The results of the LinuxQuestions member’s choice awards are in. The results: Ubuntu is the best distribution, OpenOffice.org the best office suite, GAIM the best instant messenger, KDE the best desktop environment (Run! Run! Duck! Duck!), Konqueror the best filemanager, etc. Do with the results as you please.
Do with the results as you please.
Yeah, like *burn* them. How can this become anything but a flame war?
Why sensor news just because of that? Sure it’s feel-good news, but seeing that KDE and Konqueror won the polls it does make me feel good and I’m happy to have seen it 🙂 .
WoW, Slackware came in second for distribution of the year award. It missed first place by 12 votes. As a Slack user I have always thought that I held some degree of minority status within the ranks of Linux distros. Patrick Volkerding must be feeling pretty good today knowing his vision of a stable and secure distro is so well appreciated.
Probably because we are vocal users who are interested in the community. I wouldn’t exactly call these stats the end all either way.
But I guess it’s nice to brag to counter someone bringing up the Distrowatch page hit rank of Ubuntu
A lot of Slackware users go to LinuxQuestions.org for the forums (help), it’s the biggest and most popular of the distrubution forums. So I would take this result with a grain of salt.
I can’t speak for the rest of the nominations but their should be a real indicator since they are distro independant.
Plus Slackware won last year!
So unlucky that they lost this year. 
Big ups to all the winners but it looks like more of a popularity contest. All of the winners were the most popular in their categories, with the exception of Quanta. I never heard of that application until now which I’m going to download when I get home.
Big ups to all the winners but it looks like more of a popularity contest. All of the winners were the most popular in their categories.
Hmmmm, I think that is exactly what it is supposed to be.
Floyd
http://www.just-think-it.com
Actually it’s quite hard to not know Quanta. What are major alternatives? I can only come up with Bluefish.
Kind of hilarious to see vi as the most popular text editor. That would be liking awarding “copy con filename” as the most popular DOS editor.
Floyd
http://www.just-think-it.com
vi is a very powerful editor, if not the easiest to learn or use. There is no comparison to ‘copy con filename’. Personally, I like jEdit, but I sometimes use vim when working in a console.
“if not the easiest to learn or use”
Hehehe, another one of these threads.
Obviously you haven’t tried Pico or Nano, those are by far the easiest and most user intuitive command line editors I’ve seen. They don’t have many features, but they are both fully qualified text editors. IMO Nano should be included with every distribution, when you tell a complete newbie to edit a configuration file the last thing they need is to have to learn the editor as well, that wouldn’t be necessary with Nano.
Sorry if you misunderstood me. What I meant was that it is not the easiest editor to learn. Although using it is not too bad once you get used to the modal editing thing…
I second that.
Oops, about including Nano in every distro by default.
In other words, you know nothing about Vi. I’m using it for development for 4 years now. Powerful, fast, with a lot of extensions.
Sure, it has not mr. Clippy (OK, there’s VIgor;) or a cute, little yellow dog, but if you’re an UNIX user, you find it a advantage. 😉
…a “common” distro. Call it the Users Choice Distro. Or just get Kubuntu as several K apps are user favorites already.
I’m all for these awards — give *nix/distro developers useful feedback on what users actually want. Hard to achieve this just from downloads and “sales”.
Floyd
http://www.just-think-it.com
> KDE the best desktop environment (Run! Run! Duck! Duck!),
Well if memory serves, KDE usually wins this competition (and by a big margin), so it’s not a surprise..
KDE even increased its lead (64.86% in 2005 vs 58.25% in 2004), while Gnome has reduced slightly its percentage 25.67% in 2005 vs 30.92% in 2004).
[ No while I like KDE this is not trolling, just giving the numbers for what they worth. ]
It’s suprising to me that Eclipse (262 votes,31.99%) won by such a near margin from Kdevelop (257 votes,31.38%)… Is Kdevelop really that good? What languages does is support?
I guess I’ll have to try this one out, though it won’t really fit nicely with the rest of my (gnome) desktop
.
Is Kdevelop really that good?
Kdevelop has been regarded as one of the best IDEs for years. But it does not have the amount of hype/momentum Eclipse has had the last few years. If you are writing Java, Eclipse is the winner but otherwise it’s more personal preferences that counts. Kdevelop has good support for GTK and Qt programming.
