this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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I think Arch stats are a bad way to compare DE usage in that on Arch you specifically pick one but often people just go with whatever the distro has (as default). It used to be at least that Gnome was more popular default
If we take distro defaults into account, it's possible Arch stats overestimate GNOME market share.
Based on tecmint list, the top 3 distros are Mint, MX Linux, and Endeavour. Their defaults are:
Granted, the fourth one (Debian) does default to GNOME, but your typical Debian user is more experienced, so it's less likely they stick to the default.
...I wish I had actual data instead of a bunch of guesses. :-/
This is why some level of telemetry can be useful. That ranking is just DistroWatch rank which might poorly reflect actual popularity
Indeed. Sadly, corporations abused telemetry so much that it makes users automatically distrust software with it - even when it's opt-in. As such I'm not surprised it isn't more common, specially in the Linux ecosystem.