The clarifying agreement: (https://dot.kde.org/2004/07/24/trolltech-and-kde-free-qt-fou...) finally fixed things in a way to where if Trolltech got bought out or stopped releasing the free version, it would immediately become BSD licensed. This agreement still exists to day as far as I know.

As far as I remember discussions going back then, people did not trust Trolltech much, and knew the license situation was "weird" - even after the GPL licensing. I don't have anything I can cite specifically, only old discussions that I vaguely remember.

I think Ubuntu went with Gnome because back then it was perceived as the less configurable and flashy, but also less confusing of the two. KDE 3 was for those who wanted to configure everything - the "power user" crowd. Gnome 2 was more spartan (and became more so over time - I remember the outcry when they replaced the path textbox with breadcrumbs!), but mostly "just worked" in ways that people coming from Windows or OS X could readily understand. And Ubuntu was supposed to be the Linux distro for casual users...

Our data structures second term required a medium size project in C for a DB management system based on B-Tree and low level i-node manipulation.

I decided to go with anonymous structs, using pointer fields as methods, so something like GObject. Additionally each translation unit played the role of a poor man's module.

While it was an interesting experience, it isn't something I ever considered doing again.

Mate doesn't need to be the default, but it does need to be easily installable. I never understood the "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. line of distros when the alternate DEs were easily available in stock Ubuntu. Similarly RHEL ought to make sure KDE is easily installable no matter what is their default... (Though is it common to even run a DE on Redhat?)

we were running centos on the server, so figured i'd use it for my dev vm as well.

Touchscreen UIs are not for creating. They're for taking what you're given, pecking at giant canned buttons in a dumbed-down UI.

A pigeon can peck the colored button to get a food pellet. That's tablet UI.

Gnome 3.0 was released in June 2011.[1] Windows 10 was released in July 2015.[2] Perhaps your assertion is incorrect.

[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/gn... [2] https://www.lifewire.com/windows-10-2626217

(Tbh I don't give a damn about transparency or fancy effects, either)

After Ubuntu dropped Unity I am seriously considering switch back to KDE or a plain old window manager even if I dislike them.

Never thought GNOME performance was that bad.