For example, you can press [Super] [t] [e] [Enter] to launch a GNOME Terminal instance. Just my 2c :)
I use XFCE, a lightweight Win95 style DE. My XFCE start menu ("whisker menu") is bound to Start+Space, which lets me find apps by name. For apps I use frequently, they are bound to Start+[Key], eg, Start+F for the file manager, Start+S for Sublime Text (also used to open new windows in each app).
I do miss the Expose from macOS though, I don't think XFCE has that. (Edit: apparently this can be done with a third party tool.)
Yeah I think Gnome 3 nowadays is very good. Though I recently switched over to KDE and I think it’s also pretty great from a “gadget” perspective. The options offered in a right click in the file browser are a good distillation of the design differences between KDE and Gnome (as well as the screenshot widget…)
Definitely would have no issue recommending Gnome to a normal computer user. I like having the busier interface nowadays though.
Konqueror was awesome. File Manager and Web Browser in one! For some ideological reasons they decided to introduce Dolphin as a file manager in KDE 4 which had much less features.
I ended up switching to Xfce though these days I also use Cinnamon (also Gnome 2 inspired) because it is the Linux Mint default choice. Though I hate that they have recently tried to make Cinnamon look more "fresh" and keep changing it so I probably will end up going back to Xfce if it still the same.
From what I (vaguely) remember, the reasons behind moves like Dolphin were that they felt the integrated Konqueror was a mistake. It certainly made for hard maintenance, the integration system often broke after small changes; and I can imagine security was an issue. Microsoft had made a similar choice in Windows 98/2000/XP, and went through a similar backtracking after XPsp2.
Also, they were trying to move the system to Qt4, which was a big task. Breaking things up probably seemed logical. Add a bit of classic FOSS bugfix-is-boring-let's-rewrite, and voilà...
At some point I was disappointed by KRunner of KDE 4 disappearing with my partially written formulas, then found Qalculate.
Then I saw someone at work using i3, and I was amazed and hooked.
I changed some keybindings to be more familiar (like alt+f4 close and alt+f2 run).
But recently I have been having some dual monitor troubles with it. Maybe I'll try Trinity for a few weeks. And maybe some tiling WM other than i3.
> GNOME 2 was perfect. … MATE … It’s not perfect …
Is MATE worse than GNOME 2 used to be?
I just switched to MATE and I have run into all sorts of odd bugs.
1. If I position an external monitor above the primary, I can’t put any windows in the overlapping portion along the x axis.
2. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, maximized windows return to their original monitor but half-maximized windows don’t.
3. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, the background becomes tiled instead of zoomed with Marco + compositing and it blacks out and the desktop flickers with Compiz.
4. With Compiz, I can constrain the window switcher across all windows to the current workspace but I cannot constrain the window switcher within app group to the current workspace.
5. With Marco + compositing, due to a regression, taking a screenshot of a single window includes the boundary around it that contains the window’s shadow.
There was something else too but I forget. Quite dispiriting but I have given up on finding the perfect desktop.
Came here to say this. I don't use heavy desktop environments personally (some machines of mine run dwm or even), but I set up a machine for my daughter recently and did so with MATE. It's a pretty good desktop setup out of the box. Boring and mostly gets out of the way. She's mostly using chromium.
That's a historical misrepresentation. There were no treads against the "traditional" Linux desktops from Microsoft. There were, however, a lot of mediocre designers who wanted to "be like Apple".
I still think the Applications/Places/System triple menu was absolutely superb in terms of usability. You had three clear and coherent categories where all the GUI software in your system was placed, which made all that stuff easily scanneable by anyone even if they have never used it before. It shouldn't have been ditched, if you ask me. That clever way to separate and categorize that stuff was and is superior to any 'start' menu Windows (and any other desktop environment) has ever had.
The Applications/Places/System is not a good idea: it doesn't scale. It worked relatively well at the time because people had something in the order of tens of megabytes of free space, allowing only a few programs installed. Nobody does that with smartphones for a reason.
But we're not talking about smartphones with their dozens of tiny apps. We're talking about desktops. How much desktop software does a typical user run?
