Frankly Gnome 1.x was Icaza trying to "virtue signal" his way into the big times.

He was a fervent KDE fanboy until he did an about face and starting disparaging KDE over the Qt licensing while pushing a hodgepodge of software under the Gnome moniker.

During that whole time he picked up idea after idea from the Windows world (hell, his first program of fame, Midnight Commander, was a straight clone of the DOS program Norton Commander) and rammed them into Gnome.

And Now he works for Microsoft, go figure...

Thinking about it, i get the feel that Poettering is a rerun of Icaza. Only this time OSX is the source of the "inspiration" rather than Windows.

Beyond that it is yet another round of NIH projects and divide and conqueror political rhetoric.

Very informative. Interesting you should mention OSX being the inspiration for Poettering. I always thought GNOME2 and beyond were turning into OSX Snow Leopard (really dumb Nautilus, useless file dialog) and removal of all configurability (and I loved Snow Leopard, sad to see GNOME being a bit simplistic as it was happening though).

I did enjoy using Gnumeric so thank Miguel.

Also MC is pretty useful when you SSH into a box and want some form of file manager.

Ha my memory isn't that great then! Must have been the GNOME 1 I was using. I remember being impressed with the squidgy themes it supported, until using them for 2 days made you switch back to something more conservative.