Linux Journal

TheLinux Journal Readers' Choice Awards have become an annual ritual,almost as fun as the holiday season. Our editorial team members can't wait toget their hands on the results to see what products and tools from theLinux space are keeping you productive, satisfied and wowed. And, whobetter to ask than our readers, the most talented, informed and (nearlyalways for the better) opinionated group of Linux experts anywhere?These characteristics are what make the awards such a great snapshot ofwhat's hot and what's not in Linux.

Before diving into the results, let me explain that the results,although insightful, inherently fail to capture the true diversity ofpreferences that exist in our community. I wish we had space to show youthe chaotic yet amazing mish-mash of responses to each question. As wetry to lasso you into organized responses, you are curiously gallopingoff in pursuit of your category-busting solution as we hang on to therope for dear life. The reality is that you are always experimenting;your opinions are fluid, and filling in virtual bubbles doesn't fullyexplain the nuance of your relationship to your tools.

This is a survey of big trends, and the trend underlying them all is thatyou embrace lots of tools. One respondent summed it up with “All of the above,many of the above”, and another exclaimed, “Variety is thespice, baby!”

Once again, in this year's competition, we designated only one winner percategory, with strong contenders receiving Honorable Mention awards.For instance, in the categories where a cluster of formidable contendersfollowed the outright winner, we designated up to three honorable mentions.Besides a few exceptions, a product or service had to get at least 10%of the vote for Honorable Mention status.

Here then, ladies and gentlemen, areyour 2009Linux Journal Readers'Choice Awards.

Ubuntu (45%)

Honorable Mention

Debian (10%)

The Ubuntu phenomenon, even by Linux standards, is truly paradigm-shiftingand it doesn't appear that it will be tanking any time soon. In the 2008Readers' Choice Awards, we dubbed the ubiquitous Ubuntu “the bigdistro that did” for unexpectedly leaving its myriad rivals as mere dotsin the rear-view mirror. In the 2009 tally, Ubuntu deserves an “EnergizerBunny Award” for winning the Favorite Primary Linux Distro category,increasing its popularity and becoming untouchable for the time being.Ubuntu and its related Kubuntu and Edubuntu siblings raised their votetally from 37% in last year's awards to 45% this year. At whose expenseis Ubuntu gaining? Although Mandriva tumbled most dramatically from 14% to2%, Fedora and Novell/SUSE hemorrhaged more than a few percentage points.Meanwhile, Red Hat, CentOS and Debian ticked up a few points from lastyear, the latter enough to warrant Honorable Mention with its 10% shareof your vote.

GNOME (53%)

Honorable Mention

KDE (30%)

During the past year, GNOME has reached majority rule status, with 53% ofyou electing it your favorite desktop environment. This trend is despitethe breakneck development of KDE 4 during the past year. Although GNOMEgarnered only a few more votes than it did in 2008, KDE's vote count slippedas you've warmed to Xfce, Fluxbox and Enlightenment. The long andinfluential coattails of Ubuntu can only make any presidential candidategreen with envy.

Firefox (87%)

Firefox takes first prize as both your Favorite Web Browser for 2009and the most extreme “category crusher” of this competition. No otherapplication (besides the competitor-less Apache) racked up a higher shareof votes (87%) than Firefox, although OpenOffice.org wasn't far behind.Who can argue, as Firefox keeps getting faster and accumulates moreuseful extensions? This year's surprise gainer was the historicallyunderappreciated Opera browser, which ratcheted up from 5% to 8% on theheels of its impressive 9.5 and 9.6 releases. The worthy Konquerorand the browsers based on the Firefox Gecko engine (for example, Flock andEpiphany) were left behind in the catchall “Other” category. How willthis category look next year? Look for an inevitable battle royale ifGoogle can deliver a polished Chrome for Linux in time for you to giveit a test drive.

Mozilla Thunderbird (38%)

Honorable Mention

Gmail Web Client (31%)

Evolution (11%)

Congratulations to Mozilla Thunderbird for its third consecutive winin the Favorite E-Mail Client category with 38% of the vote. The “Holyhow did that happen, Batman?” award, as well as Honorable Mention, go tothe runner up, Gmail, which got 11% more of your votes than last year,while Thunderbird dropped 7%. Meanwhile, other non-Web-based clients,Evolution and KMail, are ever more the favorites of fewer. Is the trendtoward Web-based clients inexorable, or can the non-Gmails of the worldfind a formula to stanch the decline?

