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Gnome 2 did a good job of taking all the best ideas from Windows and MacOS, then innovating on top. Sun even ran user studies to validate the UI as it was being built.

Then the gnome 3 team intentionally sabotaged it all by intentionally arranging for gnome 3 apps to refuse to coexist with a gnome 2 install.

Sigh.

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My theory was that RedHat was concerned about software patents and/or law suits, so felt they had to significantly change Gnome 2, even if it would make people less productive.

That doesn’t explain why they actively sabotaged the work done by people outside of redhat.

Yeah, I thought GNOME 2 was pretty usable. MATE is around now but aging and probably forever X11-only. Rebuilding GNOME 2 on Wayland and with modern necessities like fractional scaling would be a worthy project.

Everything except the Control Centre has been started porting to Wayland, and a few things are even finished: https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/developers-corner/wayland-meso...

XFCE are not that far along, but the developers are tinkering: https://www.phoronix.com/news/xfwm4-wayland-May-2023

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