Was going to look upon this with a hard critical eye… but found myself softening into nostalgia, thinking about where I started… On suse, just before suse offered gnome as equal player; just before xfce4 became a thing… and I remember the XFCE devs did not like me reporting bloat as a bug, even though it had gone from snappy fast to a clunky crawl. n_n

And IRIX there too… I was on IRIX before GNU+Linux. Long time ago. Still very fondly remembered, wishing for an IRIX revival, more than just Nekoware and Mogrix and pirix. But, it’s HP that are sat on the IRIX IP, right? Good luck.

Anyway, distractions aside… cool chart, though, my faves are not there, by the criteria they’ve used to choose which to show. It’s a mite odd… Not just DEs, not just distros, but an odd filter of distros by DE importance… I suppose it’s laudable to attempt depict.

I forgot all about Enlightenment. Also, no Mandrake Linux?

Note Xfce 1 and 2 aren’t listed here, because apparently there was no distribution using them as the default? If you know any, please post here, I’m curious. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfce the first version came out 1997 and started as a Linux version of the (then) proprietary Common Desktop Environment (CDE) from UNIX. So original Xfce predates KDE and GNOME about a year or so. Interesting fact.

I still love Window Maker.

TIL CDE and FVWM are still actively maintained