Hacker News Reader

In 2006 SUSE was the KDE distribution. Unambiguously. While other distros had community editions that shipped KDE (as the article mentions) when you wanted KDE with no frills and everything working out of the box you used SUSE or OpenSUSE.

IIRC SUSE had been using KDE as the default DE since its inception. I know KDE was the default environment around 2000 when I first used it. YaST 2 was also written against Qt.

The article also touches on that, at the time SUSE used KDE, and after they acquired Ximian they became more Gnome-friendly.

Even now KDE is one of the 3 default DEs, the others are Gnome and XFCE.

Like I said in another comment, I'm not sure how much is true of the reasoning of the Gnome redesign the article mentions but this part seems to pan out.

SUSE only supports GNOME. Any other DE is community maintained and only in OpenSUSE.

I wrote the article and I specifically covered why that happened.

Novell bought SUSE. Then Novell bought Ximian, the GNOME company that wrote Nautilus ("Files") and Evolution.

The Novell forcibly merged SUSE and Ximian.

https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/12755/