2004 Readers' Choice Awards

All these vendors are releasing development tools like crazy, but our voters stick with the basics, thanks anyway. GCC and Emacs combine to claim 33% of the total votes. After that, it's Eclipse and KDevelop. Among write-ins, vi, vim and VisualWorks SmallTalk are the most popular.

Last year, vim beat vi by almost three times as many votes; this year, it was by only twice as many. Hmm, I wonder what that could mean? Seriously, what's the voting process for if not a chance to develop new conspiracy theories? Coming in at a strong number four is Kate, the KDE Advanced Text Editor. Could readers finally be ready for a modern user interface in an editor instead of Meta-x this and Escape-colon-that? Stay tuned.

Be honest now, you all were most anxious about voting in this category, weren't you? Nothing screams excitement like sysadmin tools. But we're grateful to have them, that's for sure. Webmin collected barely more than 25% of the total votes to take first place. On the write-in side, a collection of text editors and shells claimed most of the votes.

HP claimed first and second place for a combined 35% of all votes in this category. Last year's first-place finisher, the Altix 3000, fell to third this year. The write-in votes featured a lot of Dell and IBM server variations. And, of course, many of you continue to build your own servers.

Only a few hundred voters expressed a preference in this category. Among those who did vote, the Cyclades AlterPath ACS was the favorite for a second year.

Laptops continue to dominate this category, although various Zaurus PDA models made a number of appearances in the write-in section. The big hardware vendors—Dell, IBM, Sony, Toshiba and Apple—ate up most of the write-in votes. HP introduced its Linux laptop too late to catch the voting, so we'll see how they do next time.

PowerPC and Opteron switched places this year, but only 20 votes separated the two architectures. Meanwhile, Athlon held on to the top spot for another year, having received 40% of the total vote count. Intel Itanium picked up the most write-in votes.

Receiving 72% of the votes, OpenOffice.org is by far this year's favorite office program. In fact, OpenOffice.org received 2,180 more votes than the second-place finisher, AbiWord. It's hard to beat office software that makes more logical sense than its competitors, is compatible with almost everything and, oh yeah, is free.

Ah, favorite programming language—time for a flame war. A bit of a shake-up this year: after being knocked out of first place last year, C reclaims it this year and C++ drops to third. The P language in the top three is Perl, while PHP slips to fourth place, closely followed by Python. The voting was close this year, too; only 59 votes separated C from C++.