2002 Readers' Choice Awards

1. Slashdot

2. LinuxFR

3. Freshmeat.net

Maybe all the Francophiles who picked Cooking with Linux as their favorite LJ column are also fans of LinuxFR.org, Da Linux French Page, which took second place this year. As always, Slashdot's endless stream of updates on open source, digital rights and new Mandrake user Wil “Ensign Wesley Crusher Must Die” Wheaton makes it the most popular web site one more time. PCLinuxonline.com is the most popular write-in vote.

1. KMail

2. Evolution

3. Mozilla

In a monster shake-up, the GUI mailers swept the top three for the first time this year. The highest-ranked text-based mailer, mutt, fell to number 4. Last year, Netscape won; this year, it's in sixth place. It looks like the release of KDE 3.0 encouraged some switching to KMail, the only client from last year's top three to return this year. Ximian's Evolution entered the category in second place.

1. gaim

2. Licq

3. Xchat

This year's favorite IM client is gaim, which didn't make the top of last year's list nor did it make much of an appearance in last year's write-in votes. Trailing not too far behind with less than 50 votes is Licq, a multithreaded ICQ clone with a Qt/KDE interface.

1. Gnutella

2. audiogalaxy

3. MORPHEUS

Remember the good ol' days when you could go to Napster and download every last b-side of some obscure '60s Britpop band or see just how many people had covered Dolly Parton's song “Jolene”? Or were those the bad ol' days? Well, the music industry still is trying to figure out what to do with music on the Internet (the Musicnet and Pressplay services didn't even show up among the write-ins), but Gnutella is going strong, receiving 800 more votes than its nearest competitor.

1. Linux in a Nutshell by Ellen Siever

2. Running Linux by Matt Welsh, et al

3. Linux System Administration by Vicki Stanfield

These three titles have been at the top of their class pretty much since we started these awards. It's amazing to see how many titles in Linux and Linux-related areas are published every year. Judging by the ever-increasing list of write-in votes, everybody's found an indispensable book to call their own—except for those of you who see no need for books because “everything is available on the Web and in man pages.”

1. Junkbuster

2. Homemade

3. SquidGuard

The top three vote-getters this year are an exact repeat of last year's. Not too many voters responded to this particular category, so perhaps you've got a quick trigger finger and zap those guys, or you suffer through them. Three write-ins even said it was morally wrong to filter ads, but they're in a very small minority. According to write-ins, a lot of you at home are using Mozilla's pop-up blocking option.

1. MontaVista Linux

2. Qtopia

3. Lineo

This is the first year that favorite embedded distribution was included in the survey. Not a lot of votes were collected, but MontaVista had one-third of the total votes, making it the favorite. A few of you are building or have built your own.

1. xmms

2. Vorbis Tools

3. mpg123

By far, xmms is the winner of the favorite audio tool award, and perhaps by the biggest margin of any category—2,300 votes between it and the second-place Vorbis Tools. Noatun, the KDE media player, is the favorite among write-ins.