2000 Readers' Choice Awards

Judging by the write-ins, this category resembles another ballot choice U.S. voters face in November: the lesser of two evils. Netscape/Mozilla wins by a mile (over 80%), with the next closest browser, Lynx, receiving 201 votes. Konqueror racks up 77 write-ins, just cracking the top five. The rest of the write-ins are almost evenly split between messages like “Mozilla—NOT Netscape”, “I hate'm all” and “Internet Explorer—Sorry!”.

Aw shucks...you're making us blush with all this praise. Now, we know you're not always happy with every issue (a certain cover shot seemed particularly upsetting to some), but you seem satisfied overall. Kernel Korner receives the most votes, making it the favorite LJ column four years in a row. Second and third place go to At the Forge and Best of Technical Support, respectively.

The Napster lawsuit gave rise to wide-spread controversy; it seemed like everyone had an opinion about it this summer. (You know something's up when Courtney Love sounds almost rational.) In our on-line vote, Gnapster proves to be the most popular file-sharing system with 45% of the votes. Gnutella comes in second with 34%.

Perhaps some of the cranky write-in comments can be traced back to the results of this category. Stereotype be damned, we like our caffeine and if it's got sugar, even better. Coffee is the beverage of choice with almost 50% of the votes. Other soft drinks come in at a collective number two, although many write-ins do not like to see their beloved Mountain Dew collapsed into this larger category. Water makes a surprising appearance in the number three spot.

In 1998, it was Quake and in 1999, Quake 2; this year, of course, the winner is Quake 3. X-Bill pulls 9% of the votes and Civilization: Call to Power takes 6%, to place second and third, respectively. Rounding out the top five are the free games NetHack and FreeCiv. We received many write-ins, suggesting, happily, that Linux gamers have more reasons than ever not to leave the house.

While not exclusively about Linux, Slashdot is where we all go, judging by the vote tally. Slashdot easily claims victory for the third year in a row, receiving twice the number of votes as the second-place site, Freshmeat.net. Other popular sites include LinuxToday.com, the Linux Documentation Project and Linux.org. Favorite web site is another category with an extensive write-in list, of which the most mentioned is linuxfr.org. Tu parles français, non?