> BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans.

oh boy its' much worse than that: KDE/GNOME were already largely precarious before that.

The whole Xorg thing was really dependant on gpu drivers and the story between linux gpu drivers and *bsd gpu drivers was so much different. Having the BSDs be fairly different didn't really help (eg: only FreeBSD had official nvidia drivers, albeit proprietary).

Gnome did take a lot of backlash and Gnome essentially became a meme at some point ("what's the use case for that?")

Gnome did take a strong dependency on systemd (both gnome and systemd are developed by Red Hat, btw).

And Gnome also did push a lot for wayland (that wasn't implemented on the various BSDs for a long time).

I haven't checked in a while, but I think Gnome is wayland-only nowadays ?

Ultimately, the real issue with KDE/GNOME and the BSDs is that the BSDs are largely irrelevant and essentially only relevant for some specific use-cases where desktop usage is not involved.