2010 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners
 

The polls are closed and the results are in. We had a record number of votes cast for the tenth straight year. Congratulations should go to each and every nominee. We once again had some extremely close races. The official results:

Server Distribution of the Year - Debian (29.35%)
Desktop Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (28.56%)
Security/Forensic/Rescue Distribution of the Year - BackTrack (36.87%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year - Android (76.82%)
Database of the Year - MySQL (51.76%)
NoSQL Database of the Year - Cassandra (27.40%)
Office Suite of the Year - OpenOffice.org (55.74%)
Browser of the Year - Firefox (55.52%)
Desktop Environment of the Year - Gnome (45.06%)
Window Manager of the Year - Compiz (26.43%)
Messaging App of the Year - Pidgin (43.85%)
Virtualization Product of the Year - VirtualBox (59.16%)
Audio Media Player Application of the Year - Amarok (28.34%)
Audio Authoring Application of the Year - Audacity (74.58%)
Video Media Player Application of the Year - VLC (58.79%)
Video Authoring Application of the Year - FFmpeg (26.70%)
Multimedia Utility of the Year - GStreamer (31.95%)
Graphics Application of the Year - GIMP (66.98%)
Network Security Application of the Year - Wireshark (32.90%)
Host Security Application of the Year - SELinux (38.46%)
Network Monitoring Application of the Year - Nagios (61.76%)
IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year - Eclipse (24.55%)
Text Editor of the Year - vim (35.88%)
File Manager of the Year - Nautilus (31.42%)
Open Source Game of the Year - Battle for Wesnoth (22.70%)
Programming Language of the Year - Python (26.56%)
Revision Control System of the Year - git (50.56%)
Backup Application of the Year - rsync (47.42%)
Open Source CMS/Blogging platform - WordPress (45.18%)
Configuration Management Tool of the Year - Puppet (46.67%)
Open Source Web Framework of the Year - Django (33.33%)

If you have any questions or suggestions on how we can improve the MCA's next year, do let me know. Visit http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ice-awards-93/ to view the individual polls, which contain the complete results.

--jeremy

New this year - pie charts with a visualization of the full results:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010mca.php

--jeremy

I notice a small glitch with your pie charts: in the "Programming Language of the Year" charts (both 2D and 3D), the C++ entry is missing its "++". ;)

Thanks for the heads up - fixed.

--jeremy

While the charts are nice, they don't really say which product won nor are the percentages given.

Plus, are they accurate? Why does the Desktop Distro look so even between Mint, Slackware, Debian, and Ubuntu, when Ubuntu has nearly 3x Debian's desktop votes?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ice-awards-93/ is the link to the full results for each category, including percentages. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010mca.php is better suited as a quick overview and nice visualization.

--jeremy

Note that there was a scaling issue with some of the charts that has now been fixed. If you used one of the charts previous to this post, you may want to take another look.

--jeremy

Well thank you, dear Jeremy :D

Really, I don't have enough time to dig EVERYTHING I'm interested in... Hm, that seems to be the major problem related to the human life shortness, isn't it?
Whatever it is, I barely have time to study into the problems I have to solve. So, here your poll comes in very handy, as I learn from it about a good deal of useful things (like a distro named Back Track, for example).

So, thanks again.
Kostya

I like the pie charts, very cool. Slackware is always a close second.

I like the idea of pie charts, but it would be better if you use distict colours. The way they are displayed now is hard to discriminate between the choices.

I'm suprised to see OpenOffice as winner instead of LibreOffice. (guessing some folks don't realize the dangers of OpenOffice.org usage, in terms of licensing and the future thereof. Hint: Oracle)

Additionally, I don't think many people knew of the existence of LibreOffice and what it is so traditionally they voted OO

I've changed the color gradient to a more LQ-esque palette.

--jeremy

Office software stands out as the one area in which, if OpenOffice and LibreOffice are counted together as they are technically almost identical, there's least competition. In other areas no one program got more than 3/4 of the vote; OOo and LibO combined have over 7/8 of the office sector on Linux. I think that's crying out for some credible competition. In my experience, KOffice is not up to much, while Abiword's focussing on lightness rather than full features. If LibO and OOo diverge, we may see some competition, but not if LibO "tracks" OOo or if development on OOo ceases.

