Out of curiosity: Am trying to get a vague impression of each DE's userbase in %
Please vote
Poll: Are you using Budgie, Plasma, Gnome or Mate?
Budgie on my laptop, but also Mate on a testing PC.
I want to follow the Mate transition to Xfce.
MintSpider I suppose a better question is "what is your main DE or what would you choose if you could only use one of our DE options?"
There is something wrong with this poll feature: as soon as I did vote for Gnome myself, Budgie got a vote, too:
After I reversed my vote for Gnome, Budgie also had 0% again.
So, don't know how reliable the outcome is.
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Sebastian I think I may have voted for Budgie the same time you did for GNOME lol
Also live changes are kinda iffy on Flarum. Leaving the thread and entering it again should be accurate
Sebastian looks correct to me. I can see who voted for each option. 2 each for Budgie and Plasma, 1 for GNOME. You are the only person who has voted for GNOME.
I was editing the poll when you made your comment, possibly you just saw some weirdness due to the poll being modified while you casted your vote.
ReillyBrogan Ok, thank you for checking.
Now, grab the popcorn and watch the votes coming in 
[deleted]
this is telemetry
I voted for Budgie because Budgie is the best! 
ReillyBrogan what is your main DE
Agreed. Here, we have Plasma on three laptops and two desktops. And each DE on its own VM. I marked Plasma first, and then clicked in XFCE, because it's the VM I work with the most now (getting familiar with the new DE).
If you do create a new poll, I promise I'll only click on Plasma. 
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I also like the pantheon edition, not that solus has that one yet. it's kind of like gnome or mac OS in style I would say.
it seems to be a desktop or DE that not seen in a lot of distros yet, deepin also is only in a few of them.
PLasma here.
budge for life, but plasma as a second option 
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0% for Mate makes me sad. It was a very good distro during dark days of nautilus and ironically likely the stablest of Solus' 4 desktop enviros (like my opinion man).
I personally thought Compiz was a relic, and it made me uneasy to use, but neither here nor there.
I sampled a few XFCE's recently to re-orient myself. Between that hypercative menu and task bar, and odd--to me--master settings windows, I saw nothing any distro did to make the XFCE experience different from each other. It was never as clean as I wished but it is more modern than Mate. I hope Solus brings something new to the table.
nolan budge for life,
pretty much
edit/clarity i hope
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brent It was a very good distro during dark days of nautilus
Don't you mean, "... during the LIGHT days of nautilus"?
brent 0% for Mate makes me sad.
Remember that this poll has a really small sample size, limited to just forum participants who are present, and choose to participate in the poll. On my torrent client, the seeding statistics show that Budgie, GNOME and MATE are just about the same in volume of seeding. Plasma is about twice as much as any of those.
Granted, this isn't a scientific poll either. For example, it's possible that different DE users have different levels of computer experience, and different preferences for HTTP versus torrent downloads. But somebody out there is downloading Solus MATE. It's definitely non-zero %.
Feel better now?
Easy choice. Plasma for me.
Due to two points.
- Wayland compatibility
- VR Support
In THAT order. And I've been waiting for too long for mutter to support the second.
Budgie on the gaming PC and Plasma on the laptop for work.
I’m mainly using Budgie on both my Desktop and Laptop… but my laptop is such an old crap that I started looking for an even lighter good looking solution than Budgie.
Currently installed along Budgie: i3, Openbox, XFCE.
Didn’t get used enough to i3 yet.
Still looking how to get everything I want/need from Openbox.
These two are - I agree - more Windows Managers than Desktop Environments.
I now have installed XFCE given the recent news from the Solus Team intending to replace Mate.
I have also Openbox there.
(Still working on having the perfect lightweight Desktop that suits me)
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WetGeek As I have described here, some minor bug showed up again with nautilus and gnome calendar recently.
brent 0% for Mate makes me sad. It was a very good distro during dark days of nautilus and ironically likely the stablest of Solus' 4 desktop enviros (like my opinion man).
I also think that Mate is ultra stable and I installed it on my parents old 2007 iMac, but I have always found that it looks a bit ugly and fallen out of time. As XFCE in my opinion 
WetGeek Remember that this poll has a really small sample size, limited to just forum participants who are present
It's true that it (still) is a small sample size. And while it is no surprise that Budgie comes in first and Plasma second, I mean you simply can get that impression by just following the forum anyways, it is the fact that Gnome comes in that far behind what makes me sad. May be one explanation is that people who contribute to Solus and are thus more active on the forum a simply more likely to run and support Budgie (and Plasma). While Gnome users maybe just tend not to be that intrested in tweaking things and just want the elegance and simplicity of Gnome and are thus less active in the forum. That's the story I tell myself for consolidation 
To the Budgie users: what is it that you like so much about Budgie?
I just tried it out again on Distrosea.com with Solus 4.3 and Fedora 38. And I was using it from 2019 until beginning of 2022 with Solus. And while I do have to admit that it is an ultra elegant, stable, fast & modern DE, I somehow never became friends with Raven.
And then when I read an article about Gnome in January 2022, I said to myself that after 20 years of Linux experience without ever having used Gnome a single day, I might just give it a shot(despite all the bad press it gets), since it looks so modern and different.
And here I am, 18 month later, still on a Gnome journey, while I have to admit that there are tons of things that are weird about Gnome and times are many where I think: why on earth would any sensible person would want to do things this way. But again, I somehow like the workspaces, the overview, the workflow. And reinstalling just sucks.
@WetGeek Didn't you do all the experimentation with XFCE and installing and deinstalling other DE's along?
You know if I can, without doing any harm, install Budgie along side Gnome?