The Difference a Decade Makes
I spent part of the last week reviewing GNOME 2.30. As I worked, I kept returning to the fact that 2.30 is probably the last release of the GNOME 2.0 series, which began in June 2002. That, in turn, got me flipping through the Progeny Debian User's Guide that I did in May 2001 (the last major manual that I wrote), and thinking of all the developments that the last decade or so have seen in GNOME in particular and the free desktop in general.
Writing in April 2010, the state of the free desktop in the early years of the millennium seems unbelievably primitive. The desirability of a free desktop was understood by some, and both GNOME and KDE had been up and running for several years. Yet there were many stone geeks and old timers for whom even a basic window manager was questionable, and the idea of an actual desktop was an abomination.
The free desktop was not helped, either, by the fact that the licensing issues surrounding Qt, KDE's toolkit, were not resolved until September 2000. For a time, Debian seriously debated whether KDE should even be included in the distribution.
Yet even among those building the desktop, the basic concept was crude.
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