I'm just noticing that Ubuntu (though they have the apparently troubled Kubuntu), Fedora, and others seem to be favoring Gnome as the default desktop.

I have been using Gnome for a long time now, and am quite used to it. It has generally lower system requirements, and does everything I need.

On a side note: As an exercise, and in interest about all the KDE hubbub, I installed KDE4 on my laptop a few days ago. It seems to have some interesting differences, that I haven't figured out yet, and some minor annoyances.
- You can't paste directly to KDE's desktop. So if you do a copy of files, you can't right-click or Ctrl-V to paste them directly to the desktop.
- If you have a file in the Desktop folder, it shows up in KDE. You can tell KDE to "remove it from the desktop", which it does. But then it reappears on the next session.
- Icons for running widgets in the taskbar don't line up. So, if you quit one of them, the remaining ones don't regroup, and it looks disorganized.

I am going to have to confess that I find the question a non sequitur.
AFAIK Fedora and Red Hat before it have always preferred Gnome as Ubuntu has always preferred Gnome. Likewise distributions such as Mandrake/Mandriva and SuSE have always preferred KDE. Some users prefer Gnome and some prefer KDE. Hence you lose me with your question.

Gnome seems, by dint of it's "easy to use" status, to be the desktop choice of the corporate world. Therefore, any distro that wishes to be included in that world would use Gnome as it's desktop. That, or because Gnome is easy to use but hard to install from scratch they feel they're helping out users?

Maybe because it's the "best"?

Had it been the best, Patrick would've never dropped it. And as everybody knows, Patrick is God.

To the OP: Slackware uses KDE. Most other distros, like Arch or Gentoo give their user a choice of DE. Granted, Ubuntu is the most popular distro nowadays, but it's definitely not the only one.

There may be a problem with the qt license if it is used commercially. At least in the beginning of KDE. Miguel de Icaza tried out KDE and liked it but when mentioning it a Red Hat, they said they couldn't use it because of the QT license. (source: twit floss interview)

Some distros will support several desktops. SuSE and Mandriva do, and if you install a package for one, the menu items will be changed on the other as well. Ubuntu distributes a free install CD so there isn't room on the CD for both KDE and Gnome. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are really one distro that install different desktop environments.

If you prefer a distro that doesn't prefer GNOME then try Slackware . And the only reason Pat dropped GNOME is because GNOME kept changing major portions of X, as well as installing other non-standard stuff, plus it became hard for one single person to maintain by oneself.

I have tried the latest Dropline GNOME for Slackware (2.20?), and I found it rather sluggish on startup.

Gnome is nothing different from KDE except that it's not got as many bells and whistles and configurable options as KDE. Both desktop environments are easy and intuitive provide a "unifying interface" which simplifies work both for the desktop application developer as well as the user. Both desktops are meant for the productive desktop user who needs a lot of GUI applications.

I believe that people who still need a GUI but don't want the bloat of either full-blown environments need to look at either IceWM (an excellent Window manager) or Fluxbox. XFCE is also an option.

Qt currently is dual-licensed - it's either GPL or commercial license. Commercial license allows development of closed-source application, and costs quite a lot. GPL is for free version, of course. So as far as I know there is no problems with license.

I personally wouldn't worry about distro X choosing GNOME or distro Y choosing KDE by default. On most distros, you can use any of the two environments or something else, so its up to you as a user to pick what works best for you.

He meant at the beginning. QT was not always dual-licensed. In fact, they changed that in 2005 for Windows platform.

Personally, if I would ever develop any GUI program, I'd stay away from QT Toolkit...

I would too. In fact, I prefer to use the line of least resistance.

In the case of developing GUI applications on Linux, I prefer GTK+ if I use C/C++ or TKinter if I use Python (mostly because TKinter is in the standard Python distribution and can run unmodified on Windows while py-gtk is not in the base Python distribution)

I am not sure about upgrading to the KDE 4.x series. I've read mixed reviews about it.

yeah, less hassle is always good

Yeah, I know I can have my choice of GUI on any distro that I choose. That wasn't my question, though. It's just been my (apparently rather limited) experience that distros seem to choose Gnome over KDE overall, as the default.

I thought that was sort of funny, because recently KDE is being advertised as the last great desktop.

The combination of KDE4 and Firefox 3 (new installation of Fedora 9) on my 1GHz, 384MB laptop brought the laptop to its knees. Gnome was a bit better, but I'm afraid that if I want to be able to update my software a new laptop may be in order. (This is not a complaint, as I know my laptop's old, and its time was coming at some point.)

I understand that it wasn't your question. I was trying to put your mind to rest about the whole KDE and GNOME thing. There are many distros out there that choose KDE only or have it by default and others choose GNOME. Red Hat for a long time refused to fully embrace KDE due to qt licensing issues (this is why Mandrake Linux was created. It was initially Red Hat with KDE) and GNOME was default. Many distros gunning for the corporate sector seem to mimic Red Hat and choose GNOME as default, probably to provide some sort of consistency on the desktop. The licensing for qt changed a few years back and most of the popular distros support support both environments (although sometimes it seems like they are forced by users ).