> for GNOME

For the life of me, I can't understand why there are that many GNOME-based desktop environments. I personally dislike most of their approach to UI. Maybe the innards are very pleasant to work with, but it's GTK-based, isn't it? That a somewhat-dated C toolkit, even if it has bindings in other languages. So I kind of doubt that.

And yet - MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE (ok, that's just GTK, not GNOME proper), Unity.

This is not a rant, I'm actually curious why GNOME is that popular, and those projects did not choose some other basis. I mean, that should be possible, right? LXDE switched from GTK to Qt a few years back.