It's always interesting for me to see that I'm so alone in loving Gnome 3. As a keyboard heavy user, it has always matched my workflow. I never appreciated a start menu. It leaves essentially the full screen for my program. The settings drop-downs are intuitive.
Granted I use the Material Shell tiling extension now, but vanilla gnome 3 will always have a place in my heart.
Not alone. I love it. I want my DE to "just work" and I don't want to customize it or hunt for programs in a "start menu". Give me my hot corner and a short list of apps any day so I can get to work. Happy to type in to launch less commonly used ones the few times a month I actually need them.
As a bonus, Gnome 3 is incredibly easy on the eyes (subjective of course). I think probably a close competitor to macOS in looks category.
Gnome 40+ is basically perfect for me after adding the "AppIndicators", "Bluetooth Quick Connect" and "Sound Input and Output" extensions.
I absolutely love being able to click a single key and being able to easily:
- see all windows open across monitors
- drag windows to different desktops / monitors
- close any window and re-organize the whole thing (something I can't do on macOS)
Default apps are also pretty good and the whole DE is super stable and snappy.
My only complaints are the GTK file picker being useless and the title bars taking too much space on non-gnome apps (which don't have window decorations).
I feel the same way. Gnome 3 feels great as a keyboard first power user, it feels great with a laptop touchpad and using single, double, triple finger swipes for different things. Presumably it works pretty well on touchscreen devices too.
It actually still matches my Windows workflow pretty closely because all I ever do is hit winkey and type the name of the app I want to launch there too.
The only place it really falls apart is if you're using it with Keyboard + Mouse and aren't the sort of person that likes to just learn keyboard shortcuts and gestures for everything without looking at the UI much.
The other problem I have with it is the opinionated stance on window border/title sizes. The defaults are way too big and you're not really supposed to change them. Other than that I quite like Gnome 3.
> It's always interesting for me to see that I'm so alone in loving Gnome 3.
You're not alone. Complaints always get projected louder and wider than happiness.
GNOME 2 was the same way. So many users treating it as the end of the world, and it took a few versions to improve and fix initial issues, but after those first couple of versions it was a great upgrade. GNOME 3 likewise took a couple of versions to find its feet, and then it was a great upgrade.
I would be curious to know when you started using Linux and GNOME. I always thought GNOME 3 was interesting and had some good ideas. But at least up until, I feel like 2016 time, most people just felt bitten by how GNOME 3 was rolled out. GNOME 3's initial roll out was essentially a burning dumpster full of issues. It did eventually get better, but it took a long time.
With that being said, I do think GNOME was way off track. Based on everyone I know who swore off GNOME after the 3 release but are using it now, GNOME is back on a great track with GNOME 40+.
I toyed with Linux growing up (2005-2012) then fully committed in 2014 with fedora. Gnome definitely had some issues at that time but I still sound it very productive to use.
I love that on my Lenovo Yoga I can use it as easily as a regular desktop or like a tablet (you haven't appreciated reading the hacker news comment until you start doing it on your couch with a screen in portrait mode).
My only gripe is I wish I could dial the titlebar height depending on the context.
Readit News
At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. Linux usage was in ascendancy, money was being thrown around, and the FOSS world was starting to attract young designers who saw it as a cheap way to build professional credibility. And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. The core teams really thought they had a shot at redesigning how people interact with computers, "like Apple did with phones". Interaction targets moved from keyboard+mouse to touch screens, because "convergence" and the fact that the mobile sector was suddenly awash with cash.
It's sad that people try to justify their missteps in this way. Microsoft was (and is) a terrible company and a constant threat to the FOSS ecosystem, but defining some of the biggest design choices of the Linux desktop only in antagonistic or reflective terms does a real disservice to those projects and the people who worked in them.
If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing.
Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _never_ thrown around. At best, a handful of engineers from a few different companies (TrollTech/Nokia, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical) were hired to work full time and that was pretty much it. I don't think more than 10-15 engineers have done paid worked on KDE at any given time. Most of the contributions were volunteers.
There was a few attempts on KDE side to get paid by Intel to develop an office suite for mobile but it was also pretty small.
