You made your claims without any "evidence and citations". Even when you provide links they mostly don't back up the assertions in the article.[1]
At any rate, demanding extensive "evidence and citations" to "prove you wrong" when you haven't done the same yourself is profoundly hypocritical.
Surely as a self-professed "atheist skeptic" – according to your profile here – you must know how this works? You can't just claim all sorts of controversial things with no evidence and shout "prove me wrong!" when people object.
Also, there ARE "evidence and citations" right here in this thread. Several people who were directly involved with the projects at the time are saying "that was not a consideration, you are wrong". Are they all misremembering something so large? Unlikely. Are they all lying? Even less likely – why would they? So why do you disbelieve them?
[1]: e.g. "Microsoft was threatening to sue all the Linux vendors shipping Windows 95-like desktops" isn't at all substantiated with the provided link, which just talks about generic threats to sue. It's been a long time, but IIRC one of the criticisms was that Microsoft would claim "Linux is illegal; we'll sue you!" without ever specifically claiming what exactly was illegal. Classic Balmer-era Micrsoft FUD. AFAIK there was never any specific threat to sue "start menu like" environments, and I don't recall it ever being brought up as a concern. A good citation to prove this claim would be a discussion on the Gnome or KDE developer list discussing these concerns, or something along those lines.
Proving a negative to something you asserted with no evidence of your own but guesswork at op-eds and quips from interviews is not possible or worthwhile.
If you would like to update your article with primary sources and evidence that can be verified, please do so instead.
If you can refute my points, please do so, with evidence and citations.