I don't think that either should be THE default.
Neither KDE nor GNOME is going away. Let the user chose during installation
what desktop to use. The user has that capability today, but the package
selection defaults to KDE. I would present a radio button selection,
something like this.
Default desktop selection:
[] K Desktop Environment (KDE)
[] The GNOME Desktop
[] Legacy Window Manager
[] no graphical display
When KDE is checked, the default packages would include KDE as they do now,
when GNOME is selected, then the package group would be GNOME. By doing it
this way they present the users with the main desktop alternatives where
some users today might not even know about GNOME, or some users may select
Fedora over SuSE because of misinformation.
But there are 2 different distros here, SLES and SuSE Linux. SuSE Linux,
like Fedora, is intended for the desktop where SLES is intended as an
enterprise server. The markets are very different for each of these. And,
since KDE users and GNOME users defend their desktops as a religion we
don't want to cause a fundamentalist war. I can just see Richard Stallman
walking into Nat Friedman's office in Cambridge and setting off a bomb :-)
--
Jerry Feldman