A Look at the LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards Winners

Every year LinuxQuestions.org hosts a members choice awards, which lets members of the site vote for their favorite Linux distributions and open source applications. There’s not a lot of change in the results from last year, but the results do show a few interesting changes. GNOME has been unseated as favorite desktop, the GIMP has gone up in the polls even further, and LinuxQuestions.org has its first-ever tie in the NoSQL category.

Of course the first result most folks will want to know about is the favorite desktop distribution. Once again, Ubuntu has taken the crown, though not quite as handily as last year. Ubuntu came in first with 21.83%, compared to 28.56% last year. Interestingly, fewer people voted on the desktop distribution this year (875 compared to 970 last year). Fedora and openSUSE also lost ground between 2010 and 2011, but Slackware, Linux Mint, Arch, and CrunchBang all made decent gains.

On the server side, Debian came in first once again with 31.15% of the vote. (Compared to 29.35% last year.) CentOS dropped by about 1% to 14%, and Ubuntu LTS dropped about 3% from last year to 9.03%.

Desktop winner this year? KDE, with about 33% of the vote. This may be because the GNOME users are split between Cinnamon, GNOME Shell, Mate, and Unity. Xfce jumped from third place last year to second, with 27.59% this year. Unity had only 4.63% of the vote, and GNOME Shell had 19.14%. Again, with the desktop vote fewer people voted in 2011 than in 2010 (627 this year versus 708 last year). Openbox is now the champion of the window manager category – last year it was Compiz.

Cassandra had NoSQL database of the year last year, but this year it’s tied with MongoDB. (Both had 26.23% each.) MySQL remains the most popular database, but it slipped below 50% this year.

LibreOffice now dominates with 81% of the votes – in 2010 OpenOffice.org was the office suite of the year, with more than 55%. LibreOffice had 36.5% last year. Note that some choices were no longer offered for the 2011 members choice, including Lotus Symphony and StarOffice.

Favorite text editor? Vim once again, with more than 31% of the vote. (But down, slightly from 35.88% last year.)

On the mobile side, Android is the clear and dominant winner with nearly 70% of the vote. CyanogenMod comes in second with a respectable 14.34% of the vote.

The full results are on the LinuxQuestions.org site.

What Does it Mean?

It should go without saying that the LinuxQuestions.org awards are in good fun and give a bit of insight into community choices, but probably shouldn’t be taken as gospel for the larger community. It is interesting to see how tastes change year over year, and it’s also a reminder just how much choice Linux users have.

If you didn’t vote in the LinuxQuestions.org awards, give us a shout in the comments about your favorites.