Onlooker since GNOME was being called Teak.. KDE initially used QT which didn't have a satisfying license. Possibly incompatible, I'm not sure it was ever res

Onlooker since GNOME was being called Teak.. KDE initially used QT which didn't have a satisfying license. Possibly incompatible, I'm not sure it was ever resolved entirely as to what the condition of things was. What was clear is that a corporate entity could close source QT and effectively end KDE. After years, multiple business transactions and such, QT was really open sourced all the way. By then RedHat had gone "all in" with BlueCurve and GNOME. I think as a result of that, and in spite of various standards about open desktop support, the commercial apps tend to be on GTK+; maybe not full GNOME apps, but Firefox and VMware and others have GTK+ in them and they will seamlessly use your distribution's custom skin... Ending support for KDE is just momentum. There could be a bit of a European vs North America thing too; I'm just speculating but take Suse vs RHEL, RHEL is tons more common in the US despite Suse's remarkably quality, there has been some questions about its future at times but it is a remarkably high quality platform with a really nice aesthetic about it but RHEL and Centos tend to dominate. To be honest, I didn't know Redhat still supported KDE. KDE is great, I think it's always been a bit more consistent, a bit more cohesive and it has a great set of well crafted applications. With Redhat being bought by IBM and everything, the possible rumors about Canonical being in play, it sort of seems like it might be time for a new distribution to take hold. KDE is a great place to start, there is an awful lot of good stuff in there.