[whateveruser]

Could also be that Red Hat has a lot of devs on Gnome. That means more contributions, which means greater control over project's direction, the only way that can happen in OSS. And with corporate backing comes faith from many people. Also Debian defaulted to Gnome since v1(?). So did Ubuntu(mostly). KDE is very much a community project despite considerable resources from SUSE and few other corporate entities. Add to it Gnome's almost fixed 6 month churn and it becomes a pretty enticing choice for organizations having to support that piece of software for 5+ years.

[digi_owl]

And you will also find that while KDE devs stay without their on sphere for the most part, Gnome devs "dives the stack".

Meaning that you will just as often find them working on something under the Freedesktop banner, but with a massive Gnome slant, as on Gnome proper.

In other words while KDE devs have a clear understanding of where the DE ends and the rest of the OS begins, Gnome devs seems to consider everything above the kernel (and is likely biding their time for the day Torvalds steps down) the domain of Gnome.

[blattimwind]

Debian was initially released before either Linux desktop.

[whateveruser]

Hence the question mark. What did Debian have for v1 then?