2004 Readers' Choice Awards

A bit of a shake-up in the audio category, as last year's number two and number three tools—noatun and mpg123, respectively—were knocked out by mplayer and Audacity. xmms remains the clear favorite, however, picking up just fewer than 50% of the total votes. On the write-in side, KDE's amaroK came in as the clear favorite, racking up enough votes to tie mpg123 for sixth place overall.

For several years now, KDE and GNOME have finished first and second, respectively, with an ever-increasing distance between the two. This year, KDE received two votes for every one GNOME received. Window Maker holds on to the number three spot, beating XFce by a single vote. No one said “they all suck” this year, and the only write-in voter who expressed frustration said he might try to write his own environment.

Last year we noted how close voting was in this category, and this year, for the first time ever, Slashdot isn't the favorite Web site. Granted, only six votes separated LinuxFR from Slashdot, but has Slashdot lost some of its cachet? Or is it simply because even hardware vendor news sounds exciting in French?

Judging by the numbers, most of our voters aren't into formal training, preferring instead to use a combination of books, Web resources and, as one voter put it, “hard knocks”. Among those going the more formal route, Linux Certified, which offers classes in San Francisco and Boston, was the favorite.

In its first year on our official nominee list, BitTorrent claimed first place with no trouble whatsoever, winning 62% of the votes. Last year's favorite, Gnutella, fell hard to second place, with just less than 11% of the total. eMule and eDonkey grabbed most of the write-in votes, except for the person who believes “communism is wrong”. BitTorrent users can check out legaltorrents.com for many gigabytes of music, books and movies all released under Creative Commons licenses.

Year after year, what people drink while programming is one of the most hotly debated categories. Especially among the write-in responses, our voters are loyal to their beverages beyond belief. Caffeine in all its forms continues its reign, claiming around 85% of all votes. And who drinks Five Alive? I didn't even know they made that anymore!

In its third year on the ballot, the embedded distribution category continued to gain an increasing amount of total votes. Judging by the write-ins, a lot of embedded Linux work is done using customized or homemade variations. Among the commercial variants, the PDA environment Qtopia remains the favorite with a strong lead, almost twice the number of votes as the second-place MontaVista. The Open Embedded Project also is attracting a number of developers.

With just less than 20% of all the votes, RackSpace is your favorite Web-hosting service again this year. But most of the votes in this category continue to come in the form of write-ins, almost 64%. So what are you using? OVH, Speakeasy, Amen (a French service) and DreamHost all received several mentions. Overall, Web hosting remains a DIY job among this voting crowd.