the KDE Plasma desktop at 38.36%, nearly doubling the share of GNOME, which sits at 19.84%
Then xfce at ~11% and cinnamon, mate, etc. to round it out.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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That feels about right. I know that when I go to set up a desktop system anymore, KDE is usually my default go to. It just works and doesn't tell me no for the few customizations that I want to make. XFCE and the others are absolutely vital for lower power systems. But if you want a low-friction daily driver with plenty nice to haves and easily replicable, it's hard to beat KDE.
Xfce is very replicable. Moving my install to a new system usually involves little more than copying the config files between home directories.
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KDE has too much going on for me. I like Cinnamon for everyday use.
You mean like whiz bang zoom distractions or just a lot of stuff to download if you do a full install whether or not you're going to use all the different KDE apps.
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I use KDE Plasma, btw.
Arch users: "Well now I'm definitely not using KDE"
Did you check the wiki to see which one it says to use??
KDE because it was recommended with cachy os, and i don't really know enough or care enough to use something else 😅
KDE works and Arch is easy to install.
I3. No desktop. Just me and the bash.
Expected it
Does this count steamOS instances? Because that would really tip the scales in KDE's favor.
Niri. I know it's not a DE, but it's currently my fav.
yup. I was tempted to give Hyprland a try but noped out for political reasons.
political reasons?
Most projects have codes of conduct, even if it's something as simple as Wheaton's Law.
The original creator of hyprland behaved in a way that made people leave the project (the "political" part comes from the creator's discrimination). It was basically a good example for why projects should have codes of conduct.
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from my limited time using it I found niri to be actually so good. will switch over from hyprland eventually i think.
Do you happen to know how it is with a multi-monitor setup?
I finished setting up Hyprland 2years ago, then learned about the shit community literally the day after being "ah, finally done!" and haven't found the energy to switch since.
I use Niri on triple screens with different sizes and refresh rates, it's all seamless. Plus per-monitor scroll up/down left/right. I have an Nvidia GPU, they seem to have worked out all the problems with Wayland support.
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I am also loving Niri
They should do this for Mint. I want to know how many of us weirdos using KDE on Mint there are.
Never tried Cinnamon(?) but to be honest, if I was forcred to use Mint, I probably would install KDE Plasma on the device.
Mint is said to be the perfect beginner friendly distribution. I am not sure, why. Robust and easy to understand package/update manager? If some of my f&f would ask to install them Mint, it absolutely would come with Plasma!
Robust and easy to understand package/update manager?
Honestly if it still has 2 gui package managers like when I last tried it that's not true neither.
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I did that before just getting Arch.
Also, I wonder if KDE on Ubuntu stuff still includes that FUCKASS FONTCONFIG FILE THAT MAKES EVERYTHING LOOK SHIT I SPENT 4 HOURS LOOKING FOR
I’d use Gnome if it had tray application icon support. I just cannot do without my tray icons for Dropbox.
Bash
Waiting for a tiling window manager with nice animations
I think you have to code those yourself. I heard Niri had some nice animations, despite being a scroller. Hyprland has good animations if you put some time into it.
I do also understand if that was sarcastic. I've learned....
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Openbox for me. Going strong since my early days on Ubuntu when one release Unity had a memory leak that wast just too much for my 2GB of RAM. I had already being flirting with Openbox and that was the cue to finally use it for good. When I migrated to archlnux it was a no brainier.
If you ever want to try Wayland, check out LabWC.
I will definetly do at some point. But last time I looked into LabWC they were not implementing some of the actions that I use. I guess I can adapt but even recently I started to use some key chains and is a shame that LabWC has no intention to implement it.
Apart from that It would be nice if they implemented an alternative format for the config files, because that is one drawback of Openbox, the XML config is really rough to do and to read.
The premise of the question is wrong, since it assumes a general preference.
If you're asking 👉 this 👈 Arch user, the answer is "NONE".
EDIT: The majority of users, especially experienced ones, don't enable pkgstats. So such stats always end up in some form of self-selection (biased towards users who would use a DE in this case).
The majority of users, especially experienced ones don't enable pkgstats.
Why would an experienced user not enable pkgstats? Anyways the biggest bias here is that arch inherently caters to power users which are going to have very different needs and likes than regular people.
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If you want to try something fresh, give mangowc a try. It is a tiling wm but also has built-in support for scrolling layouts like Niri (even vertical).
While a CachyOS user, I'm old school (X11 user and maybe XLibre) with i3 as my WM of choice. I know, hate on me all you want because I use antiquated tech. It works, unlike Wayland which is still broken as of right now. I need some features not found in Wayland natively, and that requires I use X11 (thankfully, i3 is customizable with some decent plugins). I know about Sway, SwayFX and other i3-style compositors for Wayland, but they don't work with NVIDIA as of right now I don't think.
Weirdly, my Arch System has a bog-standard absolutely uncustomized kde plasma install.
Its the Debian system which has been customized to hell and back with i3 and lxqt. I'd like to switch to sway but my gpu does NOT like wayland.
Sway. Though I graduated from Arch to NixOS, sway remains as one of the core tenets of my personhood.
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KDE, beautiful and flexible
I really love gnome but my friends keep pushing me for KDE and I really just don’t like the windows style of desktop.
You should use what you like.
COSMIC may offer a middle ground if you did want to try something else though.
And KDE is very configurable. It does not have to look like Windows.
I like gnomes features but not gnome itself. Cinnamon is good, but has its faults. Plasma is better but is missing online features (calendar for example can’t be used to create events or sync with your cloud accounts). Really would like to see how Comic a desktop turns out when it’s ready.
You are in luck. COSMIC launches in 3 days.
I am also interested to see what kind of adoption COSMIC gets. From the comments I have seen, I looks like it may pull-away a fair number of GNOME users.
Nor sure that COSMIC calendar will have all the features you want. COSMIC is a pretty good base for GNOME apps though. It does not have to be either / or.
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