OpenOffice.org (85%)

No news here, gang. OpenOffice.org, bolstered no doubt by its recent3.0 release, retains its crown as your Favorite Office Program with thesame share of your vote as last year, 85%. The alternatives, AbiWordand KOffice, each similarly continue to be the favorites of merely 3%of you. As with Firefox, there seems to be some sort of correlationbetween a program's cross-platform characteristics (should any exist)and its category-crusher status. Honorable Mention for most definitiveresponse in this category goes to “I hate all officeprograms”.

Audacity (73%)

In this year's competition, we decided it made sense to split upaudio-related programs into two categories. The first is FavoriteAudio Tool—that is, program for creating, manipulating and modifying audiostreams. The second is Favorite Audio Player—that is, program for playingand organizing existing audio streams. The cross-platform Audacity soundrecorder and editor is yet another—cross-platform rule holds—categorycrusher in the Favorite Audio Tool department, garnering top marks from73% of you. Although the applications LMMS and Ardour each have a criticalmass of adherents, each is the favorite audio tool of only 6% of you.

Amarok (36%)

Honorable Mention

Rhythmbox (18%)

XMMS (12%)

Although alternatives have knocked Amarok back a few points from last year,its 36% share of the vote tally helped the renowned audio player forKDE remain undisputed champion in the Favorite Audio Player category.Many of you also are aficionados of the audio players Rhythmbox andXMMS, each of which received enough votes to warrant Honorable Mention.It's interesting to see KDE flagging as your favorite desktop, yet theKDE audio player, admittedly more feature-packed, has double the supportof the GNOME audio player, Rhythmbox.

VLC (34%)

Honorable Mention

MPlayer (33%)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion in the Favorite MediaPlayer category. VLC, which last year landed in a close second place behindMPlayer, won the category in a photo finish by a single percentage point.Both players play pretty much any format you can throw at them, makingusability a key factor in your decision. Thus, more of you are opting forthe single-console approach of VLC rather than MPlayer. Other players thatrecorded respectable results were Totem (9%), Kaffeine (8%), SMPlayer(6%) and xine (5%).

Pidgin (43%)

Honorable Mention

Skype (18%)

Nothing changed in the Favorite Communications Tool category. Onceagain, Pidgin Internet Messenger, the Swiss Army knife-esque messaging toolformerly known as Gaim, took top honors with a 43% share of your votes.Pidgin users appreciate the ability to monitor all of their messagingaccounts in 15 different protocols. Competitor Kopete, which slippedfrom its Honorable Mention status from last year, does only 11 protocols.Meanwhile, the closed-source Skype retained its Honorable Mentionlaurels by earning 18% of your votes. That may be its ceiling until itsimprobable open-source resurrection, as a sizable contingent of uswill never fill the bubble of any closed-source application, regardlessof how good it is.

GIMP (76%)

Honorable Mention

Inkscape (11%)

The legendary GIMP remains your unrivaled choice for FavoriteGraphics/Design Tool, once again with 76% of the votes. It appearsthough, that the vector-graphics application Inkscape is emerging fromthe pack of graphics applications as a new favorite. Inkscape left thesingle-digit vote-getters to reach 11% of your votes, enough to win itHonorable Mention in the category. Are the impressive, mature programslike Blender too specialized to warrant your vote? Maybe the categoryis too broad. One write-in voter exclaimed, “You're making me choosebetween GIMP and Blender?!”, and another explained, “Blender, GIMP andInkscape are totally different tools for different purposes. They're allmy favorites in their respective categories”. Points well taken.

