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Xfce Wins Our ‘Favorite Linux Desktop’ Poll

Xfce takes home the award for “Favorite Linux Desktop Environment.” Coming in second in our poll was KDE Plasma, followed by Gnome and Cinnamon.

Xfce 2022 Best Desktop aware.

Voting has ended and Xfce is the winner of our Readers’ Choice Favorite Linux Desktop Environment poll with 35% of the total votes, followed by KDE Plasma and Gnome with 27% and 17% respectively. Cinnamon came in fourth with 11% of the vote. The remaining six DE’s listed in our poll had 9% of the vote between them.

With a total of 375 votes cast in this poll, voting was extremely light when compared with similar polls on FOSS Force, especially for the final round in a two-part poll. In last month’s Best Linux Distro poll, for example, there were 4,545 cast in the final round.

The low number of votes is even more surprising when you consider that in the opening round of this poll there were 1,299, or more than three times the number of votes that were cast in the final round. That’s another oddity. Typically, FOSS Force’s multiple round polls have far more voters in the final round than in the opening, elimination round.

Again turning to January’s Best Distro poll, 749 people voted in the opening round, meaning the final round in that poll received more than six times more votes than the opening round. However, January’s opening round numbers look huge when compared to this final round.

Which of these Linux Desktop Environments and Window Managers would you most prefer to use?

  • Xfce (35%, 131 Votes)
  • KDE Plasma (27%, 103 Votes)
  • Gnome (17%, 64 Votes)
  • Cinnamon (11%, 43 Votes)
  • i3 (2%, 9 Votes)
  • Mate (2%, 8 Votes)
  • Cosmic (2%, 7 Votes)
  • Pantheon (2%, 6 Votes)
  • OpenBox (1%, 3 Votes)
  • LXQT (0%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 375

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In March we will be running two side-by-side choose-all-that-apply polls on open source conferences, which will be our editorial focus for the month. Those polls will be up for most of the month, and there will be no prizes involved.

Cool Stuff for the Xfce Team

There are prizes for the winning DE in this poll however, which we’re hoping will be useful to the folks that do the work to make Xfce the great desktop environment it is.

For winning our Readers’ Choice poll, the project will receive a pair of top tier SCALE Passes for this years Southern California Linux Expo, one of oldest community-focused Linux events, which will take place March 9-12 at the Pasadena Convention Center. In addition, they’ll receive passes to All Things Open, the large open source event that for more than a decade now has taken place each year in October at the Raleigh Convention Center in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, just blocks from Red Hat’s world headquarters. ATO is also donating t-shirts and hats to the winning DE.

We are in the process of reaching out to Xfce to make arrangements for them to claim their prizes.

As this year’s Best Distro and Favorite Desktop Environment polls come to a close, we want to thank all the people who took the time to support their favorite Linux distribution and/or desktop environment, as well as all the technologists who do the hard work of designing and maintaining the open source software that we depend upon.

We would also like to thank the people at All Things Open and SCALE for their generous donations of hundred of dollars of passes and merchandise to the winning desktop environment team.

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