[microtonal]

I think there was a window of time where this was not true and the majority (user-wise) of the Linux desktop was really strong, united, and standardized. This lasted approximately from the mid-2000s until GNOME 3 and Unity.

- Ubuntu had a polished GNOME 2 desktop.

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux had a polished GNOME 2 desktop.

- SUSE Enterprise Linux had a polished GNOME 2 desktop.

They were also using pretty much the same components. Since then, we had the MATE/GNOME 3/Unity/Cinnamon split and the upcoming X.org/Wayland/Mir split.

[digi_owl]

I find myself wondering if things started going to hell when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux happened. Since then RH seems to have been on the warpath.

[XorNot]

I'm skeptical Mir is going to be a serious split, and even then it'll be Mir/Wayland - both of those will still run X.Org apps via shim-servers, same way Mac OS does.

[Shorel]

I seem to recall SUSE being a RPM based distribution but with KDE instead of Gnome.

[microtonal]

Their enterprise distributions were very much centered around GNOME. Remember that this is when they still had Xamarin.