Yes, Novell confirmed for us that the next release of SUSE will use GNOME by default.
It uses GNOME and is designed for use in classrooms.
Fedora uses GNOME too.
Some alternatives were to use Xfce, which has a compositing manager since version 4.2.0, or to enable compositing in Metacity when using GNOME.
Evolution is used as the default personal information manager on several Linux distributions which use GNOME by default, most notably Debian and Fedora.
The unit appeared to be using GNOME as its graphical user interface.
If your typical computer use demands something like this, you probably shouldn't be using GNOME in the first place.
Maybe some people rather use GNOME than some random ubernerd window manager which requires you to read a manual size of a bible to learn how to tile windows'n'stuff.
Possibly the greatest problem at the moment in desktop Linux is that Ubuntu uses GNOME.
It is based on openSUSE and uses GNOME as the default desktop environment.