Picasa (34%)

Honorable Mention

F-Spot (17%)

digiKam (13%)

gThumb (11%)

Although much has changed in the crowded category of Favorite DigitalPhoto Management Tool, one broad trend appears to hold. If a Googleapplication is around, it is likely to be slicing and dicing its rivals.In the photo management category, the slicer-dicer is Picasa, and thesliced and diced is digiKam. In the 2008 awards, Picasa and digiKam wereneck and neck with 25% of the votes. This year, Picasa wins the category,leaving everyone else in the dust with its 34% of the vote. F-Spot (at17%), digiKam (at 13%) and gThumb (at 11%) are still all popular enoughto deserve Honorable Mention. However, Picasa may continue to surge asunique features, such as the ability to sync photos betweenone's PC and Web-based albums seamlessly, make it a tough act to follow.

vi (36%)

Honorable Mention

gedit (19%)

Kate (11%)

The more things change, the more they stay the same in the Favorite TextEditor category. Vi wins again with a solid 36%, with gedit and Katetaking Honorable Mention honors. Emacs and nano also are popular butjust missed the cut.

Subversion (47%)

Honorable Mention

CVS (16%)

git (15%)

You left little doubt about who deserves to win Favorite Version ControlSystem, a new category in the 2009 Readers' Choice Awards. Subversion isthe favorite of 47% of you; CVS and git win Honorable Mention at 16%and 15%, respectively.

MySQL (61%)

Honorable Mention

PostgreSQL (18%)

MySQL's move over to Sun Microsystems doesn't appear to have dampenedyour admiration for the legendary open-source database. Both this yearand last year, you deemed MySQL your Favorite Database, with 61%of your votes this year. PostgreSQL also shared a similar fate as last year,registering 18%, enough for Honorable Mention. SQLite, Oracle andFirebird all polled in the single digits.

Nagios (51%)

Honorable Mention

Hyperic HQ (15%)

up.time (11%)

Nagios was not only recently dubbed one of the most important open-sourceapps of all time, but it also is the winner of the new Readers' Choicecategory, Favorite Linux Monitoring Application. A slim majority 51%of you use Nagios to keep close tabs on your networks of all shapes,sizes and levels of complexity. Most of you not using Nagios opt forthe Honorable Mention candidates, Hyperic HQ (with 15%) and up.time(11%). Ganglia and GroundWork also garnered respectable votes in thesingle digits.

Python (20%)

Honorable Mention

C++ (19%)

Java (17%)

C (13%)

Perl (12%)

Last year, we created discord when we split programming languagesinto two categories: Favorite Programming Language and FavoriteScripting Language. Then, we limited your choices according to our owndefinition of each. In order to shield ourselves from the avalanche of“WTFs” (whew, we succeeded!), we gave you more latitude to decide whichis which. Therefore, the results look a bit different from last year.In an interesting twist, Guido van Rossum's venerable Python, which tookFirst Place in last year's Favorite Scripting Language category, wins thisyear's Favorite Programming Language award with a hefty 20% of your votes.Close behind in the Honorable Mention group are your other favorites, withfew surprises: C++ with 19%, Java with 17%, C with 13% and Perl with 12%.

bash (28%)

Honorable Mention

PHP (24%)

Python (19%)

Perl (14%)

The results of the Favorite Scripting Language illustrate the diversity ofopinions on what is a scripting language. Although the prosaic workhorsebash (shell) wins the category with 28% of the tally, three otherquite different languages follow close behind in the Honorable Mentioncategory: the Web-centric PHP, the flexible Python and the SwissArmy chainsaw of programming languages, Perl.

SSH and X (40%)

Honorable Mention

TightVNC (14%)

rdesktop (13%)

RealVNC (12%)

Your inaugural choice for Favorite GUI Remote Access or Network ComputingSolution is clear. SSH and X wins hands-down with a commanding 40% shareof the votes. Meanwhile, a hefty chunk of you choose to go graphical,using variants of VNC, such as TightVNC, RealVNC and UltraVNC. In fact,if you add those three user groups together, you're just shy of winningthe category. TightVNC, rdesktop and RealVNC are all popular enough toshare the platform for Honorable Mention.

Eclipse (42%)

Honorable Mention

NetBeans (14%)

KDevelop (11%)

Yet another new category in this year's awards is Favorite Linux IDE,which the ubiquitous Eclipse won commandingly and unsurprisingly with42% of the votes cast. The fact that in Eclipse one can work in a leanenvironment and add and subtract an incredible array functionality withits myriad modules has closed the deal for nearly a majority ofyou.At the same time, the second largest vote-getter was “Other”. Clearly theLinux developer community cannot be pigeonholed.

