Last year, I published stats of what desktop environments Czech Fedora users are using. The data came from a survey which was done by the most popular Czech Linux magazine Root.cz. They did the survey again this year and made all the data available. By running queries on this data, you can actually do interesting statistics. But first the most important outcome of the survey: popularities of Linux distributions among Czech desktop users:

2013: Ubuntu 58.1%, Debian 26.8%, Fedora 16.9%, Mint 16.3%, Arch 10.1%, openSUSE 9.7%, Gentoo 6.9%, RHEL 3.8%, Mageia 2.5%, Slackware 2.3%, Mandriva 2.2%, Sabayon 1.4%, PCLinuxOS 0.8%, SLED 0.4%, others 7.1%

Last year (2012): Ubuntu 53%, Debian 17%, Fedora 12%, Mint 10%, Arch 9.5%, opensuse 9.5%, Gentoo 6.7%, Mandriva 1.8%,…

As you can see, Fedora remains the third most popular distribution after Ubuntu and Debian. The first four distributions have gained, but partly only optically because users could choose more distributions and apparently they were a bit more “promiscuous” than in the last year. For example, Ubuntu got 58.1% which is more than the last year, but it’s just 35% of the sum of all shares while it was 44% last year. DEB vs RPM is 101.2% vs 36.5% which is a better ratio than the last year’s: 80 vs 22.4%.

And now to the desktop stats. Popularity of desktop environments among Fedora users has always been a hot topic. We don’t really track what packages users are using, so no one really knows. The data from the survey surely don’t reflect the reality 100%. The survey was done among Czech users and doesn’t cover users “who don’t care” (like our moms, dads, grandparents who use Linux, but don’t read any Linux magazines or participate in surveys). On the other hand, users “who care” are interesting the most to us and 4745 users participated which is a large statistical sample. The stats from the last year can be found here. Unfortunately, they’re not very comparable with this year’s numbers because this year users could choose more than one desktop, last year they couldn’t.

The chart above shows popularities among all Fedora users including those who indicated that they were using other distributions, too. That’s why Unity has a significant share although it’s not even available for Fedora. It’s interesting to compare it with answers that come from users who use just Fedora, not any other distribution (die hards 🙂 ). They were approx. 1/3 of all Fedora users.

Like last year, I compared it with Ubuntu numbers (also users who only use Ubuntu). As you can see, GNOME 3 stands out even more and achieve a number that is close to the share from the last year when users could only choose one desktop. KDE 4 is around 25%. Xfce has apparently gained some share among both broader and core Fedora user base. GNOME 2/MATE still has its user base, somewhere below 10% (similar to the last year’s numbers). LXDE has also gained a bit, but it’s apparently much more popular on Ubuntu than on Fedora. As you can see, Unity got completely filtered out which makes sense because if it’s not available for Fedora it can be hardly used by Fedora-only users. Cinnamon is also significantly more popular among users who use Fedora just as one of their distributions. Apparently, who wants Cinnamon, goes for Linux Mint because it doesn’t have a large share among Ubuntu users as well (BTW it has a 59% share among Mint-only users).

I will bring some more stats when I find time again. For example how Fedora market share changes with the age of users or their experience.