>>_2paq+pd
In the case of GNOME it is not apathy towards choice but corporate backing. Companies that do business with Linux like Redhat, Canonical, will benefit greatly if the vast number of options that the Linux ecosystem has can be culled to a certain approved stack, at least on their supported platforms. Since they also employ or sponsor a large amount of development within the ecosystem, other players are left either to grudgingly adopt them or seethe in frustration. KDE would've gone the way of Xfce etc had it not already had considerable momentum from the earliest days. Despite being an even larger collection of s/w than GNOME and strongly supported by SuSE, they're still second place by quite a way. That shows the power of big corporate money's ability to take over even ostensibly "FOSS" software that's theoretically free but practically still dominated by a few companies, perhaps trending towards an absolute monopoly in the future, like Google on the Web.