Am Mittwoch, 9. März 2016 schrieb Thomas Maus:
I consolidated this to the following tables, but you might prefer the original survey links given above:
2010 2012 2014 2016 Cinnamon - - 4% 9% Enlightenment 1% 1% 1% 0% GNUstep 0% - - - Gnome 2/MATE 31% 14% 4% 4% Gnome 3 - 13% 12% 19% KDE 3/Trinity 5% 2% 1% 1% KDE 4 54% 42% 42% 20% Plasma 5 - - - 19% LXDE 1% 2% 4% 2% XFCE 4% 11% 16% 20% Unity - 8% 10% 3% others 5% 8% 6% 7% [...] Given that -- IMHO -- TDE is still having a competive edge in many areas, the interesting questions are:
- Why does TDE not benefit from the user migration away from Gnome and KDE???
- Especially, why did TDE not soak up the migrating users and soared between
2010 and 2012 and perhaps 2014, when it was clearly superior to XFCE (which soared)?
Let's cite some people from devuan ML: - TDE = KDE = bloatware - TDE too much configurable - xfce is much slimer (and less configurable, which is good) - as xfce and other WMs is so slim, there is need for 3rd party tools - dmenu is perfect as it makes wms (+xfce) usable
You see, these arguments run in circles. The funny point is, there are only some individuals that call for XFCE, but they make all the noise. If more users from TDE ML go to devuan ML, then there could/would be a change.
Current situation is, that no distribution bundles TDE (on contrary to all other above metioned DEs - even enlightment is packaged with debian, but I have not seen it in use ever). Debian did everything to kill KDE35 and will never include TDE. Giving that, 1% is good. Devuan would be an opportunity to change this, as would be FreeBSD or OpenBSD (which still has KDE 3.5).
From the marketing point of view, TDE is not "cool": The homepage shows 3 screenies "blue", one "gold" but for FreeBSD. The screenshot section has 6 screenies of "blue". So, if you don't like "blue", dont use TDE. The iconset is "old" and blue. Where are themes? Is this thing even themable?
Do not forget, the next (= this) new user generation has never seen KDE35.
So, having said this I think a visual facelift is the minimum that should happen. This does not mean that the classical themes should be removed. But there need to be more visual variation, e.g. themes presented on the homepage, etc.
Nik