2005 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards

Gaim integrates with both GNOME and KDE, thereby setting a desktop application paradigm for the future—an application that plays standards, not desktop wars. Besides that, the selection of smiley-face icons is great for adding a touch of sarcasm with a well-placed smiley-face wearing a halo or shedding a tear.

Here's a fun project for a cold fall evening: compare the table of contents in the first edition of Running Linux to the one in the fourth edition, and see how much more you can do now and how much less time you need to spend tweaking low-level stuff. Much space in the first edition, for example, was used to explain things such as kermit and elm—it even brought up troff (shudder). The fourth edition, however, talks about KDE and GNOME, not to mention the final section on Web development with LAMP.

We know it's not your fault that you keep playing Frozen Bubble. We can't stand the pitiful little noise the penguin makes when we lose either.

You guys are suckers for cute animation.

Yes, we know training is important and the horrors of what can happen when a poorly trained sysadmin is set loose in a server room. But we don't know why IBM won; in the ads, that kid who looks like Eminem's little brother seems pretty bored. Maybe a Mick Bauer live security intrusion demo would hold his attention a little better.

Readers always will have a special place in their hearts for a Web site that, on one page worth of headlines, offers updates on PSP 2.0, marketing strategies for Firefly (Joss Whedon's canceled TV show that made it to the big screen), Google's new IM client and house-sitting robots in Japan.

Oh, François, the readers, they love you still. Un affair de coeur, c'est tr� beau, non? 2005 was pretty significant for the second- and third-place finishers, as regular Paranoid Penguin columnist Mick Bauer turned it over to a rotating author list and Reuven Lerner celebrated his 100th At the Forge.

We know our US readers aren't actually running MPlayer because of the software patent situation, but it's nice to see what people in countries with more sensible patent systems can do.

For our readers living outside the US, MPlayer really does run on anything—even your Zaurus.

Besides the fact that Astaro works well, our readers appreciate that the Astaro box isn't just a “firewall” in the ordinary packet-filtering sense. It also comes with antispam, antivirus, intrusion detection and a Web proxy—features that would be expensive add-ons for other firewalls.