And to this date that is still the case with KDE. Very few engineers paid to work on it hired by entirely different set of companies like Blue Systems or Krita trying to make a living with very modest donations and contributions.
KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it.
Your main point is valid though. FAT and SMB patents were more serious threats.
(I would also add that, certainly in KDE circles, there was also a bit of a cultivated aura of rockstar developers around these fulltime hires, with folks making big calls without ever accepting they might be wrong... until several years (or decades) later.)
I think people also forget the core of KDE is Qt. I think when you think of how capable and powerful Qt is, it kind of makes sense that KDE can thrive the way it does, now I don't want to take away from KDE because no doubt they build their own things on top of Qt, but I would assume a lot of the complex heavy lifting is done by Qt in aggregate.
I mean when Plasma came around it was so full of bugs, the useless activity thing, etc, and bug repors were just ignored (or all the response was get HEAD and reproduce on it otherwise no one cares.)
Doesn't KDE use a monorepo to store each and every project under the sun whose name starts with a K?
I vaguely recalled from way way back that even the most basic of development tasks, such as building kmail, forced developers to checkout all other projects.
This doesn't look like something to brag about.
> At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity.
But I don't agree with this.
I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of.
I used Gnome 2 at the time, but I also changed a lot. It's been a decade, so forgive me for forgetting most of the specific app names but: I used compiz then later beryl. I replaced the bottom bar with a dock. I removed the application launcher and instead used the dock plus a Spotlight clone. I switched apps with the Expose plugin provided by compiz/beryl. My top panel had a clock, system tray, and I don't think anything else.
We were definitely loud, but maybe also a minority. Threads, blogs, newsites, etc constantly had discussion on new apps you could use to mod your Linux (mostly Gnome) desktop experience. I remember cycling thru several docks and several spotlight clones within a couple years. The people behind Gnome 3 and Unity very well could have seen all that buzz as an indicator that this is what people really wanted. So that's what they built.
But in retrospect saying that you find the defaults fine and there isn't a real need to change them doesn't make for a very interesting blog post. So the people who were just fine with Gnome 2 didn't get heard until Gnome 2 was gone.
But then shortly after came the iPhone, and the developers felt like they had to copy design cues from Apple. It was no longer just about improving desktop rendering and enabling new kinds of visuals. They wanted a combined workspace for the desktop and phone, and they wanted a "pattern language" like Apple, so they limited the ways in which users could tinker with their tools, aiming towards uniformity. The GNOME3 designers/developers in particular had a very pretentious attitude and ignored complaints.
It might not have been so bad if they had succeeded right away, but the earliest releases of GNOME3 and KDE4 were heavily bug-ridden. The whole desktop would crash, or come out with strange glitches. Sometimes you would lose your desktop configuration and had to start from scratch. People who were using Linux for real work would have to revert back to something more stable, and the newer desktops had already left a sour taste.
None of this had anything to do with Microsoft.
Having seen this type of thing play out in several industries including other open source projects, it would have been more like follow the competition I would say.
Users sometimes get listened to. Often times that's only to retroactively justify decisions that already got made.
What gets attention is competition. Incumbents are watched like hawks by everyone for obvious reasons. And the incumbents themselves are paranoid of newcomers or new ideas.
I worked in software at a company that developed CPUs. "Intel is doing this" or "Intel is adding that instruction" was the quickest and easiest way to get the attention of CPU designers. Not "our customers want this" or "that instruction will speed up this software our customers run". Those things would be considered, but you would have to do a lot of work, modelling, and justification before they'd look at it.
There's actually good reasons for this. Intel having done something, you could assume they had already done that justification work. Them deploying it meant customers would become familiar with it and accept using it (or even expect to be able to use it). So it's not necessarily stupid or lazy to put a lot of weight on what competition is doing, it can be very efficient.
You can get into these death spirals of the blind leading the blind when everybody starts fixating on something if you're not careful, though. I'd say this is what happened with everybody trying to shoehorn smartphone UIs into the desktop back then.
