2001 Readers' Choice Awards

Sorting through the results of the 2001 Readers' Choice Awards, ballots gathered from six weeks of on-line voting, it's clear that Linux Journal readers have opinions on everything—lots of opinions. Also evident is the fact that more options, tools and methods exist now than ever before; a good thing to keep in mind during a year so turbulent.

This year over 6,500 readers voted in 24 categories, from favorite Linux book and office suite, to favorite communications board and backup utility. Thank you to everyone who participated. Now, on to the results.

1. Red Hat 2. Debian 3. Mandrake

Red Hat received 30% of the votes this year, repeating their victory from last year. Debian moved from fourth to second place this year, and Mandrake stayed at third. Linux from Scratch and the Polish Linux Distribution (PLD) were the most popular write-ins.

1. The GIMP 2. xv/xview 3. CorelDRAW

The winner here is what you would expect; the GIMP received 77% of the total votes. xFig and Photoshop were the favorites among write-in votes, with pleas for a Photoshop port abundant.

1. StarOffice 2. AbiWord 3. Kword

StarOffice wins this category for the second consecutive year. Its nearest competitor, AbiWord, received half as many votes, and the spread between it, KWord and Emacs was only 19 votes. Though not really a word processor, LaTeX was the favorite write-in.

1. vim 2. vi (and clones) 3. GNU Emacs

We took your advice from last year and split vi and vim into separate categories. This time around vim wins with twice as many votes. mcedit took the write-in vote.

1. KDE 2. GNOME 3. Window Maker

This was one of the most popular categories, and KDE is the clear winner, receiving 40% of all votes. GNOME came in second with 24.5%, and the favorite write-in was xfcr. And special mention, of course, for the command line.

1. StarOffice 2. KOffice 3. WordPerfect

StarOffice is your favorite word processor and your favorite office suite this year, same as in 2000. KOffice finished a strong second this year, after a small showing last year. And, the write-in opinions want everyone to check out Open Office.

1. C 2. Perl 3. C++

Here's another category where we took your advice from last year and split C/C++ into separate categories because, hey, they're not the same. Java and PHP finish out the top five, with Python just missing out by 15 votes. Kylix/Object Pascal had a strong write-in showing, over 200 votes.

1. GCC 2. Emacs 3. KDevelop

GCC took first place again this year, but by a percentage significantly lower than last year. Emacs continues to prove its flexibility here, too. Last year's popular write-in, KDevelop, took third place this year, while Borland's Kylix made another strong write-in showing.

1. bash 2. tcsh 3. ksh

Eighty-one percent of all voters chose bash as their favorite shell, with tcsh coming in a distant second. ksh came in third, but only by receiving five more votes than fourth-place zsh.

1. AMD Athlon 2. Intel Pentium 3. PowerPC

Readers' favorite processor is the AMD Athlon, tallying 42% of the votes. AMD's Duron, K6-II and Celeron were popular write-ins. Quite a few votes commented that their selection of Pentium was out of necessity, not performance.

1. Cyclades 2. Digi International 3. Equinox

This one received the fewest total number of votes and, judging from some of the comments, it's because not everyone knows what we're talking about. Well, it's not a surfboard and it's not a bulletin board. Of those who did get our meaning, Cyclades is the favorite.