Survey Reveals Some Open Source Surprises

LinuxQuestions is out with results from its annual Members Choice Awards survey, which highlights favorite open source platforms and applications, ranging from favorite Linux distros to favorite new innovative hardware ideas in the open source realm. Probably, if asked to guess which Linux distro was rated the favorite, many readers would guess Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but that's not the favorite. Here is what the survey respondents had to say.

"We had a record number of votes cast for the twelfth straight year," LinuxQuestions reported, also noting that some of the races were extremely close. In perhaps the biggest surprise from the survey, Slackware was rated best desktop Linux distribution. It pulled 20.59 percent of the vote, while Ubuntu grabbed 17.02 percent of the 981 total votes. Linux Mint was third with 16.21 percent of the vote, and Debian was fourth with 12.64 percent.

LinuxQuestions has made available some useful graphics to represent how the votes stacked up in many categories of open source software. Check them out here--worth looking at.

LibreOffice was named best office suite by survey respondents, and won by one of the largest margins in the survey with 85.14 percent of the vote.  Some may be surprised to find that KDE was named best desktop environment with 31.31 percent of the vote.

We predicted that the Raspberry Pi credit card-sized Linux device would be one of the biggest open source stories of the year, and, sure enough, survey respondents named it best open source hardware product of the year with an overwhelming 79.29 percent of votes.

Be sure and check out all of the results, and if you're wondering which browser won, it was Firefox with over 52 percent of votes.