LQ Members Choice Award Winners Announced
Every year Linux fans wait for the results of LinuxQuestions.org Member Choice Award Winners and today the end of 2014 results are in. What was the favorite distribution this year? Which was the most used messenger these days? Who brings the best office suite or desktop environment? You might be surprised.
LibreOffice won the Office Suite of the Year poll in Jeremy Garcia's LinuxQuestions.org Member Choice Awards for 2014. LibreOffice had four other competitors including Apache OpenOffice and Calligra, but LibreOffice won its category hands-down. It was really no contest with LibreOffice picking up over 86% of the vote. The runner-up was Apache OpenOffice with less than 8.5% or 43 votes.
Web browsers, always a staple of software stacks, is becoming more and more important these days. In fact, some people even believe the humble browser is actually "the Internet." So, it's no small consequence who rules that space. This year the honor went to Firefox with almost 58% or 371 votes. The next runner-up was Chrome with 13.55% of the vote. Poor Slimboat didn't get one single vote.
The favorite graphic application by far was GIMP with almost 66% of the vote. Competitors included big names like ImageMagick, Krita, and Blender but GIMP ran away with 238 votes. Inkscape came in second with 28 or 7.73% of the vote.
Window managers and desktop environments are separated into distinct categories with entries like Enlightenment, Compiz, KWin, Fluxbox, Window Maker, and Openbox in the window manager choices. KWin pulled ahead in the 27 member field but only by single digits. KWin garnered 20% of the vote with second placer Openbox earned 13.12% or 53 votes. Desktop environments is a smaller field containing entries such as KDE, GNOME Shell, Cinnamon, Unity, and Xfce. KDE again pulled ahead, but not by a landslide. KDE earned 33.57% or 187 votes with second place Xfce getting 145 votes or 26% of the vote.
Desktop distribution of the year is my favorite category and this year Slackware tied last years winner in a three way tie with Linux Mint. They all earned 202 votes during the survey period making them have to share the honor this year. Debian came in second with 9% or 83 votes. Last year Ubuntu held the title alone. CentOS won favorite server distribution of the year with 30.74% of the vote, just barely ahead of Slackware that got 153 or 29.03% of the vote.
Other category winners included ownCloud as the OSS Cloud solution, MariaDB as favorite database, Android as favorite mobile OS, VirtualBox the favorite virtualization/container, and favorite audio and video apps of the year was the same VLC. See all the categories and winners at LinuxQuestions.org.