GNOME 3 would absolutely have not been pushed as the future of GNOME so unilaterally if the lead devs showed any restraint or signs of listening to their users, given how much initial outcry there was. Given that they announced they may be dropping X11 support in GTK5 (!) [1], I argue they are still drunk to one extent or another. X11 is the GUI server that most desktop Linux users use as of 2022! Have an ounce of respect for your users, and at least ask if that's what people want / are comfortable dropping.
I get it, it's their project. But if a good chunk of the Linux userbase uses your software, then it's good to at least ask if people are OK with the direction being taken.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/05/gtk_5_might_drop_x11/
They literally post screenshots[2] showing less options (eg, the "Close it when downloads are finished" checkbox has gone! Oh no!!).
I was thinking exactly what you've posted here.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258822
[2] https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/mozilla.html#historyof...
Ubuntu was talking about scopes and lenses in your Dashboard (basically, internet content in your start menu, which they thought was revolutionary), Ubuntu TV (nobody adopted that), and later, Ubuntu on Phones and Tablets with a (to put it mildly) bastardized Ubuntu 16.04 install that some phones are still stuck on to this day in UBports, in part because they were actually a Ubuntu/Android hybrid system with some Android driver compatibility blended in for good measure because they couldn't get all the drivers running in GNU Linux, so you had a mess of Android and GNU Linux drivers simultaneously? And after all that, the headline feature, scopes again! Not better privacy, not features any user otherwise really cared about, just scopes and lenses again and "it's Linux, on phones, with a Qt interface!" Oh, and it will have convergence in the future.
Convergence, convergence, that was a buzzword for a while. A neat idea... but Microsoft had the same idea, tried it on Windows Phone, and then completely abandoned the idea, years after Ubuntu had the idea and years before Ubuntu cut their losses.
That was a completely unnecessary disaster. I love Ubuntu as much as anybody, but looking back, it 100% deserved to fail as much as I would have wanted it to succeed. It's just an example of how, sometimes, it doesn't take a evil competitor megacorporation trying to undermine us - sometimes we've got plenty of blame ourselves for not succeeding.
I also recall being annoyed that they were ripping away something (GNOME2) stable that worked just fine, but also that Unity was an absolute cinch to learn and a true joy to use.
In the end, though, I ended up on KDE Plasma.
Those were the days, we laughed and laughed.
This is four years before that.
You are confusing effect with cause, or as we say in the British Isles, "putting the cart before the horse".
That's a line worth memorizing. Well done.
Oh, I remember when I could go to Medium every week or so, and there were numerous useful (or somewhat useful) articles tagged with UX - and then it slowly died out.
Yup, the fact that many prominent desktop people from that era refute that here, that all the links in the article point to TheRegister, and that nobody else seems to remember it happening that way - it is probably safe to disregard it.
I work for the Register now. That's why I pick links to them: I have saved searches that make it quick and easy.
I wasn't working for them then. In fact I only started freelancing for them in 2009 and went full-time late last year.
Secondly, many other now-popular tech news sites weren't around 15 years ago, or the links have gone. The Reg is stable and doesn't delete or move old stories.
This was entirely factual, and if you go Googling you can find plenty of supporting evidence from other sites.
CNN: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...
ComputerWorld:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m...
And so on.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-...
The fact that some people weren't paying attention and forgot this does not mean it isn't true.
Seriously, you've just summed up a significant fraction of both my parenting and my professional life.
- OpenGL is crossplatform, we could have crossplatform games... but no. Microsoft didn't like that. So they made sure nobody used OpenGL so that Windows became the de-facto platform for PC games: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an...
- Regulators demanded Microsoft to define an open format for Office documents. They did, by creating the most complicated standard they could in a 6000 page document, and then decided to not use it by default in MS Office so that they could keep an advantage over competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
- Internet Explorer for many years was the standard browser and internet browsing experience on non-Windows platforms had compatibility problems. They didn't pass Web Standards Compliance Acid Tests, so that a website that respected standards didn't render properly on Internet Explorer. Sometimes Microsoft websites would deliberately send broken CSS stylesheets to non-IE browsers.
- They tried to lock down the PC with Palladium, they failed. They now did it with Pluto and succeeded. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
- They tried to compete with google by stealing their top results. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
- They have bought every major PC game publisher: Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard, Mojang, and countless others.
