> My theory at the time was this: GNOME won on developers' desktops, so most software was developed on Linux natively, with BSD compatibility (and performance) as an afterthought.

when i tried FreeBSD a couple years ago i was actually surprised that gnome worked OOTB. i remember some of the settings were gated off (Bluetooth? can’t remember the specifics), but the base desktop worked exactly as before.

maybe different in the early days though: dunno, wasn’t there.