KDE and GNOME Users: Different Download Habits

October 9, 2008
By

Bruce Byfield

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Does this number of multimedia applications reflect the fact that GNOME has been promoted for business in the last five years, leaving KDE more common at home? Or do KDE downloaders not have as pressing needs as GNOME downloaders?

The second explanation seems possible, since some of the lists' items seem more trivial than GNOME's, such as the KDM Theme Manager or the screensaver KCometen4. But, in the absence of further data, you can choose the explanation you prefer.

The one usability issue that seems to affect KDE users is menus and application docks. The statistics give no indication of whether downloaders are using KDE3 or KDE4, but, if you look around KDE sites, discontent with both KDE3's unwieldy Classic menu and KDE4's Kickoff is widespread.

What other reason would there be for so many alternatives being downloaded -- everything from KSmooth Dock, KoolDock, and KxDocker to Lancelot, which now seems the main Kickoff replacement? Apparently, KDE users are looking for alternatives in this area.

Otherwise, KDE downloaders seem more content with their desktop than GNOME ones. While SMILE might be considered a replacement for the Gweview's basic slideshow ability, the fact that it is new and under heavy development seems an equally valid explanation of its high rating. Relative newness (to say nothing of heavy development and lots of changes) might also explain the high rating for KDE Partition Manager.

Nor do KDE users seem as taken with command line utilities, the position of Yakuake, the drop-down terminal emulator near the top of the Highest Rated list notwithstanding. This difference could very well reflect the larger array of tools available on KDE than GNOME.

Conclusions

The lists of downloads on GNOMEfiles and KDE.apps.org could be said to define by absences: What people download or rate highly on them suggests what is missing from the desktops they supplement.

If the list items mentioned here are any indication, then both GNOME and KDE reflect strong interests in music and videos among their users. However, they soon diverge.

GNOME users seem to looking not only for administrative applications, but also alternatives to GNOME itself. They also seem far more likely than KDE users to look for command line functionality. On the whole, aside from looking at alternative menus or docks, KDE users seem more content with their desktop environment, downloading more multimedia applications, and less administrative applications.

However, how fixed or representative these generalities are is another question. Users of GNOMEfiles and KDE.apps.org are likely to be relatively advanced users, since many of the applications available on the sites require users to compile source code. Very likely, seeing what less advanced users chose to install would give different results.

Yet the relative expertise of the sites' users make them more likely to know the limitations of their favorite desktops. After all, if they were satisfied, they would be less likely to look for alternatives in the first place.

Probably the greatest limitation of this off-the-cuff analysis is that the lists on both sites are dynamically updated. That means that, while I was writing, the position of applications on a given list could change dramatically. However, most did not change positions very far on the list, although momentary blips of popularity are always possible.

In the end, looking at these lists suggests what most GNU/Linux users already know: GNOME and KDE users are different. What either would think of those like me, who happily use both, is a question for another day.