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Comment by tvon | Hacker News Reader

> Mac's UX is not bad to the extent they have adopted a Gnome like desktop.

To be clear, GNOME adopted an OSX like desktop.

I don't think so. Ideas have flowed both ways, but I've been using Gnome since the 90s and OSX has taken more from Gnome in my opinion than Gnome from OSX.

I hesitate to go down this road, but what features do you think originated in GNOME and found their way into OSX? I think you're giving quite a bit of credit where it is not due.

I know it didn't originate in GNOME, but GNOME was perhaps the most popular environment using virtual desktops at the time that Apple introduced Spaces:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaces_%28software%29#Compariso...

Virtual desktops are a feature of X11, not GNOME.

Really? Gnome definitely didn't come up with them, and most WMs have virtual desktops, but if you just launch X11 without a WM I definitely don't see any virtual desktops unless I'm missing something.

I'm a little rusty on this stuff (haven't messed with it for ~5 years) but IIRC you have the ICCCM specification and some non-standard but well adopted extensions[1] that define how a window manager communicates with the X server, and in this specification you will find all the virtual desktop goodies that every X window manager implements (including metacity, beryl, kwin, twm, fvwm2, etc).

In short, as far as virtual desktops go, what GNOME (metacity/beryl) does is the exactly same thing every window manager has been doing for the past decade at least, and the concept of virtual desktops (non-ICCCM+ implementations) goes much further back than that.

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html

Jesus, virtual desktops have been around since the mid-80s. Crediting them to Gnome is like crediting cars to Preston Tucker.

My guess would be that features you see as "OSX taking from Gnome," both Gnome and OSX got from NeXTStep.

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