But there's hope...
- Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, and there is an open source Direct3D implementation on top of Vulkan. Wine/Proton uses this to run Windows games with a very low performance overhead.
- There are Open source office suites other than OpenOffice/LibreOffice with a proper UI that do not look like developer art. There are also cloud office suites like Google docs you can use for free.
- Internet Explorer is dead and their successors are dead.
- Nobody uses Bing and it will likely never be the top search engine.
I'll just repost my desktop linux rant from last year since nothing's changed:
---
1. Update glibc and everything breaks
2. Update Nvidia drivers and everything breaks
3. 99% of laptops have at least one device with missing or broken drivers. 802.11ac is very old in 2021, but the most popular ac chips still need an out-of-tree driver which will break when you update your kernel. Have fun copying kernel patches from random forums
4. Even the smallest of changes (ex: set display scaling to something that's not a multiple of 100%) require dicking around with config files. Windows 10's neutered control panel is still leagues ahead of Ubuntu's settings app. (Why are the default settings so bad? High DPI 4K monitors have been out for a decade now. Maybe they've fixed this since I've last checked. Or maybe all the devs use 10 year old Thinkpads)
5. Every config file is its own special snowflake with its own syntax, keywords, and escape characters
6. Every distro is its own special snowflake so it takes forever to help someone unfuck their computer if you're not familiar with their distro. Releasing software on Linux is painful for a related reason: The kennel has a stable ABI, but distros don't. You have to ship half the distro with every app if you want it to work out of the box. Using Docker for GUI apps is insane, but sometimes that's that you gotta do.
7. The desktop Linux community seems to only care about performance on old crappy hardware.
8. Audio input and output latency is really high out of the box. That's one of many things that require tweaking just to get acceptable performance.
Linux desktop hasn't been a thing because running anything other than FOSS on linux is an absolute nightmare. If SOMEONE hasn't compiled your gui for your specific linux flavor, you're in for a bad time.
Heck, if you are looking to distribute a binary, it is often EASIER to target windows and use WINE instead of trying to get binaries working for the 5 million platforms on linux.
There's a reason 30 different containerization package distribution systems (flatpak, snap, et all) have cropped up.
In addition to all that, there's simply the fact that the Linux GFX backend is a complicated mess. XFree86? X11? Xorg? Wayland? Y11?
All of those + the fact that windows management is a DIFFERENT problem from the actual rendering so now you have concepts like "Window" strewn across 20 different systems.
The Linux desktop is a lovable freakshow. The reason it hasn't caught on is because it's far too common to need to grab the man pages, pull up vim, and tweak 30 config files to get it just right for your specific set of hardware.
That isn't to say that OSes like Ubuntu, Redhat, or Debian haven't made herculean efforts to make things appear simple. However, it's far from "Well, microsoft bad therefore this didn't happen."
The fragmentation, the inconsistency, the need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things, and the difficulty of dealing with driver problems for inexperienced users all do more damage than anything Microsoft attempted to do.
1. OOXML is an XML-ization of a descendent of earlier binary office formats. You can do things in binary formats that don't map efficiently to XML. That resulted in OOXML having uglier and more verbose XML. If I recall correctly this was only a small part of the size difference.
2. OOXML was way more complete. This was a big part of the size difference.
The first approved standard for ODF for example gave no details on how formulas worked in spreadsheets. All you could get from the standard was that you should support formulas.
The OOXML spec on the other hand described in detail the format of formulas and gave detailed specs for a large number of functions. There were often 2 or 3 pages for a single function.
3. When IBM and Sun were touting that 6000 page number for the draft OOXML spec, they were using a printing that has something like half as many lines per page as the printing of ODF they were comparing with.
1. Making OpenGL a compatibility layer on top of DirectX simplifies the stack, and helps Microsoft save $$$. (Apple doesn't support OpenGL 4.4+, is that "psychotic ill-intentioned"?)
2. Giving things away for free costs $$$. (If the EU demanded that IBM provide an open interface to its mainframes, do you think they would comply eagerly? Would it be "psychotic ill-intentioned" if they didn't?)
