2002 Readers' Choice Awards

1. bash

2. tcsh

3. zsh

The printout of votes collected in this category is always the shortest, tidiest of the bunch. It's not that people don't vote in the favorite shell category—over 5,000 people did—it's that everybody's so quiet about it. So what can be said about bash? It's dependable, flexible, extendable, hardworking and 83% of voters chose it as their favorite.

1. Cooking with Linux

2. Kernel Korner

3. Paranoid Penguin

Marcel Gagné will be very happy to learn that he's your favorite for the second year in a row. Maybe poor François can have a glass of wine to celebrate instead of running to the cellar all night. To those of you who wrote in that all the articles are your favorite, thank you; the checks are in the mail.

1. AMD Athlon

2. Intel Pentiums

3. AMD Duron

Athlon and the various Pentiums were the big winners this year. Combined, the two processors received 74% of the total votes, with about two-thirds of that percentage going to Athlon. Not too many write-ins for this category, but Itanium, Power4 and Zilog Z-8000 (!) all made appearances.

1. Cyclades

2. Digi International

3. Sangoma

Okay, guys, we explained this category last year, but once more: the communications board category includes things like internal WAN router cards that let servers act as WAN routers and multiport serial cards to connect printers, point-of-sale devices and the like. Of the votes collected, Cyclades is the favorite for another year.

1. MySQL

2. PostgreSQL

3. InterBase

By a two-to-one margin, MySQL is the voters' favorite again this year. MySQL won the LJ Editors' Choice Award this year too. Last year's third-place winner, Oracle, slipped to fourth place this time, replaced by InterBase. The write-in favorite is Firebird, a commercially independent relational database based on InterBase source code. To the voter who asked—no, a “haphazard arrangement of XML files” does not count.

1. tar

2. Amanda

3. Arkeia

tar won by a landslide again this year, receiving just under 2,000 more votes than its closest competitor and 90% of the total votes in the category. rsync is the big write-in favorite. Of course, the point is moot because “real men don't need backups”—right? Well, maybe only the guy who followed up that comment with the admission he'd deleted his hard drive twice.

1. Coffee

2. Water

3. Tea

The write-ins for this category are always fun, because we get to catch up on all the new sodas and coffee drinks available, especially those available abroad. Sometimes the emotions run as high here as they do in the favorite distribution category. What we learned: Coca-Cola cannot be lumped in with the more general Soda category; some of you actually like Vanilla Coke; they still make Afri Cola; Hi-C isn't only for kids; and Swedish coffee kicks wussy-American coffee's butt. Between caffeine and sugar, you people are wired to the gills.

1. Quake 3

2. Tux Racer

3. Freeciv

We collected 3,514 total votes in the favorite game category, and the first-place winner, Quake 3, only received 473 votes. Do you know what that means? It means a lot of games are out there, and each one is somebody's favorite. Among write-ins, Frozen Bubble and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are the most popular.

1. Mozilla

2. Galeon

3. Konqueror

Last year's winner, Netscape, fell to fourth and fifth place this year (we split it out into Netscape 4.x and Netscape 6.x), as Mozilla overwhelmingly claimed the title of favorite web browser. Galeon, the GNOME browser based on the Mozilla rendering engine, picked up the slack and rushed in to second place. Thankfully, the number of Internet Explorer write-ins dropped significantly.