KDE could be called the "defacto standard" at least, if RedHat would ever see the light and support KDE as their default just like SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake, Corel, et. al. do.
I'd agree with that, but it does raise an interesting point. The fact Redhat shipped that awful GNOME crap for a year before it was ready, and the way they are still shipping the second best desktop system even now GNOME is fairly usable, has allowed other distros to jump in a grab some market. "Software Darwinism" I think it's called. Around here Redhat with GNOME is the primary Linux platform, but when those users see my anti-aliased fonts, Konqueror, Kmail, Knode, etc., they realise they are on an inferior distro. The trickle of people switching to KDE based desktops is becoming a noticable stream. I wonder how well SuSE or (in particular) Mandrake would be doing if Redhat hadn't made that daft decision?