1997 Readers' Choice Awards

Welcome to Linux Journal's third annual Readers' Choice Awards.

In response to requests for a larger survey, last year's nine categories were expanded to twenty. A few of the new categories are “Favorite Shell”, “Most Desired Upgrade” and “Best Linux Web Page”.

The Readers' Choice survey was conducted on the Linux Journal web site, where the voting was open for 6 weeks. Almost 3000 people participated in this year's poll. This survey, though unscientific, is a good way to see what products Linux Journal readers are using, what books they are reading and what games they are playing.

Now, here are the results...

Winner: Red Hat Linux

Runner Up: Debian Linux

Red Hat was the runaway winner of the “Favorite CD-ROM Distribution” this year. Red Hat garnered almost three times as many votes as its nearest competitor, Debian.

Winner: Kernel Korner

Runner Up: Best of Technical Support

Kernel Korner, our technical guide to kernel programming, won the prize as LJ Readers' favorite column. Second place went to the question and answer column Best of Technical Support.

Winner: GCC

Runner Up: Perl

Not surprisingly, GCC won as the “Most Used Development Tool”. Perl came in a strong second.

Winner: Cyclades

Runner Up: Digi International

For the third year in a row Cyclades' boards have topped our “Primary Communication Board” category.

Winner: Bash

Runner Up: Tcsh

Bash was the clear winner in the competition of the shells. Our readers picked Bash almost four times more often than any other shell.

Winner: vi

Runner Up: Emacs

vi edged out Emacs in this hotly contested category. The word processing programs lost big to traditional text editors—most word processors got less than a tenth of the votes that vi received.

Winner: GIMP

Runner Up: Corel Draw!

GIMP, the freely distributed graphics program, won a decisive victory over the other graphics applications. GIMP had an edge of more than 1000 votes over runner up Corel Draw!

Winner: Netscape

Runner Up: Lynx

Linux Journal's Readers favor Netscape as their web browser by a wide margin over the text-only Lynx browser.

Winner: Running Linux by Matt Welsh and Lar Kaufman \tPublished by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Runner Up: Linux Network Administrators Guide by Olaf Kirch \tPublished by SSC, Inc and O'Reilly..

In a reversal of last year's results, Running Linux took first prize and the Linux Network Administrator's Guide took second.