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.
It has KDE Plasma at first place, and surprisingly,
XFCE at second place.
Sorry, but TDE is almost the smallest one.
That Trinity was even listed is a victory considering the little coverage the project
usually receives.
These numbers says that classical desktop environment
can still have a great part of ''market'', since XFCE is quite a classical
desktop environment.
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.
One thing that I am very sorry, is how TDE got almost
no media coverage at the R14.0.0 release, and almost none at all for the stable quality
releases as 3.5.13.x series.
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.
What strikes me, is that some things need to be done
to attract more attention, more users and more developers. Since classical DE as XFCE can
have a large market share, I think that it is still possible to get more users, possibly
by ditching away the perception that it is the outdated kde3.
What do you think? Have a great day!
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