The article also touches on that, at the time SUSE used KDE, and after they acquired Ximian they became more Gnome-friendly.

Even now KDE is one of the 3 default DEs, the others are Gnome and XFCE.

Like I said in another comment, I'm not sure how much is true of the reasoning of the Gnome redesign the article mentions but this part seems to pan out.