It's a political thing, at least in part. GNOME was created because some Linux folks liked the KDE environment, but didn't like the license parts of it were un

It's a political thing, at least in part. GNOME was created because some Linux folks liked the KDE environment, but didn't like the license parts of it were under at the time. KDE later changed its license, but by then, GNOME had its own community that didn't want to go back. And of course, it has the word "GNU" in the name, which gets some folks misty-eyed. Red Hat is probably the biggest sugar daddy GNOME has. They've always shipped a GNOME desktop as their default desktop in RHEL, and they employ a lot of the GNOME developers. Xfce is, in my opinion, a better and more focused desktop, but it was "not invented there" and so doesn't get very much PR from Red Hat. Ubuntu, of course, is pushing their own crappy desktop and doesn't have any incentive to make people aware of alternatives. Most of the Xfce devs are in Europe, I think. Arguably, what happened here is that Microsoft Windows jumped off a cliff, and GNOME and Unity said, "wow! let's do that." The idea of having the same interface on a tablet as on a desktop is an old one with Microsoft (it's why Windows CE was such a flop) but it just keeps coming up again at that company. Now I think some people are starting to see the pavement approaching at terminal velocity. Hopefully we'll get our start menus and windows back in the next year or two (from Redmond and GNOME).