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openSUSE Survey Results Online
apokryphos writes "openSUSE have announced that the results from the openSUSE survey (PDF) are now online. The survey was live for almost 3 months and more than 27,000 users participated, making it one of the largest Linux distribution surveys ever."
There is, as far as I can tell, only one place in the world where GNOME is more popular than KDE, and that is, surprise surprise, on the Ubuntu Forums. Everywhere else, KDE appears to lead my a margin of roughly 2:1. In particular, it is a consistent winner of the LinuxQuestions Members Choice awards. It's also very popular on the desktops of European government, being used on 10.2% of desktops, compared to GNOME's 5.5% (see page 29).
It always saddens me to see the Big Distros rallying around GNOME and pouring funds into it as I've always viewed Open Source as a meritocracy, whereas the decision to back GNOME development is quite clearly not based on its merits (or at least, not its technical ones), nor even, clearly, on what the end users want. It also strikes me as a terrible waste of resources: GNOME's shaky technical base and general bureaucratic attitude means that even though money is thrown at it, nothing ever seems to get done, with GNOME's busiest days barely matching KDE's laziest, while the KDE team are completely shaking up the code and architecture of their massive code-base on a shoestring. A real shame, but - c'est la vie, I guess!