DesktopLinux.com: KDE Increases Its Dominance

In the 2004 Desktop Linux Market survey (concluded in January 2005), 3841 DesktopLinux.com readers weighed in with their choices for amongst others Linux distributions, email clients and web browsers. Particularly interesting are the result of the windowing environments poll: in just a year, KDE grew from 44% to 61%. Congratulations to the KDE team for such amazing results.

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Comments

by ac (not verified)

Since when is Mozilla a XFCE application .. now that you speak about other desktops ..

by cm (not verified)

I think what Kevin is alluding to is the fact that in the past some people have "claimed" Mozilla (the predecessor of both Firefox and Thunderbird) and OpenOffice for GNOME while they haven't been integrated in any way at the time, let alone been native apps (which they probably won't ever be).

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

Exactly.

That's why I wrote "mistaken for" :)

by ac (not verified)

As a KDE/Firefox user, my opinion is that the numbers are correct. Konqueror is a great file browser, but it's just not as good as Firefox at web browsing. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has made this observation.

A lot of Linux users tend to also be web snobs of some sort or another. As of today, Gecko just does a better job than KHTML. KHTML is a great second choice and it's getting better every day, but it's still not there (yes, bugs are filed and being worked on, I'm not just uselessly complaining on the dot...). Opera has some interesting advanced CSS support, but it lacks VERY simple things like DOM createContextualFragment support. So Opera is #3 in my book. IE (using Wine) brings up the rear at #4. Again, all of this only applies to web snobs--if you think IE is fine except for all the security issues, then KHTML is likely more than adequate for your needs.

I don't mean this in a condescending way (I probably sound like it anyway) but I do different stuff with a web browser than most people. Not better stuff, just different stuff. And some software is better suited for that different stuff than others. Right now that means I choose Firefox. Maybe sometime soon it won't.

I recently switched to KMail from Mozilla mail, and I definitely see some shortcomings. Because HTML mail tends to be much simpler and easier for KHTML to understand, it does just as well as Mozilla/Thunderbird regarding HTML mail. But there's plenty of little things, like replies starting inside the quoted message instead of a few lines above (why? is everyone just used to hitting enter a few times to create spacing?), lack of format=flowed support, and simple things like making new messages appear in *bold*. (Actually I think this last one is recently fixed, and in all fairness I haven't checked it out since). I still choose KMail over Thunderbird because I like my attachments to open in the correct application. (KMail *sigh* occasionally doesn't even get this one right 100% of the time, but I think that'll be fixed soon).

Anyway, I do not intend to "degrade" KDE with my choices. KDE is the only desktop worth my consideration. Period. I would sooner use bash than Gnome. I see a bright future for KDE applications (and Qt applications in general, for that matter). They are maturing and, once they meet my needs, I will switch over to them in a heartbeat.

Also, I hardly use "Office" software at all. Because of this, KOffice is fine for my needs although "heavy" word processing & spreadsheet users say OpenOffice is better. They're probably right, but for my needs, KOffice is just as good--and I believe that the KDE integration and clean design will make my choice a good one in the long term.

Many distros default to KDE+Firefox+OpenOffice (SuSE is one). It's not surprising to me that this is a common combination in the wild. Not so much because people just "go with the defaults" (that's part of it too I'm sure) but because there must be reasons those distros made those the defaults to begin with.

by andreas (not verified)

> I recently switched to KMail from Mozilla mail [...]

Well, I'm using KDE as my main desktop but I have a Win XP system in parallel running Firefox and Thunderbird. At a first glance TBird is a nice email application. But when you work with it you realize pretty soon the limitations. I was absolutely surprised to see TBird suppressing ICS attachments when viewing a message. You can see the data in the source view, but you can't handle the attachment in any way. Think about Kontact and you'll know what can be possible with OSS.

Maybe this work pattern is uncommon for most of the TBird users. Nevertheless I believe that the rumours about TBird are to high compared to it's functionality. OTOH KMail seems to be unknown even to a lot of people running KDE despite it's functionality.

by Kim (not verified)

For me it's the other way around.

While KDE is wonderfully polished in most respects and just plain rocks, my penchant for conserving RAM and CPU cycles means that I still feel drawn to FVWM with it's blistering speed and unsurpassed configurability.

The main reasons I stay with KDE are Konqueror and KMail.
Something about how they look and feel just suits my tastes perfectly.
I also love Konqueror's highlighting-as-you-type spell checking in web forms.

I know they both can run happily under FVWM, but as they, together with Emacs, are the apps I use most of the time, causing the KDE libs to be loaded anyway, I figure I might as well use an environment where they fit in.

Anyway, having the option to choose from top notch apps like Konqi and Firefox is great.

Just one question about something you wrote:

> But there's plenty of little things, like replies starting inside the quoted message instead of a few lines above

Are you referring to top quoting as a positive thing?!?!?
Heathen scum! ;-) (he, he, just kidding... well sort of anyway :-)

by Kim (not verified)

>Are you referring to top quoting as a positive thing?!?!?

Ahem. That should of course be top posting.
Some things even a spell checker won't catch.

by Danni Coy (not verified)

I don't think so.... Suse & Mandrake are two of the top distro's I am sure that these and other distro's put KDE in as the default desktop... but firfox as the default web browser...... Firefox seems to work with more sites (Konqueror works with all the sites I use regularly thankfully) and has a lot of very cool extensions for it.

KDE happens to be the desktop that works best for me. There are some other excellent applications that would make me concider KDE as best Desktop environment not just Window manager....

Amarok is by far the best media player I have used... K3B is an excellent CD Burning program... Kate is my choice as programming Editor. Digikam is a really nice photo manager.

by Huber Daniel (not verified)

To all on this great project.