>Never understood why all the distros pivoted to Gnome shell
AFAIK two reasons.
For one, KDE 4 was considered horrible, making everyone switched to Gnome, and due to inertia, they stuck with in instead of going to KDE 5. And some users can be incredibly petty, stubborn and opinionated, just because they tried KDE 4 one time, hated it, and then keep bad mouthing it years later even though they haven't tried KDE 5 and their opinions are out of date, they'll still keep bragging how they tried KDE once and it was shit so nobody should bother with it according to them. Even on HN. All this bad publicity didn't help since other users took it as gospel.
And two, the release cadence of Gnome versions was on a fixed calendar basis, meaning distros like Ubuntu and Fedora could plan their own releases to line up with that and always ship their newest distros with the newest Gnome, while KDE wasn't and would update the KDE Gear framework, QT and KDE release at totally different times unallied to any fixed dates, making sync planning for distro releases to ship with it very difficult. The KDE release cycle is more fitting for rolling releases. I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
No, these things go back much further than the KDE 4 or Gnome 3 product cycles.
The distro/commercial ecosystem preference for Gnome dates back to earlier times, and comes down mostly to geography and licensing.
Wrt/ licensing, the underlying GTK GUI toolkit had LGPL some years before Qt moved to also having an LGPL option under Nokia ownership. That meant if you were a commercial entity wanting to invest (as, e.g. Sun and Adobe did with GTK at various points), GTK looked like the better bet.
Geography: When the Gnome community initially forked out of the KDE community, the fault line was partially regional, with the core of the KDE community remaining in Europe and the initial Gnome developers being American KDE devs. As a result, for many years (and to this day), if you go to a Linux event in the US, you're more likely to run into a Gnome/GTK person, and therefore things are more likely to happen.
The software industries in the US and Europe also tick quite differently. The US for a long time offered more career paths for young kids in FOSS to graduate into product companies involved with what they were doing before (e.g. Red Hat). KDE/Qt developers have generally graduated into consultancy companies that spend their time on proprietary products instead (with exceptions).
These things have a lot of inertia and long-term effects.
It's interesting to see a bit of a reversal of this trend now, with the latest breed of meaningful new Linux deployments that get to make fresh choices (e.g. Asahi for Apple Silicon or the Steam Deck) generally shipping KDE Plasma instead of Gnome.
> I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
KDE has had time-based releases and has also been doing LTS releases for about a decade now, ever since the 5.x series.
But your comment still contains some truth; you're probably thinking of the monthly release cadence the KDE Frameworks libs have had vs. the slower Plasma cycle. This has indeed caused some discomfort at distros over the years, and KDE is now making changes to make this easier.
KDE4 was great. KDE 4.0 was terrible, but everyone ignored the developer advice to wait for 4.3 (which is when KDE 4 became great again) and the concluded all of KDE4 was bad even though it was just the first release.
>As much as I'm a KDE fan, saying "developer advice" was to wait for 4.3 is very unhelpful (not to call it something else)
At least they were honest and upfront about it that it's shit and it's gonna be fixed later. Gnome's response in such a case would have usually been "it's not a bug, you're just holding it wrong"[1].
AFAIK two reasons.
For one, KDE 4 was considered horrible, making everyone switched to Gnome, and due to inertia, they stuck with in instead of going to KDE 5. And some users can be incredibly petty, stubborn and opinionated, just because they tried KDE 4 one time, hated it, and then keep bad mouthing it years later even though they haven't tried KDE 5 and their opinions are out of date, they'll still keep bragging how they tried KDE once and it was shit so nobody should bother with it according to them. Even on HN. All this bad publicity didn't help since other users took it as gospel.
And two, the release cadence of Gnome versions was on a fixed calendar basis, meaning distros like Ubuntu and Fedora could plan their own releases to line up with that and always ship their newest distros with the newest Gnome, while KDE wasn't and would update the KDE Gear framework, QT and KDE release at totally different times unallied to any fixed dates, making sync planning for distro releases to ship with it very difficult. The KDE release cycle is more fitting for rolling releases. I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.