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Why is gnome still the de-facto default DM? Is it just that gnome 2 was great, so gnome 3 (despite practically a new project with a new goal) inherited that position? And not just RedHat. I would expect Debian to ship with Cinnamon or xfce as the default.

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Gtk became "the default" because Qt had some dual licensing weirdness until qt3/qt4 (I didn't pay that much attention so don't quote me) and by that time several fundamental projects like Firefox, gimp(of course) and OpenOffice (koffice took until like ~09 to get production ready) had established gtk as the primary Linux toolkit

Gnome just follows on because the gtk team is a very purple Venn diagram with the gnome team (at least for paid developers)

na everyone uses mate now

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