[andmarios]

I think it was more about companies than individuals. European companies (e.g. SUSE, Mandrake) defaulted to KDE, whilst US companies (e.g. Red Hat, Novell) to GNOME.

I don't know why. Maybe it was RMS who pushed for GNOME as back then Qt wasn't free software (as in FSF or OSI approved license). Maybe it was that KDE started in Europe and later GNOME in the US to provide an alternative to the “non-free” KDE.

This caused European funding (from companies and institutions) to go to KDE, and US funding to go to GNOME, thus creating the communities and ecosystems we have today.

Another point for GNOME back in the day for companies, was that it was (could be?) more locked than KDE and it had less customization options. These are desirable traits if you want to install it to your company's workstations, so maybe it made sense for Red Hat to adopt GNOME.

The key point in time where GNOME became way more popular, was when Ubuntu came out with GNOME as the default desktop. A smaller point was when Novell bought SUSE, so SUSE switched to GNOME, leaving almost no commercial distros that default to KDE.

All in all, it doesn't matter much anymore. Our life and workloads have moved to the cloud and locked down devices, thus limiting the surface area of desktop environments and their ecosystem.