I don't think much of KDE uses GNU tools under the covers. I know for instance that they've implemented their own copy functionality instead of just piping to c

I don't think much of KDE uses GNU tools under the covers. I know for instance that they've implemented their own copy functionality instead of just piping to cp or whatever. I don't know if they're dependent on any other GNU tools for runtime (they are probably dependent on GNU build tools), maybe we could ask a KDE developer. It'd be interesting to know.