On 02/17/2013 12:38 PM, Gordan Bobic wrote:

I believe there is, in fact, a way to reasonably reliably gauge broader opinion. While Fedora doesn't seem to have the sort of a community that is prepared to fork or repackage the distribution at a moment's displeasure, Ubuntu does, and there are number of variants favouring different desktop environments.

Gordan

Fedora offers 9 versions in addition to the mainline release, including KDE, XFCE, and LXDE.  That's in addition to the availability of MATE and Cinnamon in the mainline release.

Still, FOSS has no reliable way to measure who likes what, or who uses what.  Things like counting downloads or clicks at Distrowatch are a long way from measuring usage, and can be very easily gamed. When someone says something like they don't use KDE because it is too cluttered or they don't use Gnome Shell because it is too barren, we have no way to determine how many other people feel the same or if, in fact, that person was even telling the truth. We can't take online postings too seriously, because almost all the fora target enthusiasts of one product or another.