Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickcox | Hacker News Reader

> GNOME is the most used desktop environment

I find that pretty hard to believe without a citation.

I also have no citations, but Fedora and Ubuntu are each more popular than OpenSUSE, KDE Neon, Arch and Manjaro, so assuming that the same proportion of users of each distro stick with the default DE, it's probably true.

(Arch doesn't have a "default" DE, but https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun puts KDE at 36% and GNOME at 22%, so I put it in the KDE camp.)

I'd wager that's because a vast majority of Arch users are power users and KDE has power-user features.

GNOME's number is buoyed by the numbers of Fedora and Ubuntu (since they use GNOME or variant as their 'default' DE).

It's because it is the default on more of the most popular distros. Ubuntu is the most popular distro. Fedora is the third. Both have GNOME. Linux Mint is second with Cinnamon.

I don't think you need a citation for common knowledge, given how many mainstream distributions ship it as their default.

Surely more people use Windows, iOS, Marcos and Android though.

Which never was the claim if you put it in context.

For Linux. And I think that’s pretty common knowledge.

For Linux, when you exclude Android and ChromeOS. So for desktop GNU/Linux. And even then I'm not sure now, because Steam Deck and Manjaro use KDE, and Linux Mint uses not-gnomish-fork-of-gnome.

It's the default on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, and RHEL to name a few.

I'd bet most CentOS and RHEL installations don't use any desktop environment at all.

However, why argue if we can check the actual stats? [1] GNOME seems to be well ahead for now for desktop GNU/Linux. But the dip in the February, when the Steam Deck was released, is interesting.

1 - https://github.com/linuxhw/Trends#de

> However, why argue if we can check the actual stats?

Because nobody has actual stats. Your link is from one attempt to find some stats, but unless every major distro activates it by default (which they will probably never do on account of privacy issues), it's a tiny and biased sample.

Its the default on those distros because those distros invest on GNOME and GTK and GTK is SW.

QT has an history of being connected with non-free SW licenses, therefore commercial (or company sponsored) for those distros to rely and invest on such project is risky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com