What languages does is support?
The most common, the quality of support may vary. C/C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Pascal, Ada, Haskell, Fortran……..
it won’t really fit nicely with the rest of my (gnome) desktop
If you get your work done in a more efficient manner, does it matter?
Edited 2006-03-07 17:33
i always consider the fact gnome apps integrate better in kde than visa versa a nice plus for KDE… esp with the new tool to use the KDE file dialogue in most gnome apps (http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=36077).
Looking thru each poll, the # of votes for developer / expert tools is typ 800-1500 compared with up to 2500 votes for general polls like distro & desktop env’s.
Note that vi/vim came in at 38% with 1549 votes cast.
Polls are just polls and this one probably has higher representation of developers & proficient nix people than the whole range nix users out there.
Make of it what you will sums it up
When you look at the numbers, and even compare with last years result, some of them are quite interresting.
Like in the text editor category, you see Kate in a stable position behind vi/vim after last years overtaking of emacs/xemacs. I’m guessing after the recent love gedit has received they too may pass emacs/xemacs next year.
And finally XMMS got rightfully(IMHO) kicked down from the top spot by something more modern. The result are more or less a reverse of last years between amaroK and XMMS. Not really a surprise.
In the mail category it looks like nearly half of the Evolution users has migrated to Thunderbird. Some of it are caused by the none Gnome users switching, as you see nearly no Evolution usage on non Gnome desktops these days. And it follows last years trend showing the decline.
I’m a member and didn’t even know there was voting going on lol…. i guess I was too focused on my threads and the issues I was working out to notice… how many people like me are there? ;-p
Heh, I was gonna register to vote, but found out that I was allready a member! I can’t remember registering thou… :$
Ubuntu is #1? Personally I wouldn’t know, Ubuntu is the only distribution that won’t install on my computer. I guess I’m missing out.
I had voted in that survey and I am glad that majority of people who voted have the same tastes in applications as I have. Other than Quanta, I had voted for all the applications which came first place in the survey.
Ubuntu went from last year’s 7.59% to 19.49%. Slackware and most other distros stayed more or less unchanged. Of the more popular distros, Fedora (15.09% –> 9.38%), Gentoo (13.54% –> 8.99%) and Mandrake (10.13% –> 5.79%) went downslide. SUSE (10.13% –> 13.18%) improved a bit.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=272090
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=409010
or at least all the multitude of opinionated comments? t5he response so far hasbeen rather lame hehe
or at least all the multitude of opinionated comments? t5he response so far hasbeen rather lame hehe
All the kids are still in school I guess.
Don’t worry, they’ll get home soon and then it will begin.
Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu
Office Suite of the Year – OpenOffice.org
Browser of the Year – Epiphany
Mail Client of the Year – Evolution
Text Editor of the Year -gedit
Open Source Game of the Year – that one OSS FPS
Window Manager of the Year – metacity
Desktop Environment of the Year – GNOME
Audio Multimedia Application of the Year – amaroK
Video Multimedia Application of the Year – totem
Messaging App of the Year – Gaim
LiveCD Distribution of the Year – ubuntu
Windows on Linux App of the Year – Wine
File Manager of the Year – nautilus
Graphics App of the Year – GIMP
Shell of the Year – bash
amarok is cool 😉
in other words, i have a rather different one… why doesn’t osnews start a vote for these 😉
and this time not just 6 US hours, but 24 at least
Simply because Frozen Bubble and Tux Racer are in the Games menu after the default install does not necessarily mean they are better than BZFlag or Wesnoth…
What do you think?
Simply because Frozen Bubble and Tux Racer are in the Games menu after the default install does not necessarily mean they are better than BZFlag or Wesnoth…
What do you think?
I think that the penguin sliding in the snow PWNS!!!
Edited 2006-03-07 21:16
I like all the mentioned games – but AFAIK tuxracer is dead. PlanetPenguin Racer is neat thou, it’s a continuation of tux racer – it supports for example higher screen resolutions, and I belive I heard that 0.5 beta supports multiplayer.
with some of the polls. Especially the one concerning audio multimedia application of the year. Whet is the point of placing in one poll such different applications like k3b, ardour or audacity, xmms & amaroK?
