Even though I haven't used it in a few years, KDE was the reason I started running Linux on my desktop (actually a laptop) all the way back in 1998, when I gave them a donation. I remember thinking, "wow this will be great to have a nice KDE desktop, plus Linux, and I'm sure Wine will be finished pretty soon so I can run all of my Windows programs..." :) Wine didn't really develop super fast, but it's amazing to think that the last copy of Windows I ran was Win 95.

As a side note, if I recall correctly, Gnome was started in response to concerns about potential licensing issues with QT at the time.

Yes, Qt was released under a proprietary license at the time.