Arch Linux’s pkgstats data provides one of the few large-scale, opt-in snapshots of how real users configure their systems. While not a perfect census (participation is voluntary), the long-running dataset offers a clear picture of how desktop environment and window managers’ preferences have shifted across more than a decade.
At the same time, the data (to some extent) also reflects a broader trend for one key reason: as you know, a default Arch installation gives you only a base system, and you build everything else according to your own needs and tastes. In other words, there’s no predefined desktop environment that users are locked into, unlike most other distributions.
That means these statistics give us a very accurate look at which desktop environments and window managers Arch users actually choose to install and use. But enough talk, let’s move on to the data.
I really love gnome but my friends keep pushing me for KDE and I really just don’t like the windows style of desktop.
You should use what you like.
COSMIC may offer a middle ground if you did want to try something else though.
And KDE is very configurable. It does not have to look like Windows.
I3. No desktop. Just me and the bash.
Expected it
Bash
The premise of the question is wrong, since it assumes a general preference.
If you’re asking 👉 this 👈 Arch user, the answer is “NONE”.
EDIT: The majority of users, especially experienced ones, don’t enable pkgstats. So such stats always end up in some form of self-selection (biased towards users who would use a DE in this case).
I like gnomes features but not gnome itself. Cinnamon is good, but has its faults. Plasma is better but is missing online features (calendar for example can’t be used to create events or sync with your cloud accounts). Really would like to see how Comic a desktop turns out when it’s ready.
You are in luck. COSMIC launches in 3 days.
I am also interested to see what kind of adoption COSMIC gets. From the comments I have seen, I looks like it may pull-away a fair number of GNOME users.
Nor sure that COSMIC calendar will have all the features you want. COSMIC is a pretty good base for GNOME apps though. It does not have to be either / or.
Weirdly, my Arch System has a bog-standard absolutely uncustomized kde plasma install.
Its the Debian system which has been customized to hell and back with i3 and lxqt. I’d like to switch to sway but my gpu does NOT like wayland.
