GNOME is aiming for simplicity and consistency we're the first open source desktop project to have a documented set of human interface guidelines.
Quotes about gnome (12 Quotes)
The changes to make Linux accessible on the desktop will be in the user interfaces of things like Gnome (Gnu Network Object Model Environment) and KDE (K Desktop Environment), rather than in anything we do.
Drab Habitation of Whom Tabernacle or Tomb - or Dome of Worm - or Porch of Gnome - or some Elf's Catacomb
GNOME, n. In North-European mythology, a dwarfish imp inhabiting the interior parts of the earth and having special custody of mineral treasures. Bjorsen, who died in 1765, says gnomes were common enough in the southern parts of Sweden in his boyhood, and he frequently saw them scampering on the hills in the evening twilight. Ludwig Binkerhoof saw three as recently as 1792, in the Black Forest, and Sneddeker avers that in 1803 they drove a party of miners out of a Silesian mine. Basing our computations upon data supplied by these statements, we find that the gnomes were probably extinct as early as 1764.
Everything else in the free software world gives you a package and the best package or distribution is used. The fact KDE and Gnome exists suggest they serve different groups of users, ... KDE provides more configuration and control, and Gnome more ease of use while giving up that control.
In the GNOME project we tried to keep the platform language independent.
I take my line from a remark made by Aubrey Herbert, surveying his fellow members of the intelligence cadre brought together in Cairo in 1914 'Then there's Lawrence, an odd gnome, half cad - with a touch of genius'. AW Lawrence Lawrence's youngest brother and the keeper of the flame for more than half a century thought that was just right.
Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.
OS X is sweet: it's simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a lot of values with it.
As Mono matures, people will begin to use it to write desktop components that take advantage of all the hard work that's gone into some of the meatier GNOME libraries, as well as the nifty language features of C.
The new LSB desktop group will be dealing with more than just KDE and GNOME issues though. It will be dealing with all issues dealing with interoperability, ... everyone at the table, and motivated to make the Linux desktop a success, everyone will be seeking a consensus. This may not mean making developers choose between KDE and GNOME, but instead finding a way to make it easier for ISVs to create applications that can easily work with both.
We cannot choose one desktop over the other - Gnome or KDE - because there's users for both code bases.