[ddtaylor]

Wayland was created in 2008. Mir was created in 2013.

Bazaar and Git were created around the exact same time.

Unity was abandoned after a failed attempt to circumvent Gnome 3. I was actually involved with the development of Compiz and they hired Sam to work on Unity, as he was one of the masterminds behind Compiz, but again they just didn't have the vision or execution to make it work.

[zeroc8]

Mir worked in 2014? Wayland took until 2025.

[pjmlp]

Unity was great, after it was abandoned I tried yet again GNOME 3, me that in the past have collaborated with Gtkmm, ended up moving into XFCE, and nowadays I am fully on macOS/Windows anyway.

If I ever go back to GNU/Linux full time, GNOME certainly won't be it.

[ddtaylor]

Things improved a lot with Gnome over the years, but as a fellow Gnome 2 user the initial release of 3 and the following years were a real kick in the teeth.

Things have improved, but the overall Gnome Foundation attitude hasn't improved. They are still very stubborn and remove basic features. This seemed to start when they did their infamous "focus groups" where they claim users can't understand basic things.

I get the desire to provide a cohesive experience, but I think you can do that while also giving people control.

KDE is shaping up to be much better and it's likely because Valve is providing commercial support and exposing it to a larger audience.

Cosmic is the new kid backed by system76 and its pretty nice too and may rescue Gnome in some ways in due time.