Welcome to the 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards
 

Welcome to the 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. The categories have been chosen and the polls will open soon. I am going to post the nominees now, to give members a couples days to post feedback. This will allow additions and modifications to be made before the voting commences. If you have any suggestions, please post in the thread for the poll in question. Any general suggestions can go in this thread.

--jeremy

oops only found this post b4 replying to video player...due to zero post order.

How you gonna choose the Best of Best Awards?i mean Tell me more about the Awards???

We should really add a Backup/Disaster Recovery application/utility of the year, it's been long overdue in my opinion. Backups are always a part of a setup, well, should be part of every setup. Here's a quick list of some applications I know of:

Amanda
MySQL-ZRM
Bacula
BackupPC
rsync/Grsync
dump
restore
cpio
DAR
tar
Ark (KDE Archiving Tool)
Mondo Rescue
Areca Backup
FlyBack (rsync based)

Could probably break them up into Single or Networked Systems as well. ;)

Backup Application of the Year sounds like a good addition for next year.

--jeremy

Backups
 

I use PartImage Backup, not on the list.

Partimage & rsnapshot
 

Me too. Partimage for now and then. rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/) (based on rsync) for every hour, day or what you like. Great stuff.

Marc

Hey when d poll is goin to start....

I think there should be a non-linux distribution poll if there's time and if it would be easy.
Freebsd
openbsd
netbsd
solaris
darwin
etc.
I would come up with a better list but I'm only familiar with a few popular distributions.

I like the backup category and would vote for rsync.

Shouldn't this be sticky so people will be more likely to hit it first?

I second this request
 

When does it start? I'm all rairin' to go vote!!!

I use acronis true image. its capable of backing up linux and windows. It even backs up dual boot pcs

The polls are now open!

--jeremy

Yee Haa here we go again!
 

It's gonna be another interesting vote.

I'm happy here ,although my capacity of speaking and reading english is poor .
because i'm Chinese .
Some content i can't understand when encounter some stranger word .
And my major is Computer science .
I like this plot and hope every have a good time.

Just wondering why are the polls open until feb 21. It would seem to me that most voting would end after the first couple of weeks. By the time the winners are announced we would have forgotten about even voting.

While I definitely think a "couple weeks" is too short, it's possible next year we'll make it closer to five or so. Thanks for the feedback.

--jeremy

I think it would be interesting to have some kind of max project age. How can projects which haven't been updated for years be nominated to "X of the Year"? Like if an actor got "Best actor of the year", even though he'd retired several years ago.

I'm not saying that the grand old apps shouldn't be there. Often they simply are the best app for the job. What I'm saying is that people tend to vote on them, simply because they know them, which really isn't good for anybody. Young projects need advertising, for old projects it doesnt really matter to be crowned "Best Email Client of the Year" every year.

I think that either there should be categories especially for young projects, or even better: Every project should have a small note telling why this app has been the best game of 2007. Like: "Nexuiz went from nothing to one of the most played FPS'es for Linux, thanks to its innovative interface" or something.

Just my 50 cents.

where do i have to put the vote in the poll. I like the idea of also using the non-linux systems for polls.

I don't like the max-project-age concept. I use couple of utilities which stopped being developed few years ago, and still are more useful for me than modern alternatives.
But, separating votes for project that come out this year could be very interesting. We could have the catergories "best of all years" and "best newborn".
cheers,
dr_agon

Mouse
 

It would be a small but very nice addition to have a program written that would snap the mouse to the highlighted selection so all that is needed is to click on the selection.

Yes a good idea indeed.
But please don't forget to add StoreBackup to the list. Even if it is not so popular in my opinion it is the best solution for disk based backups I came across. Each backup looks (and actualy is) like a full backup. The space needed is less than for classical incremental backups.

It is a couple of perl scripts which do the trick with hard linking.
The script might participate from some improvement (if the author permits), but I love it. :-)

We need some sort of "Open category"....

For example "meld" is a delight of a diff tool deserving kudos.

"Filelight" is just plain pretty.

"strace" is probably the most useful general fixit tool use.

Office Productivity Category
 

I think there should also be some category for office productivity. There is the office suite poll, but this would be for more specific needs such as project management (ie dotProject, Ganttproject, etc.) or CRM or planning (ie freemind).

slacware 12.0 and curent.
mandriva for gui

What I will vote for...
 

This is who I vote for :

GIMP 2.4
Inkscape
OpenOffice 2.3
Scribus (latest version)
KDE 4

and for OS

tie between Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8

I sure hope many people vote the same way as me! :D

Mark McLaughlin

I prefer openSUSE, because it is easy to install, and it provide an easy way to install Avia AntiVir and Dazuko.

The polls are closed and the results are in. Look for an official announcement concerning the winners very soon.

--jeremy

...and the winners are:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...inners-622825/

--jeremy

Jeremy,

I've followed these awards for the last 3 years.

And, have loved every advance that I have made running Linux.

Great job!

Do it again. Lots to learn here.

"Other" option for all areas
 

It would be a good idea to have an "Other" option for all categories. e.g. for IDE those preferring Code::Blocks could select "Other" rather than not participate in the poll. I suggest allowing voters to specify the "Other". If ever the "Other" votes were large and many were for a specific "Other" then that can be included as one of the options.
Sincerely,
Aouie

This is a vote, if you put "Other" then how would you provide the award certificate if "Other" was the winner? This is why the polls all allow free text discussion, should there need to be another product in the poll it can be discussed here and either added to this one if there's time or put into the next one.

"Other" option would need extra coding to the polling scripts.
 

One would have to allow people to enter a text field when they choose "Other". The software would never pick "Other" as the winner (hardcoded), but if ever a specific "Other" was much bigger, then the moderator would have the option to move those votes to an entry (which would then be eligible to be picked as the winner). The reason to not automate this process is because people may vote for a product that may not qualify for inclusion into the specific category.

Though the member's choice awards are gravitating towards standard mainstream Linux user's choices for the most part, the awards are probably relevant and useful enough to put in the extra time to add some useful features to the polling code. (Unfortunately, I am not volunteering to work on the necessary code for the feature.)
Sincerely,
Aouie

Which is one more reason you'll probably never see "Other" added to the polls.

Fact is, Jeremy and the mods keep close track of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and they included several options in each category, many of which received very few, or no votes at all. Typically, the top 2-4 products get the lion's share of the votes. IMHO, there's nothing that could be added through an "Other" option that could even be worth mentioning.

Of course, if you use something that you feel is an excellent product and for some unknown reason it's being ignored, you could always post a review and give it a high rating to help boost it's popularity.

Cheers

Lest we forget, we technically do include an "other" section. For the first few weeks before things start you can make suggestions in individual polls and suggest additions. Obviously, if you miss the first period of the polls you have to wait 12 months.

True, but not for the final polls, as I assumed the OP was suggesting. ;)

Cheers

But then, if we're going for an "other" option that needs someone to go through the threads and posts manually to count the votes, why bother with a poll at all?

"Other" is always a bit useless, could you imagine seeing that option in a general election?

Exactly.

AAMOF, I'm hoping for an "Other" option, this year. I don't like any of the nominees. :(

Cheers

What about best linux magazine of the year?