Readers' Choice Awards 2010

Audacity

In the Best Audio Tool category, the program Audacity becomes more dominant every year, winning the 2010 award with a resounding 81% of your preferences, up 8% from last year. The popular cross-platform sound recorder and editor has little competition—only 8% of you consider Ardour your favorite audio tool.

Amarok

Honorable Mention: Rhythmbox

Your preferences for Best Audio Player this year are consolidating around two favorites, namely the winner, Amarok, and the sole honorable mention, Rhythmbox. Previously, this category was more crowded with contenders. However, Amarok is one of those apps that is riding the wave of resurgence we're seeing in KDE and its related applications. It doesn't hurt that Amarok is one kick-butt music app too.

VLC

Honorable Mention: MPlayer

After winning the Best Media Player award for 2009 by a single percentage point, there's no looking back for VLC, which won again in 2010, this time with more than triple the votes of its nearest rival, MPlayer. VLC's attraction could be the fact that it plays nearly any audio (or video) format you send its way, as well as its cross-platform capabilities. If you happen to find yourself in front of a Mac or Windows (or BeOS!) box, you're never far from “the cone”.

Xmarks

Honorable Mention: Delicious

Nobody works on more machines than a Linux geek, so we're perfect guinea pigs for rating the product in this new category, Best Bookmark Syncing Tool. Your two favorites are Mitch Kapor's Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) and Yahoo!'s Delicious (er, deli.icio.us). Firefox's own Weave tool fared well, but its Firefox-centricity may keep it from jousting at a higher level with its multibrowser-capable rivals.

Google Docs

Honorable Mention: Wikis

On the surface, it's somewhat counterintuitive how you love Google Docs as an on-line collaboration tool but merely like it as an office suite. (See the results for Best Office Suite above.) Perhaps it's because you use OpenOffice.org more for your day-to-day work tasks but use Google Docs when the task specifically calls for collaboration? Despite your penchant for Google's tools, a solid number of you turn to wikis to share information with your dispersed colleagues.

Dropbox

Honorable Mention: Ubuntu One

For creating a redundant off-site backup copy of your important files, your tendency is to choose the popular Dropbox and Ubuntu One services. Knowing how we Linux geek cheapskates work, I bet you're signed up for the free 2GB accounts—40 separate ones to back up your 80GB drive.

Tux Paint

Honorable Mention: GCompris

The winner of the new category Best Kid-Friendly Application is Tux Paint, a gleefully fun drawing program for kids. Reading your comments, we also know good number of you have managed to get Linux into your local school, so you've probably installed Tux Paint free of charge for the students to use as a tool for art instruction. On that same install, a sensible companion would be GCompris, a somewhat more diverse set of educational applications for children.

Frozen Bubble

Honorable Mention: Doom and Battle for Wesnoth (tie)

It is beginning to seem that no game will ever knock Frozen Bubble from its lofty perch as Best Game. Bubble has won the title every time. Not only does Frozen Bubble lure you in with its pure simplicity, but those penguins are just too darn cute! Take note though that the Battle for Wesnoth has won honorable mention for the first time ever.