Today I caught a story about the issues GNOME 3 is facing [1], including concerns and issues that GNOME developers are not listening to from users. [Some of the comments to the story are a worthwhile read.]
I followed a few links [2] that eventually led me to find two surveys done by linuxquestions.org for Desktop Environments [3] and Window Managers [4] to find the most popular of both for 2011 (voting ended Feb 9th 2012). I've reordered the list in terms of popularity, and this is the result: Desktop Environments -------------------- KDE 207 33.01% Xfce 173 27.59% Gnome Shell 120 19.14% LXDE 44 7.02% Unity 29 4.63% MATE 21 3.35% Cinnamon 16 2.55% Trinity-DE 7 1.12% Razor-qt 7 1.12% rox 3 0.48% ------------------------------- Total: 627 votes Window Managers --------------- Openbox 73 15.90% Compiz 72 15.69% Fluxbox 62 13.51% KWin 57 12.42% xfwm4 47 10.24% Enlightenment 43 9.37% FVWM 16 3.49% MetaCity 15 3.27% IceWM 11 2.40% Mutter 11 2.40% awesome 10 2.18% xmonad 9 1.96% dwm 8 1.74% Window Maker 7 1.53% i3 6 1.31% Ratpoison 5 1.09% JWM 5 1.09% Sawfish 2 0.44% Marco 0 0% -------------------------------- Total: 459 votes What is notable is that in the survey for 2010 (the year before) for Desktop Environments [5], Gnome had 45% of the vote, KDE was the same at 33%, and Xfce was at ~15%. [1] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/08/18/2047203/gnome-possible-recovery- strategies [2] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4-to- be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/11127 [5] https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2011-linuxquestions-org-members- choice-awards-95/desktop-environment-of-the-year-919888/page6.html [4] https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2011-linuxquestions-org-members- choice-awards-95/window-manager-of-the-year-919891/page5.html [5] https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members- choice-awards-93/desktop-environment-of-the-year-855913/ -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected]
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