GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology design, making each application they ship feel like part of a greater whole. Rather than feeling

GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology design, making each application they ship feel like part of a greater whole. Rather than feeling like applications made by developers each with their own ideas of how to design an application (which is very much what KDE looks and feels like), GNOME pushes every one of its components into a unified look and feel and it really makes it feel like everything was made by the same people (despite the actual development story). It permeates everything from user interface design to what libraries the applications use (eg: GNOME applications use SQLite for database needs. And that's it. You don't get some using SQLite, others using PostgreSQL, others using MySQL; that's the situation KDE found/finds itself in.) On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious development money behind making GNOME check all the accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's the only environment outside of Windows that can match the accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.