Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened
Microsoft invented the Win95 desktop from scratch. Its own previous Ones (e.g. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows NT 3.51 and OS/2 1.x) looked nothing like it. The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", all that: all original, *patented* Microsoft designs. There was nothing like it before. (The closest was Acorn's RISC OS, with an "icon bar" that works very differently, on the Archimedes computer. A handful of those were imported to North America, and right after, NeXT "invented" the Dock, and then Microsoft invented the task bar which is quite a bit more sophisticated.