3. Standards are almost never followed by the company with a dominant position. Standards benefit companies that are not dominant in the market. Adhering to standards as the dominant player in the market = wasted $$$.
4. Trusted computing puts PCs on the same footing as Playstation/Xbox and allows content to be streamed without risk of piracy. That's the simplest explanation. A lot of people would like to stream 4k netflix on their PCs, but they can't because piracy is too great a concern. More popular features = more $$$.
5. This has nothing to do with Windows vs Linux. Regardless, plagiarizing your competitor makes you more $$$.
6. It should come as a surprise to no one, owning property makes you more $$$. (If Nintendo buys a game studio, is that also "psychotic"?!)
Dead Comment
Apple's "Look and Feel" lawsuits had failed by then, and it was clear there was no way Microsoft would succeed. As you say, they were only pursuing exact copies.
The real problem was the KDE/Gnome split.
KDE came first (1996), but used the non-free Qt. Gnome was started (1997) to be entirely free, and so developers split like that.
Subsequent splits were for a bunch of reasons, but none were really related to MS threats.
I wrote it because it was 15 years ago now and everyone is forgetting about it now.
Follow the links I put in the piece.
No legal action was taken in the end, partly because they couldn't work out who to sue, and partly because of the legal principle of laches. I cover this in the last article I linked to, which I wrote, a decade ago.
For other readers it would be interesting to read evidence about the original article being wrong / right or more details that helps to better understand the situation.
I really would love to see someone just take Ubuntu kind of like how Budgie was inspired by Material Design from Android, and just work on something new that really makes your software a little nicer in terms of being integrated with the Desktop Environment, something I would argue Mobile gets well, and would be a boost for multi-tasking. I really do like Ubuntu Budgie, but it feels kind of incomplete. The most decently integrated DE I can think of is probably KDE since a lot of the apps are made with KDE libraries, and they integrate nicely, you can expect the same behavior out of all of them.
I know I kind of went all over the place, I guess my pipedream is to see some companies invest into R&D on Desktop Environments to see what we can do better. I'm really getting sick of Windows again, with all its telemetry but it is a nightmare to get Linux going due to the GPU driver situation, plus I don't want to spend a fortune on a GPU.
On the topic of Unity: I, a linux user since the mid 90s, worked an actual linux job through the forced deprecation of GNOME 2.. I don't have much anything constructive to say about it. I even used fvwm2 for a while after gnome2 got yoinked.. it was a nice reminder of my halcyon days writing perl in xemacs, running fvwm on my sparc 2. It wasn't too long after that I landed on xfce. I still wonder what gnome2 could've been.
All I ever wanted was a compositing, focus-follows-mouse, raise/lower window manager with a full-featured keyboard shortcut config. I still feel as though we were sold out. I don't think my mental representation of Canonical will ever recover. It just felt so blatantly anti-user during that period, and that impression has not been tempered with the passage of time.
I did not write these other articles covering it:
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m...
The idea of having a UI that works is any device messed up not just Ubuntu but the entire industry. Windows 8 and up is also a victim, and even Apple couldn't resist.
Desktop computers and smartphones and TVs and cars are entirely different. Desktop computers (and laptops) have keyboards, a large screen and an accurate pointing device, smartphones have small screens and fingers are inaccurate, calling for big buttons, gestures and minimalist interfaces, TVs have a large screen but seen from far away, so not that much information can be shown, and are typically operated from handheld remote controls with limited pointing capacity, cars displays should be operatable without looking at the display, in an environment with lots of vibrations, so we need very big buttons, predictable, static interfaces, physical controls and limited gestures.
Many contradictions here, and for me, trying to unify all that requires too many compromises.
Dead Comment
If it’s true that GNOME’s radical direction beginning with version 3 is the result of threats from Microsoft to change its desktop to avoid influences from Windows, then that definitely changes my assessment of the era, and my distaste for Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior only deepens (this is the same Microsoft that complained about Apple’s look-and-feel lawsuits).
I even managed to give gnome2 to my mum at one point and she remarked how nice everything was and easy to find. I had more difficulty than she did since I was much more into computers and had learned all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Windows.
