I voted for MATE which with Gnome2 has been my primary interface since I started using GNU/Linux full time in 2006. However unless MATE's roadmap undergoes some serious revisions, this will probably be my last vote for it. You see, now that MATE is migrating to GTK3-only and adopting more and more of the underlying structure used by Gnome Shell such as upower/udisks and what not, it's getting to be yet another shell for Gnome 3 and not a desktop environment of its own. I hope the devs listen when people say that dropping GTK2 is NOT the way forward. Seriously? If they want GTK3, they had better cut one version, stick with it for (literally) years, and maintain a whole bunch of themes. And it had better come with mnemonics and icons-on-menus. MATE also with the most recent release quietly dropped support for the two most popular OS'es, Windows and OS X. Is BSD next? Will MATE go Linux-only - but with these hooks into Gnome-land, will that be GNU/Linux-only or systemd/Linux-only?

I have written several tutorials for installing MATE on a couple distro's as well as built MATE for BLFS twice. Will I do this next year? We'll see. Looks like it's time to learn LxQT.

Xfce is both highly customizable and low resource consumption desktop I have ever used.

Not all that surprising for KDE to come in #1, but even now after all these year, seeing Gnome Shell languishing in 5th is somewhat surprising. Doubly given that KDE released just as poor quality with 4.0 and again with 5.0, but doesn't seem to have lost ANYWHERE near the popularity despite their releasing alpha-level software as release compared to how far Gnome Shell has fallen.

1 members found this post helpful.

I've a feeling that, as with other poles, the large percentage of Slackware users may have pushed KDE to a more definitive lead.
In a lot of ways I prefer KDE to XFCE -- it uses more resources but does so to provide integration and there are a lot of tools. However, as you suggest, the KDE team keep changing things.
KDE is my potential new DE but I don't hold my breath...

KDE has won the title for five straight years, and 13 of the 15 years that the LQ members' choice awards have been conducted. I do indeed like to use some KDE apps. Xfce has been the most voted GTK+ DE for five years straight, and with GTK+ somewhat more lightweight than Qt, Xfce continues to be a solid choice for a DE.

I also notice that even though Unity is likely the most used desktop environment in Linux, it only got 4.43% of the vote. This indicates that many people use Unity because it is the default desktop with the best known distro, but the vast majority of Linux users that know about several DEs prefer another DE.

1 members found this post helpful.

I just installed Centos 7 on a new host, with Gnome (3).
Terrible.
I read Linus Thorvald's opinion about it, and he is 200% right (unsurprisingly). The Gnome 3 developers ARE FASCIST GOTHS OR WHAT ? And having read his troubles about broken extensions, and how to install a decent theme instead of this crap which is the mandatory choice as decided by these goths, I installed MATE. Because I really liked Gnome's features. When it used to be usable.

And the window menu at the top of the desktop ??? And apparently it is impossible to remove it ???

Gnome 3 is just crap.

Not surprising that Gnome which used to be among the bests desktops is now among the WORST...
Down to 9,46% when MATE takes 12,47% shares...

Maybe it is a strategy of the developers ? The fewer the users, the fewer the bugs found...
I don't even understand why they lose their time on this stuff. They are killing Gnome.

1 members found this post helpful.

The GNOME 3 developers had decided to fix what wasn't broken. It should be mentioned that Unity is used on no other distro, also, which is hardly wide adoption.

MATE has, from my perspective, only gotten better. I've been using it since v1.2, and Ubuntu MATE flies on my 10 year old 32 bit Lenovo laptop.

Right now, I'm rocking Ubuntu MATE 16.04 beta2, and, while I get some errors, it's very stable.

Gnome looks better than Kde 4&5 in my opinion, but Kde is much more considerate than Gnome. Both desktop environments are running a shell, but Gnome's is much more restrictive. Try running a different window manager in Gnome to Mutter and see how it goes.
This is intended behavior. Gnome isn't broken. You can't fix what isn't broken. You are restricted to run things the way the Gnome devs want you to. Extensions are a shitty fix. Gnome users like to advocate them to extend the flexibility of the shell but the extensions are only designed to integrate with the shell and not to intergrate with other extensions, thus conflicts do happen. This is a god awful setup designed purposefully by the Gnome devs so they can deter responsibility for bugs to the people that use extensions. Red Hat, lol, they certainly know how to manipulate the Gnu/Linux users.