GNOME is the ideal choice for almost any purpose:
GNOME is the desktop of choice for industry leaders like IBM, HP, and Sun. Governments in places as diverse as Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the US, Extremadura, Spain, and Beijing, China, have selected GNOME for their desktops. With a large number of users, and a wide range of vendors, you can be assured of availability and support for a long time to come.GNOME is easy to use and easy to learn: the usability project team makes sure of it. GNOME has all the software you need every day: games, browser, email, office suite, and more. GNOME has excellent Windows file compatibility, so you can work with files that Windows users send you.
Your business wants to cut costs and improve reliability, and GNOME is the obvious choice: GNOME is easy to use and easy to support, so you can cut down on IT costs. And of course GNOME is free software, so you don't have to pay licensing fees or spend money keeping track of licenses. In addition, the generous GNOME library licensing terms mean that you can develop software royalty-free, even if you choose not to release the source.
GNOME is available in your language. Many large software companies do not produce translations for smaller languages, but GNOME makes it easy for dozens of languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Swedish, and Basque, not to mention more common languages like Spanish and Chinese.
If you have limited mobility or vision, then you'll be glad to hear that GNOME is serious about accessible software. GNOME meets accessibility requirements for many governments worldwide, including the US Department of Defense.
GNOME gives developers the greatest licensing flexibility and the greatest variety of programming languages. In addition, can even use Gtk+ on Windows as well as Unix and Linux systems.
Most GNOME libraries are available under the terms of the LGPL, which means you can develop GNOME software free of charge, no matter what license you use for your finished product. And because the GNOME object system is easy to bind to other languages, you can choose from a dozen popular development languages like Java, C#, Python, Perl, and of course plain old C and C++.
Administrators choose GNOME because easy to use means easy to support, and because remote system administration cuts down on time spent pacing hallways and waiting in elevators. The GNOME System Administrations Guide has more information on how to manage a GNOME desktop deployment.