Then gnome3 came and was a huge regression in terms of flexibility, ease of use, aesthetics and performance.
Plasma was the same, though, subjectively it looked better and was a lot less antagonising than gnomes radical redesign, it was still really heavy and buggy compared to kde3 (or whatever the predecessor was, I think 3).
Plasma/KDE was also very windows-like, so I don’t buy the argument that Microsoft was the cause, it was mostly gnome devs thinking that they could get a radical touch-first redesign in before anyone else.
This is a very long way of saying: the parent is correct in my opinion.
The article does touch on that, apparently Suse signed a patent deal with MS which sidestepped the issues so they could continue the design as usual. Gnome and Redhat refused.
If this is true it kinda reinforces my feeling that Gnome 3 was a redesign for the sake of it. I hate almost everything about it though I'm not married to the windows concept. But everything about it just feels wrong. The huge "touch-friendly" title bars, the menus hidden in hamburger buttons, the lack of configuration options like macOS. And I really tried to like it. When I moved back to FOSS from Mac it was my first choice.
I love KDE though only recently, I thought KDE 3 was too cluttery. It feels like it only came into its own right with Plasma. And I don't find it all that Windows-like though the taskbar certainly is more Windows-like than other DE's. But a taskbar doth not a windows make. Overall I find it distinctly different from Windows. The control panel is definitely a lot better than that mashup of different styles in Windows.
There was no discussion I saw that they doing all this under the threat of legal action, although maybe they didn't want to paint an even larger target on their backs by naming Microsoft or be seen trying to change things just enough to avoid the patents.
For example, it was GNOME 2 that removed the address (path) textbox in the file picker by default: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=605608
In other words, there's just no way this is true.
1\2 the effort of the modern linux desktop is screwing up your WM until it's in a normal state
From my recollection, the real issue was Mac OS X (as it was spelled at the time) gaining territory by being a real Unix with a good interface, thus attracting a lot of Unix/Linux users into the Mac. I'd even bet that many old-timers abandoned Linux on the desktop to move to the Mac, which in turn left room for the newcomers to replace the interface with something resembling the coolness of the Mac. But I'm only hypothesizing here.
Got the job via the EU in the end and bought a 2010 13” MBP which was rock solid for many years.
For me it was this + small form factor + high pixel density. I always looked at System76 and the laptops were too big and the displays were disappointing. Other sellers seemed similar or were just refurbishing, except Dell briefly, but I never trusted them. Hardware integration is just very nice to have.
On a side note a similar project exist for KDE 3. Trinity Desktop https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
And on a second mildly related side note: /r/linux had a thread about a modern (2009) OpenSuse spin with KDE 2 a few months ago. It was released as an april’s fools joke but the ISO file totally disappeared from the internet. Or at least the sub couldn’t find it (and the archive.org mirror is corrupted) https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-bri... Maybe someone here have it? :)
I'm one of those rare people that like Gnome 3 way better than Gnome 2 or any other "windows 95" or "traditional-style" desktop. Other than command-line apps, I run like 5 main pieces of software regularly (IDE, browser, etc.) and probably 20 pieces of gui software total over the lifetime of my PC. I want something that:
1. Makes it easy to launch my main 5 apps (under 1 second)
2. Makes it fairly easy to run the 15 apps I run less often (couple secs max)
3. Looks pretty out of the box w/o customization so I can just get stuff done
The only environments I've used that tick all my boxes (subjectively of course) are Gnome 3 and macOS.
I think Gnome 3 especially does this extremely well. I flick to my upper right hot corner to expose my dock with my 5 apps - instant launch. If I want one of the other 15 I'm happy to type it in the resulting app search box. Done. I never understood why I would want to click and navigate for like 10 seconds (much less have to remember WHERE it is and WHY it is under a certain 'category') to launch one program from a Windows 95 style start menu. To each their own I guess.
EDIT: I should add a #4: Minimal customization. Gone are my days tweaking me DE exactly how I want it. While I do _some_ customization - it is very little (1 or 2 extensions)
By the way, I find it even faster to launch apps by pressing the Super (Windows) key and typing the app name. For example, you can press [Super] [t] [e] [Enter] to launch a GNOME Terminal instance. Just my 2c :)
I do miss the Expose from macOS though, I don't think XFCE has that. (Edit: apparently this can be done with a third party tool.)
