On Sat February 7 2015 9:04:47 am Alexandre wrote: Voting likely was limited to registered LQ users and one vote per registered user. Not a significant sample size. LQ is the official forum for Slackware users. Slackware LQ members tend to participate in this annual poll more than other distro users for the primary purpose of ensuring Slackware ranks high as a favorite distro. The Slackware subforum is the most active LQ forum. Hence the not surprising large chunk of votes for Slackware as the most popular distro. Considering the high participation of Slackware users in the poll, and that the stock Slackware comes with only KDE and Xfce for full desktop environments, there should be no surprise that those two desktops ranked high. Slackware users who use other desktop environments must compile the software on their own, like me. I use Slackware. I did not and never have participated in the annual poll. That Trinity was even listed is a victory considering the little coverage the project usually receives. As Slackware users likely were the most active in the poll, and Slackware users tend to be traditional, no surprise that Xfce ranks high. Despite the limited poll, MATE ranked respectfully. MATE is popular with Slackware users, so perhaps not surprising for the respectable voting. MATE is a decent desktop (a fork of the original GNOME 2). I use MATE exclusively with my LMDE support and usually with Fedora. TDE remains my desktop with my Slackware usage. Like Xfce, the MATE development community is small, although probably larger than the Trinity developer community. A quick web search indicates more than a few media folks posted the press release. What did not happen was any follow-up by reviewers. That does not surprise me. Trinity is a conservative traditional desktop and is not bleeding edge, which to many folks is interpreted as "not shiny" and "boring." I think desktop themes is a challenge for Trinity. While themes are the responsibility of distro maintainers, Trinity does not provide or support much in the way of themes. On my LMDE and Fedora systems MATE is quite eye pleasing because the distro maintainers provide a lot of effort in that area. Trinity limits the choices distro maintainers have to make Trinity appealing. Yet that was true even back in the KDE3 days. This topic has been discussed before. My perspective is most Trinity users and devs don't rate media exposure a high priority. Not necessarily a bad thing. The Xfce developers make no effort at high publicity, nor do the MATE developers. The best thing to do is keep hacking away at bugs to make Trinity as robust and stable as practical. XDG compliance remains incomplete and is potential for breakage. Providing better support is needed to install/use Trinity from /usr rather than /opt (for example, read this article how the reviewer had to improvise to get $PATH and a *.desktop file configured: http://www.oxygenimpaired.com/install-amarok-1-4-on-a-current-linux-desktop). More frequent releases, along with respective press releases, would nominally improve exposure. That does not mean "release when not ready" only that with a "point release" strategy, more releases become possible and higher frequency raises exposure. Last I recall the topic being discussed, the agreement was to schedule point releases about every three months. If that still holds then R14.1.0 would be released in March. If I remember correctly, an R14.0.1 release would be forthcoming only if there is a serious security issue or major unforeseen breakage. Darrell

Hi all, I don't use personally FreeBSD, but, of course, it can be a good idea to support it. I have heard a lot of good words about it. Have you seen advantages of using it rather than linux? I think that having a screenshot tour (with text) would be a good idea to let new users see its features, but I am not willing to do it with TDE's out-of-the-box theming. It makes me vomit as soon as I see it and it would rather make new users runaway. Not only under-the-hood features are important, even if they are still of great importance. I think that TDE has its niche in providing a feature-complete desktop environment for older computers, but I am not of those who use it for plain conservatism. -Alexandre