Same here, and worst of all is that in the past I though Gnome was linux (when I started using linux, Ubuntu was practically the only thing available to me) and I hated it. I then discovered there are a whole world of different desktop environments, and linux with KDE is now my preferred OS. On my job they gave me an Ubuntu laptop, first thing I did was install KDE desktop on top (later I discovered I was not the only one to have done that).
It's sad because I know there are more people that rejected linux at first because of Gnome, so if you see someone that doesn't like linux, show them a few screenshots of non-gnome desktops first.