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This is because SuSE was traditionally a KDE distro and so all the OpenSuSE users who replied to that survey are naturally favoring KDE. In fact, I find the shown Gnome percentage high -- when you take into account the kind of voters who voted in that survey.

It's sad to see that only 2% of women use SuSE though. I am sure the numbers are similar for Fedora/Ubuntu too.

It's sad to see that only 2% of women use SuSE though. I am sure the numbers are similar for Fedora/Ubuntu too.

I can't say I was entirely surprised, but this was by far the most overwhelming statistic reported in this survey. I seem to remember some articles on OSNews about this very issue, but I'm not sure I buy into the stock theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon. I'm not convinced that women are significantly less likely than men to feel comfortable in a meritocratic community. If anything, I've found in my academic and corporate experiences that female peers tend to be assertive and very performance-oriented.

As a computer engineering student, the male/female ratio was really high in many of my classes, about 80/20. But if anything, it seemed that the ratio of female students with Linux prominently installed on their laptops might have been higher than for the guys. This might not have been the best conversation starter, but it wasn't the worst, either ;-)

I remember SuSE quoting 75% of their users used KDE back in the days before the takeover. These figures show they have not converted anyone to gnome despite their efforts. If anything, more are using KDE now than before. It was KDE that made SuSE what it was, a company that made them want to buy it. Why try to fix what isn't broken?

This is because SuSE was traditionally a KDE distro and so all the OpenSuSE users who replied to that survey are naturally favoring KDE.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say there. All you're saying is that 70% of the users who replied said they used KDE, even now that there is no default desktop environment in OpenSuse. The selection in the install is left blank for you to choose.

...when you take into account the kind of voters who voted in that survey.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, and similar comments always pop up when surveys of this kind happen. 70% of the people who responded to the survey and who use OpenSuse (presumably, because many people said they used other systems in the survey) use KDE. There's no hidden message there.

No, it just proves that many KDE users use OpenSuSE.

And? Given the fact that Gnome is much more of an equal citizen in the OpenSuse world now, and given the fact that there is no default desktop environment now, the original poster is correct to wonder why Novell have taken the direction they have given that OpenSuse is a feeder project. I know of many SLES users who've looked at SLES 9 and then SLES 10 and asked "What the hell happened there?"

Just like if you surveyed RedHat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core users, you would probably find more GNOME users than KDE users.

You'd have to do a similar survey, but I think you'd be surprised. KDE support in Fedora and Red Hat is actually quite good these days, and I doubt whether you'd see a proportion like that in the OpenSuse survey.

In addition, note that roughly 5% of users identified themselves as basic knowledge.

Does that mean Linux is not attracting people with more basic IT knowledge? Does that mean that Gnome's 'focus' on these users (or what they think they are), given that they make up a small percentage of people actually using desktop Linux, is actually wrong?

The majority of users indicated they were very experienced and liked configuring things themselves. KDE fits users like that better obviously.

So what? Everyone at some point finds the need to configure something, basic user or not, and when they do they want a GUI to do it. This is not a special kind of user we're talking about here. Whenever a survey comes out like this an awful lot of comments such as the above are made that don't really mean anything. The fact is, the figures are what they are.

Novell made GNOME default on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. That has nothing to do with openSUSE.

As for KDE developers, yes, openSUSE employ more people to work on KDE than any other company (possibly tied with Trolltech), but to see a list of most of them see http://opensuse.org/KDE_Team ...and that "KDE developers let go" was...one artist. So .

There is also plenty of newsworthy stuff in the article. These type of surveys are never taken by that many people; it's one of the largest (if not the largest) Linux distribution surveys ever. Just because you're not interested in the results, it's not to say that they're not incredibly important. Read blogs from planetkde for example to see the interest.