Over the last fourteen months, discontent with Unity and the GNOME 3 series of releases have sent GNOME users galloping in all directions in their search for alternatives. Xfce and Linux Mint’s Cinnamon and Mate in particular have benefited from this search. However, one alternative that users have not considered to any extent is KDE.
Considering the years in which GNOME and KDE were considered the main desktop environments for Linux, this trend is surprising at first.
Yet the trend seems hard to deny. Compare the results of LinuxQuestion’s Members Choice Awardswith the statistics from previous years, and you’ll see that GNOME 3’s release cost the desktop as much as half its users.
However, the same comparison suggests that KDE is only at three-quarters of its pre-KDE 4 popularity.
The indication is that KDE has failed to benefit from the exodus from GNOME. Meanwhile, Xfce was three times as popular as the year before.