Also 13% votes on Ubuntu as livecd of the year shows that these polls are mere statistics and cannot actually show what was best or has made biggest progress during last year. Or maybe I’m just missing the awesomeness of some applications? Anyway, I see it as a useless bunch of forum threads, which can only be used as a flamethrower…
But, I’d look forward to a poll about biggest expectations for 2006.
Anyway, I see it as a useless bunch of forum threads, which can only be used as a flamethrower
True, the poll is not well controlled, users can vote twice or more if they want to, some day someone will make a more reliable poll.
Disclosure: Yes, I have studied some statistics, but the following musings result from eterogeneous data collected around the internet and zero serious work, so take them for what they are worth, i.e. very little. Desktop: standard Kubuntu 6.04 (alpha), browser: Konqueror, window manager: KDE. Laptop: Vector 5.1, fluxbox, firefox.
There are around 950 million computers (desktop and laptop) in use in the world today, 95% of which in North America, Europe and Asia. Windows has around 90% market share, with Apple and Linux neck and neck for second place at 4%. So, there should be around 37 million pc running linux as desktop or laptop.
Now, 37 million is approximately the electoral turnout for a mid-sized European country (e.g. Italy or the United Kingdom). Election polls for these countries with a sample size of 1500-2000 people and the margin or error is something like plus or minus 2.5%.
So, given that the number of votes is also 1500-2000 in the most popular categories, I would assume that this is our margin of error as well (could be considered conservative as the pc data might include servers and business pc as well, but consider that the sample is probably not random – and this might increase the error and bias the estimate).
Based on the above:
Winners: Ubuntu, of course: when you nephews will asked you about the year when Ubuntu blitz-krieged linux, you will be able to tell them: “I saw it, I was there!”.
I put Slackware in the winners even though it has not gained any market share as I find incredible how it still manages to retain its popularity in spite of dropping Gnome official support and keeping a very limited, some would say minimal, developers base. According to an article by disto-historian Ladislav of Distrowatch, around 1993 Slackware had a Windows-like market dominance in Linux (90%!), but the surge of point-and-click linux meant steady losses (26% in 2003 and 19% in 2004): contrary to my expectations, it halted the slide in 2005. Patrick and Goliah.
Drawers: Knoppix lost massive market share (from 58% to 39% in the live cd category), but that was to be expected: what disto hasn’t got a live cd version now? However, it managed to keep a first place at a very healthy distance from the second player (no prize for guessing who it is), so it’s a drawer together with Debian and Suse (both pretty much unchanged). Debian finally went stable with Sarge while Suse opened up its development, and this helped to shore up the citadel and survive unscathed the raid of the U-stormtroopers.
Losers: Gentoo is losing out in the fight for the uber-geek hearts against Slackware (from 13.5% to 9%).
Among the big boys, Fedora lost out (from 15.1% in 2004 to 9.4% n 2005), and so did Mandriva (from 10.2% to 5.8%).
This last fact is particularly worrying due to its size (its popularity almost halved) and due to the fact that Mandriva acquired two distributions (Lycoris and Conectiva), that should have boosted its user base in the intention of management, whereas the opposite seems to have happened. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: purchasing a distribution and integrating it does not seem to yield particular advantages, as the distraction of integrating the two entities does not pay off. The same happens often in the general market, just look at Compaq and Hewlett-Packard. Competitors almost always benefit as one tends to lose focus and losing precious time re-organising. It is not a chance that some of the biggest winners in technology tend to be very wary of large acquisitions, (note: Dell is the most famous example, while Cisco is the biggest exception to this rule).
The rest is below the margin of error, so difficult to say anything meaningful. What a ride!
Steff
“Election polls for these countries with a sample size of 1500-2000 people and the margin or error is something like plus or minus 2.5%”
Election poll samples are probably random but members of linuxquestions are self chosen to vote so the margin of error is way way more than +-2.5%.
I think this poll story has received too much credence and analysis.
My favorite is mcedit. I use mc as my default filemanager most fo the time.
My favorite is mcedit. I use mc as my default filemanager most fo the time.
I use Joe, for all of us that learned Wordstar eons ago it’s a godsend.