Adobe Air (21%)

Honorable Mention

Gears (18%)

JavaFX (15%)

When it comes to your Favorite Platform for Developing Rich Internet Apps(yet another new category for 2009), you are less decided than in theLinux IDE category. Although Adobe Air is the favorite of the most of youat 21%, you also are using Gears and JavaFX in solid numbers, 18% and15%, respectively, among others. Mono Moonlight and OpenLaszlo also wereclose to the 10% mark. Will one of these tools break away to be the nextEclipse in a few years? Tune in to this space next year to find out.

Frozen Bubble (17%)

Honorable Mention

Doom (11%)

Tux Racer, alsoPlanetPenguin Racer andExtreme TuxRacer (10%)

With some barely perceptible percentage changes, the Favorite Linux Gamecategory remains the same as last year, led byFrozenBubble and withHonorable Mention going toDoom and theTuxRacer series. Besides beingconsistent, the Favorite Game category is characterized by having thelargest share of “Other” votes, with 27%, and the wittiest comments.One of you commented “Keeping it old school with SCUMM[VM]games”.On the flip side, a surprising number of you also commented that you“have no time for games” or “don't like games”. Meanwhile, this writeris wondering whether the many commercial game companies that now make Linuxversions will ever break through with a runaway hit that could giveFrozen Bubble a challenge one day.

VirtualBox (32%)

Honorable Mention

VMware (30%)

Wine (13%)

We've been watching VirtualBox for a few years now, wondering when itspopularity would finally match its technical prowess. Well, 2009 isfinally VirtualBox's time in the sun, as this year it toppled VMware towin Favorite Virtualization Solution. Last year, VirtualBox receivedroughly half the votes of VMware (20% vs. 39%). This year, VirtualBox wonthe matchup 32% to 30%. VMware and Wine, thus, took HonorableMention honors. Xen fell just short of 10% of the vote. [See MarcelGagné's Cooking with Linux on page 26 for more on VirtualBox.]

Amanda (16%)

Honorable Mention

Bacula (14%)

Simple Linux Backup (14%)

Once again, in the backup department we differentiated betweencomprehensive applications, or systems (this category), and specificutilities (see Favorite Backup Utility below). Regarding the FavoriteBackup System category, most of you continue to prefer the same systems aslast year, although the deck chairs have been rearranged a bit. This year,the open-source application Amanda took the victory lap, which SimpleLinux Backup took last year. Still, the latter won Honorable Mentionthis year along with Bacula (yet again) for network-based backup.Favorite Backup System also has a variety of write-in votes with somevariation of “roll my own solution”.

rsync (47%)

Honorable Mention

tar (34%)

Though rsync and tar are your perennial favorites for Favorite BackupUtility, this year, the two flip-flopped positions, with tar taking thecrown last year and rsync taking it this year. rsync is the favoritebackup utility of 47% of you to tar's 34%.

apt (37%)

Honorable Mention

Synaptic (16%)

Yum (13%)

RPM (10%)

As the fate of Ubuntu and siblings slopes ever upward, so too trendsthe popularity of apt, the principal package management system for Ubuntuand Debian. Once again, apt, with 37% of the votes, is the clear andeven more dominant victor as Favorite Package Management Application.More of you also are turning to Synaptic, the groovy front end to apt,to keep your system loaded with your favorite programs. The classic RPM(10%) and its amigo Yum (13%) declined slightly from last year, as moreof you are leaving Fedora and Novell/SUSE in favor of Ubuntu.

WordPress (25%)

Honorable Mention

Joomla! (23%)

Drupal (19%)

No surprise that the blog publishing application WordPress once again winsthe category Favorite Content Management System with 25% of the vote.In the Honorable Mention department, your same two favorite Web contentmanagers, Joomla! and Drupal, are present only to flip in popularity.This year, Joomla! reached an impressive 23% to Drupal's 19%. Drupal gotour vote—LinuxJournal.com runs on it.

Apache (89%)

As with last year, the thought arises in Favorite Web Server categoryofwhether we should just ask “Do you use the Apache Web server, yesor no?” and leave it at that. Apache wins again in 2009 with 89% ofyour votes.

