I don't think the reason is really c++ vs c. But the regional aspect is spot on. Also when SuSE was bought by an American company (Novell), they fired all the K

I don't think the reason is really c++ vs c. But the regional aspect is spot on. Also when SuSE was bought by an American company (Novell), they fired all the KDE devs. Another aspect is the licensing, GTK was licensed under LGPL way before Qt and RMS casting doubts on the legal aspect of KDE even after Qt was re-licensed under GPL didn't help. All these played a role in the early 00s, nowadays the problems is mostly that GNOME has many more enterprise features and integration with other RedHat products and it is hard to catch on.