The 2011 Members' Choice Awards from LinuxQuestions.org has honored the KDE Community with "Best Desktop Environment of the Year". In addition, Tech Radar has declared that KDE Workspaces are the best desktop environment. KDE innovation, performance and stability have particular appeal for users. Tech Radar reports that KDE Workspaces have "the best mix of cutting edge software and stability...", and writes, "We were amazed by the level of comfort the users experienced with KDE." Chris from the Linux Action Show is switching to KDE!

The Tech Radar article makes a special point about business users. "Business users feel at home in the common desktop metaphor that KDE so beautifully creates. This, coupled with its well-integrated applications, means KDE wows almost every business user I present it to." Recognizing the love that has been shown to Plasma Workspaces, Tech Radar writes, "When all's said and done...every one of our testers was floored by KDE 4.7 across all devices."

There were comments in both articles about various KDE performance factors. Martin Gräßlin's blog post addresses issues such as these.

Two individual KDE applications also came away as winners this year. Amarok scored the Audio Media Player of the Year award and Dolphin was selected as the Best File Manager. Congratulations to these teams and to everyone who contributed to making KDE Workspaces the best desktop of 2011!

Update: A comment from filipesaraiva points out that Choqok was recently named "The Best Twitter Client for Linux" by Lifehacker.

Update 2: An anonymous commented that Life Hacker has more favorite KDE applications:

Digikam : Best Photo management app

Okular: Best PDF Reader

K3B: Best Disk burning app