Definitely would have no issue recommending Gnome to a normal computer user. I like having the busier interface nowadays though.
Konqueror was awesome. File Manager and Web Browser in one! For some ideological reasons they decided to introduce Dolphin as a file manager in KDE 4 which had much less features.
I ended up switching to Xfce though these days I also use Cinnamon (also Gnome 2 inspired) because it is the Linux Mint default choice. Though I hate that they have recently tried to make Cinnamon look more "fresh" and keep changing it so I probably will end up going back to Xfce if it still the same.
Also, they were trying to move the system to Qt4, which was a big task. Breaking things up probably seemed logical. Add a bit of classic FOSS bugfix-is-boring-let's-rewrite, and voilà...
At some point I was disappointed by KRunner of KDE 4 disappearing with my partially written formulas, then found Qalculate.
Then I saw someone at work using i3, and I was amazed and hooked. I changed some keybindings to be more familiar (like alt+f4 close and alt+f2 run). But recently I have been having some dual monitor troubles with it. Maybe I'll try Trinity for a few weeks. And maybe some tiling WM other than i3.
Is MATE worse than GNOME 2 used to be?
I just switched to MATE and I have run into all sorts of odd bugs.
1. If I position an external monitor above the primary, I can’t put any windows in the overlapping portion along the x axis.
2. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, maximized windows return to their original monitor but half-maximized windows don’t.
3. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, the background becomes tiled instead of zoomed with Marco + compositing and it blacks out and the desktop flickers with Compiz.
4. With Compiz, I can constrain the window switcher across all windows to the current workspace but I cannot constrain the window switcher within app group to the current workspace.
5. With Marco + compositing, due to a regression, taking a screenshot of a single window includes the boundary around it that contains the window’s shadow.
There was something else too but I forget. Quite dispiriting but I have given up on finding the perfect desktop.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m...
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...
https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuit...
https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/patent-suit-against-red-h...
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240057754/Open-source-i...
Who are you going to believe? People trying to stoke fear or an important GNOME project member?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035
Dead Comment
Smartphones combined Applications and System into one app drawer, and don't have Places. It should have been an even worse idea, yet it worked.
Granted I use the Material Shell tiling extension now, but vanilla gnome 3 will always have a place in my heart.
As a bonus, Gnome 3 is incredibly easy on the eyes (subjective of course). I think probably a close competitor to macOS in looks category.
I absolutely love being able to click a single key and being able to easily:
- see all windows open across monitors
- drag windows to different desktops / monitors
- close any window and re-organize the whole thing (something I can't do on macOS)
Default apps are also pretty good and the whole DE is super stable and snappy. My only complaints are the GTK file picker being useless and the title bars taking too much space on non-gnome apps (which don't have window decorations).
It actually still matches my Windows workflow pretty closely because all I ever do is hit winkey and type the name of the app I want to launch there too.
The only place it really falls apart is if you're using it with Keyboard + Mouse and aren't the sort of person that likes to just learn keyboard shortcuts and gestures for everything without looking at the UI much.
The other problem I have with it is the opinionated stance on window border/title sizes. The defaults are way too big and you're not really supposed to change them. Other than that I quite like Gnome 3.
You're not alone. Complaints always get projected louder and wider than happiness.
GNOME 2 was the same way. So many users treating it as the end of the world, and it took a few versions to improve and fix initial issues, but after those first couple of versions it was a great upgrade. GNOME 3 likewise took a couple of versions to find its feet, and then it was a great upgrade.
With that being said, I do think GNOME was way off track. Based on everyone I know who swore off GNOME after the 3 release but are using it now, GNOME is back on a great track with GNOME 40+.
I love it being easy to use keyboard driven.
I like that the virtual desktop are dynamic
I love that on my Lenovo Yoga I can use it as easily as a regular desktop or like a tablet (you haven't appreciated reading the hacker news comment until you start doing it on your couch with a screen in portrait mode).
My only gripe is I wish I could dial the titlebar height depending on the context.