Contegix (15%)

Honorable Mention

Rackspace (12%)

Talk about a meteoric rise, Contegix went from one write-in vote in 2008 to championof the Favorite Linux-Friendly Web Hosting Company category in2009.Otherwise, four well-known names have remained among your perennialfavorites for years, namely Rackspace, GoDaddy.com, DreamHost and 1&1.Of the four, only Rackspace broke the 10% barrier this year forHonorable Mention, while the other three were just shy of the mark.GoDaddy.com was category winner last year, and DreamHost and 1&1 werethe two Honorable Mentions.

ASUS Eee PC (24%)

Honorable Mention

Android G1 (22%)

Last year, we admittedly were dorks for having the category FavoriteLinux Handheld Device, which left so many cool Linux gadgets out inthe cold. The Nokia N800 won that one. This year, however, we've takenour smart pills and expanded the category, calling it Favorite Linux-BasedGadget. Not surprisingly, one of the most well-known devices, the ASUSEee PC won the category with 24% of the vote, followed by the Android G1,which achieved Honorable Mention status with 22%. After the G1, the fieldwas so crowded, making it impossible, unfortunately, for any other device tocrack the 10% barrier. The Nokia N810 Tablet, Acer Aspire One, TomTomNavigation System, OpenMoko FreeRunner, Amazon Kindle, the Palm Pre andseveral write-ins all received a fair share of your vote, which shows howsophisticated, interesting and crowded the Linux device space has become.

ASUS Eee PC (32%)

Honorable Mention

Lenovo T61p (16%)

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (12%)

Acer Aspire One (10%)

There is something oddly liberating about the “big guys” pre-installingLinux on their PCs. At long last, when we go to buy a PC, a device socentral to our identities and livelihoods, we find the well-thought-outpreference for Linux taken seriously by the companies we want tobuy from. After being shut out so long for being too smart, it surefeels good, doesn't it? Your vote for the ASUS Eee PC as Favorite LinuxLaptop (with 32% of the vote) tells us how much you appreciate theopportunity to buy a laptop designed with Linux in mind and not just afeature-handicapped afterthought to placate the pesky geeks. The groupof Honorable Mentions includes not only the returning Lenovo T61p (16%)but also the newcomers Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (12%) and Acer Aspire One(10%). Despite such euphoria over the big guys, you didn't forget ourLinux-specialist friends like Linux Certified, EmperorLinux and R Cubedwho kept us motoring during darker times. They fared well as a groupif you add up all the votes for their various models.

Dell (41%)

Honorable Mention

Hewlett-Packard (16%)

Let's start with the official results for Favorite Linux DesktopWorkstation. Dell won the category with 41% of your votes, andHewlett-Packard earned Honorable Mention with 16%. Unfortunately, theofficial results fail to appreciate the “roll-your-own” spirit that isso vital to our community. Because we didn't include a choice like “Iconfigure my own desktop PCs”, you told us as much in your own words.In a classic survey creator's nightmare, the responses “I do.:)” and“I do, as in self-built” and “Home-brewed” all registered as separatevotes worth 0.05% each even though they mean the same thing. Allow meput on my Katherine Harris hat and have a look at these “hangingchads”, Florida-election-style, to shed some light on yourroll-your-own tendencies. Hours of investigative sleuthing revealed that roughly12% of you configure your own desktop PCs. Therefore, the honoraryHonorable Mention award in this category goes to theroll-your-ownspirit of the Linux Community.

Dell (32%)

Honorable Mention

IBM (16%)

Hewlett-Packard (15%)

While the roll-your-own philosophy is alive and well when it comesto servers, you tend to feel more comfortable giving this business tothe big guys. Dell is the winner of the Favorite Linux Server categorywith 32% of your votes. Your Honorable Mention winners, IBM and HP,trailed Dell with 16% and 15%, respectively.

