2004 Readers' Choice Awards

We know the timing of this article puts us at a disadvantage. It's November of a US presidential election year, and it's hard for our Readers' Choice awards to compete. But, we know you've been waiting to find out whether C beat C++ for Favorite Programming Language and where Gentoo fell in the top three in the Favorite Distribution category. It's time for the awards.

Once again, the top three choices in this category were GUI-based clients. The only difference between this year's top three and last year's is the order: Mozilla jumped to first place from third, Evolution dropped to second and KMail dropped to third. The fifth-place finisher came from the write-in votes—the new Mozilla Thunderbird was only a few votes shy of fourth-place mutt this year.

Debian won first place for the second year in a row, picking up almost 300 more votes than second-place Mandrakelinux. Last year's number two, Red Hat, fell to fourth this year, as Gentoo cracked the top three to come in third. The most popular write-in vote was Red Hat's all-free, community-oriented Fedora, coming in at number eight.

Seventy-five percent of voters agreed with the sentiments of the reader who voted for his “bastard child of desire and affordability”, the ever-popular homemade desktop workstation. Like proud parents rattling off the list of talents and skills their offspring possess, voters wrote in the entire list of components in their homemade systems. Other write-in voters echoed the opinion of LJ contributing editor Greg Kroah-Hartman, who selected the Apple Power Mac G5, well supported in Linux, as his desktop of choice in this year's Editors' Choice Awards.

This year's top three favorite databases were a repeat of last year's top three. Although the Editors picked PostgreSQL as their favorite back in August, readers selected MySQL over PostgreSQL by a 2 to 1 ratio. Combined, MySQL and PostgreSQL own 78% of the votes. Add in Oracle 9i and that percentage climbs to 83%. So what else are readers using for their database work? SQLite, GemStone/S and Firebird picked up less than a hundred votes apiece, and Versant was the most popular write-in vote.

Ah, Marcel. Like Susan Sarandon, David Bowie and '02 Bordeaux, Cooking with Linux columnist Marcel Gagnékeeps getting better with age. Whether he's showing us a new game, recommending a lovely Australian red or demonstrating a little monitoring GUI, he's always supplying us with useful information in fun ways.

I was beginning to think I'd never see a new title in the top three spots in the book category—just advancing edition numbers. But after five-plus years, we finally have a new one. Advanced UNIX Programming by Marc J. Rochkind landed in third place this year. Yes, it's a second edition of a book originally published in 1985, but the content is mostly new. The most popular write-in vote continued to be man pages.

For another year, tar was by far the most popular backup utility, gathering votes from 65% of readers who responded. Amanda came in a distant second, garnering 5% of all votes. On the write-in side, rsync took the top spot. After that, it was a onesy-twosy game of Bacula, personal shell scripts and proprietary offerings. This is weird, though: no one said backups are for wimps.