I wonder if "Gnome-Office" lost votes from people unaware it means "Abiword and Gnumeric" though. Perhaps office software should be separated out? I for one have historically preferred OO Writer and Gnumeric, the latter used to be much more powerful for graphs than OO Calc. (OO's since caught up I think, but I still do like Gnumeric.)

Other things to note: a remarkable result that RHEL+CentOS exactly tie Debian.

Things that got zero votes shouldn't be on the pie chart I think.

A bit surprised at VLC dominating its poll so much. I expected a more even balance between it and mplayer.

I concur with folkenfanel's comment in the "Welcome to the awards" thread that we should have at least a category for mathematical and scientific software. Amongst the more obvious candidates, it might also be a place to put LaTeX, since while not limited to maths papers, it's very often used for them.

Finally, I reckon it would be really nice to see some trends across the years. What's rising, what's falling, what's forked?

I'd like to see
 

Well Done.

I have 3 comments

1. Who sais those that voted Know their stuff? It seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Yes I realise it reflect only ppl voted. That said, it is still good info.
2. Althow valuable in terms of last year, The Static Statistic must be seen as "Old News" as IT moves faster than year increments. I'd like to see change/movement data like in how much did Ubuntu's popularity change in the last year.
3. Where can we expand the application list or even the Categories? Where dir ebox/Zentyal feature if at all. I think there is room to expand this, make it monthly then you can get more movement and categores, will also increase the voter count to get better representation.


Well Done!

That's not a requirement to vote.

I see things I'd disagree with insofar as voting goes. Then again, I didn't vote, mainly because I don't care about the results.

Given the choice, I'll take Oracle's 11g database server over MySQL any day of the week. Of course there are instances of which throwing huge bags of money at Oracle isn't an option, therefor MySQL will do. And yes, I do use MySQL in some of those instances, but prefer PostgreSQL. MySQL does the job, and I can't complain about it.

The poll is a popularity contest, nothing more. I'm sure that one were to poll the business community the results would be dramatically different.

Love the pie charts. I find it interesting that if RHEL and CentOS (which are basically identical distros) were combined, would they be tied with Debian for Server Distribution of the Year.

Oracle badguy?
 

It may be too early to be calling Oracle the Bad Guy, just yet. There were several in-house Sun projects which were killed during the acquisition, and Oracle gave those projects their blessing to fork and continue development, with all of the source-code, elsewhere. So, they could've been jerks about it, but they weren't. I have to give them credit for that. OpenWonderland continues on development it's massive open-source 3D world kit, both server and client, without Cousin Larry interfering. And, since it's Oracle's OpenOffice that I'm using, until LibreOffice makes it into the Ubuntu repos, I have to dance with who brung me and be thankful, not ungrateful, to Oracle about it. As Grandma would say, "It's best to give the Devil his due." :) Ric

Wouldn't have guessed Slackware was so popular.

I wouldn't say Slackware is that popular outside of LQ. It's just LQ is the official Slackware forum so inevitably there are a lot of slackers here.

That's a good point to keep in mind. If you did a nationwide or worldwide poll for "best burger",
almost certainly McDonald's would win by a large margin, and all of the thousands of smaller places
that make much better burgers would get less than 1% each. A poll tells us how POPULAR something is,
not how good it is. Interestingly, in a poll asking about the WORST burger,
McDonald's would again get the most votes, just because that's the name which
comes to mind when you hear the word "burger".

I'd hope Burger King would smash them. As far as big chains go, BK is a Core i7 to McDonalds' 486.

/offtopic

What sticks out, to me, is that every one of these softwares is open source and free.

Except Puppet.

And also, Debian is the most popular server OS? After the SSL vulnerability that they caused by tinkering, going un-noticed for 2 years, I don't trust them to be on a server in an enterprise.

Thats just me though.

I use Fedora Core 14, and it's very good as distribution,

I was thinking of PHP as the programming language of the year ^^

Where or when can be found the 2011 linuxquestions members choices polls?

In this sub-forum, you may need to do a search and restrict it to Linux-News.