Virtualization (45%)

Honorable Mention

PowerTOP Tool (16%)

Last year, VMware took top honors as Favorite “Green” Linux Product orSolution partly because of how we phrased the question. This year,to be more fair, we grouped virtualization solutions together, and theywon the category with 45% of your votes. The win makes sense giventhe technology's impressive improvement in the efficiency of servers.The PowerTOP tool for finding energy wasters on your systems alsois popular and won Honorable Mention with 16%. We failed to list therecent (kernel 2.6.21) innovation of the tickless idle on Linux, whichtakes advantage of low power states in modern processors. Are youtaking advantage of this feature? Next year, we'll ask you directly.Finally, this author wishes to express his dismay at the significantnumber of disparaging remarks in this survey toward green solutions.Although the vast majority of respondents are positive to neutral in thiscategory, responses such as “Don't drink the green Kool-Aid”and “I don'tcare!” were plentiful. Will our progeny admire our arrogant proclivityto waste natural resources and do little to change our ways? I doubt it.

Linux in a Nutshell by Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour, StephenFiggins and Jessica P. Hekman(4%)

Honorable Mention

Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by LinusTorvalds and David Diamond (3%)

Running Linux by Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, TerryDawson and Lar Kaufman (3%)

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S.Raymond (2%)

The Linux Bibleby Christopher Negus (2%)

Last year, we limited the selection in this category to books published from 2007 to thedate of the survey (February 2008). This year, we decided to try FavoriteLinux Book of All Time, and the results didn't gel as easily.Because this category is so crowded, we decided totoss out the 10% rule for Honorable Mention and honor your top five books.Interestingly, two of your favorites were not technical guides but ratherrequired reading for understanding the Linux phenomenon, namelyJustfor Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, the story of LinusTorvalds' rise to fame, andThe Cathedral and theBazaar, Eric Raymond'sseminal book on the Open Source movement. Rounding out the HonorableMentionsRunning Linux andThe Linux Bible. The information-overloaded among youmeanwhile opted for the popular write-in candidates “Too many tochoose”or “Very tough question”.

Tie:Marcel Gagné's Cooking withLinux (19%) andKyle Rankin's Hack and / (19%)

Honorable Mention

Dave Taylor's Work the Shell (10%)

Mick Bauer's Paranoid Penguin (10%)

Here is someLinux Journal lore for you. Our publication used to havea column called Kernel Korner, which many faithful readerscertainly remember. Kernel Korner dominated the FavoriteLinuxJournal Column category from the awards' inception in 1996 until 2000.Things got competitive in 2001 when Marcel Gagné and hisCooking with Linux, the world's first column ever to pair practical(and hilarious) Linux advice with appropriate wine selections. Cookingwith Linuxhas been so popular ever since that it won FavoriteLinuxJournal Columnfrom 2001 to 2008, and last year, I suggested that “MarcelGagné is goingto have to be knocked off before anyone knocks him off the awardstand.”My prediction was premature, because this year, although Marcel won thiscategory again, he shares his title with Kyle Rankin's more recent Hackand / column. Believe it or not, Marcel and Kyle received the exact samenumber of votes, or 19% each. Congratulations are due to both excellentcolumnists who offer vastly different but equally useful content intheir monthly musings. Meanwhile, Dave Taylor's Work the Shell and MickBauer's Paranoid Penguin are both popular with 10% of you,enough to award them Honorable Mention.

Android Platform and the T-Mobile G1 Phone (9%)

Honorable Mention

Ubuntu (8%)

KDE 4 (7%)

ASUS Eee PC (6%)

In the question for 2009 Linux Product of the Year, we didn't give youany suggestions. We left the responses 100% up to you. Naturally, thismade nearly every response unique and left it up to us to categorize it.Nevertheless, it is safe to proclaim that your 2009LinuxJournal Productof the Year Award goes to the Android platform and its first commercialimplementation, the T-Mobile G1 phone. The pair garnered 9% of yourvotes. Close behind, with 8% and Honorable Mention, was the UbuntuLinux distribution, followed by the KDE 4 desktop with 7% and, finally,last year's winner, the ASUS Eee PC with 6%. Last year, the Eee PC reachedan impressive 37% of the votes. Interestingly, the development of Androidand the G1 phone, although popular and groundbreaking, didn't have quite thesame dominant effect that the Eee PC had last year—nor did any othersingle product. This effect allowed you to remediate my lament fromlast year that “when Ubuntu releases yet another fantastic upgrade, ourexpectations are met and the buzz meter quickly subsides”. This year,Ubuntu got the respect it deserves in this category for revolutionizingthe Linux desktop oh so gradually with each great upgrade.

Thanks to each and every one of you who participated in the voting.