KDE user stats

[Lamont Peterson]

On Friday 04 May 2007 05:42pm, Ahmed Kamal wrote:
> openSuse has posted the results of a survey spanning 27,462 users. An
> interesting piece of info, was that the number of KDE users was over 71%,
> with Gnome around 22%. I'm not trying to start any kind of flame wars, and
> I know most opensuse users are on that distro for KDE. Still I think we
> should use a mechanism to gather desktop environement popularity
> information for Fedora. If that survey is any indication, the KDE "spin" or
> whatever they call it today, could perhaps use more love.

I'm would almost be willing to bet (except that I never gamble with my 
money:) ) that such a survey of Red Hat/Redora users would show numbers the 
other way around.

In my experience, the vast majority of users seem to prefer one desktop 
environment over the others simply because that's what they became used to,  
They became used to GNOME on Red Hat because that's what Red Hat (and Fedora) 
default to.  For SUSE users, KDE is not surprising.

In other words, most users usually have zero technical reason for choosing one 
desktop environment over the others.  The exception to that has been the real 
or imaginary perception that KDE on Red Hat isn't built the way KDE could be 
because Red Hat "doesn't like KDE" or whatever.  Personally, I've experienced 
that myself and have had to rebuild packages to turn on the building of apps 
that the Red Hat/Fedora packages have disabled for no apparently good reason 
(though, most of that is worked out now and I haven't had the need to do this 
for those reasons in a long time).  In almost all cases, I simply re-enabled 
the building of an app and everything worked without any further changes to 
the spec, or I simple removed some "rm" command(s) that deleted apps 
before %files could get hold of them, but still wasted time compiling them 
(and they worked just fine).  I'm not suggesting that any of this was done to 
intentionally "cripple KDE on Red Hat to make GNOME look better" or anything 
like that.  I'm sure that all of these kinds of incidents were because there 
were too many things for the very few people who dealt with KDE packages at 
Red Hat to have time to do things "right".

Anyway, I'm glad to see more love going into KDE on Fedora.  Open source is 
about choice and by that I mean my choice (as an end user), not Red Hat's 
choice, not SUSE's, not Fedora's, etc.  This is what makes users love a 
distro; when they can choose to do things the way they want to.
-- 
Lamont Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]

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