Eliminated in the first round of voting were Deepin Desktop Environment and Budgie, replaced by two popular window managers that received more write-in votes. Voting in the final round has already begun, and will remain open until 6 pm EST on Tuesday, February 21.
Editor’s note: The polls are now closed for voting on this poll. We are currently checking the results against our logs and will announce the official results in the morning, which we presume will be the same as the results our polling software is showing.
Which of these Linux Desktop Environments and Window Managers would you most prefer to use?
Total Voters: 375  Loading ... |
The elimination round of our Readers Choice Favorite Desktop Poll 2022 has ended and voting has begun for the final round. The team of developers behind the desktop environment that wins the final round will receive a pair of SCALE passes to attend the Southern California Linux Expo that’s coming up in March courtesy of the team at SCALE, as well as two passes to All Things Open, t-shirts, and hats, courtesy of All Things Open, the large East Coast open source event that’s held in October.
KDE’s Plasma topped the voting in the first round of our Readers Choice Favorite Desktop Poll 2022, which opened to voters on February 8 and closed at 6 pm EST on Tuesday. On the ballot were 10 of the most popular desktop environments. KDE collected a total of 454 votes, or 35% of the votes cast — and had a 13% lead over the number two vote-getter, Xfce, which finished the round with 285 votes, or 22% of the votes cast. Following closely behind was Gnome, with 262 votes, or 20% of the total.
Because this was an elimination round, however, the focus of this round is on the desktop environments that didn’t get a lot of votes — and at the bottom of the list this year, votes seemed hard to get. While KDE and Xfce between them shared 57% of the total vote, the bottom half of the slate struggled, only capturing 6% of the total votes between them.
DDE, or Deepin Desktop Environment, the DE developed specifically for the China-based Deepin Linux Ddistribution, and Budgie, a popular DE developed for the Solus distro but also used in a Ubuntu spin, received the fewest votes (DDE received four votes and Budgie had seven) and have been removed from the ballot for the final round, being outvoted by write-in votes for i3, a tiling window manager, which received eight write-in votes, and OpenBox, a configurable window manager, that received five write-in votes.
Those two window managers have been added to the ballot for the final round, where write-in votes are not allowed.
A total of 1,299 were cast in this first round poll. Traditionally at FOSS Force, in two-part polls like this, fewer votes are collected in the first round than in the second. For example, in January’s “Best Linux Distro” poll, there were 749 votes cast in the first elimination round, while 4,545 votes were cast in the final round poll that followed.
Also, final round polls generally don’t produce the same results as first round polling. Again using January’s “Best Distro” poll, the “winner” in the first round of voting was MX Linux, followed by Linux Mint and Fedora. In the all important final round, however, top place went to Fedora, followed by Pop!_OS (which placed 10th in the first round, barely making it into the final round) and MX Linux.
| The results of our first round of polling. |
What Linux desktop environment did you use the most in 2022?
Total Voters: 1,299 Loading ... |
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i3 WM (8 votes) OpenBox WM (5 votes) Awesome WM (3 votes) Sway WM (3 votes) FVWM (2 votes) LXDE (2 votes) Trinity DE (2 votes) bspwm (1 vote) Moksha DE (1 vote) JWM (1 vote) dwm (1 vote) E16 WM (1 vote) Pop!_OS (1 vote, not counted) Gnome (1 vote, not counted) |
lmao the one person who didn’t know what COSMIC (Pop!_OS’ customized DE) is. And the one person who who writes-in Gnome despite it being an option because… why?
KDE Plasma is currently the best desktop environment available for computers. It is very powerful and flexible and you can make it work and look almost identical to every other desktop environment. It has the most features and despite all this it is still one of the lightest desktop environments available. If KDE Plasma was shown and promoted to users of closed proprietary alternatives I am sure there would be a lot more people wanting to switch to GNU/Linux. Steam Deck does a lot of this luckily, and hopefully more like this will be done in the future.
KDE Plasma is absolutely the best one. I can’t even understand why it is not the default desktop in all those corporate GNU/Linux distributions. I would say GNU/Linux would have a much higher market share if KDE Plasma was the default and the promoted desktop.
The simplest desktop is LXDE, I like the lightness and it just works, if you say which Linux Desktop year 2023 will be, it should definitely be KDE Plasma, ok it’s not lightweight, it’s midweight and it’s moving towards being more functional…
KDE Plasma is the best!
It comes with a very nice default layout.
It’s lightweight, fast, customizable.
And it’s feature-packed.