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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...

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

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

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