Linux Questions Desktop Environment of the Year - interesting result

[mike cloaked]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:

> Doesn't matter. The question is whether there is a change in trend. It's improbable that KDE adoption is increasing in statistically significant numbers, while at the same time KDE spin downloads remain flat, just because people can install KDE from the standard DVD installer. If there is a new trend developing, downloads and even yum updates would represent much more valuable data from which to draw general conclusions than a poll off one forum. The very poll's existence, and question structure, will disproportionately draw disaffected Gnome users to participate in the poll.
>
> Let's not forget there are KDE affectionados who were not pleased with KDE4.
>

That is certainly true at the time KDE4.0 was released to users.
However the situation with disaffection is not a static thing.  KDE4
in its initial phases lacked functionality big time and had a great
deal missing. A lot of linux users moved on. Since then things have
improved vastly and the developers have honed KDE4 into a really nice
DE - and with version 4.8 it is really usable and functional and most
of the major problems that were present in its early stages have now
been fixed, and users have been returning to the new playground and
enjoying it.  I was one of those who left KDE for Gnome at the time
KDE4 came out. I have now reverted to KDE4.8 as my primary desktop,
although I also have a number of machines with xfce which is light and
fast especially on older hardware. I tried Gnome3 and found it simply
slowed up my workflow so I felt the need to move on.  Of course it is
a personal choice and others clearly love Gnome - and thankfully there
is a choice - unlike the situation with some other OSes than Linux!

People will switch DE and even will switch distro altogether despite
the learning curve and the pain in that process - if they get
sufficiently irritated for long enough.  Many people will accept some
temporary irritation but if things are not resolved then at some point
many people will just give up and not feel it is worth the fight any
more.  Not dissimilar to a bad marriage - many will soldier on despite
continuous frustration but only for so long - in the end separation
and divorce are not uncommon and a new partner often emerges at that
time!

Nevertheless although one can argue whether polls have any value -
they do give some representative figures that are worth keeping watch
on, but of course the uncertainties are large for smaller datasets -
and the figures are not sufficiently different for different DEs that
there is predominance of only 1 DE for current polls - but there may
be a trend and changes over time - and of course if the figures for a
poll showed a huge predominance of one DE over all others then even in
a small poll that would be significant.

-- 
mike c