We added a couple great new categories this year, so be sure to read on to see the results!
It's time for another Readers' Choice issue of Linux Journal! The format last year was well received, so we've followed suit making your voices heard loud again. I couldn't help but add some commentary in a few places, but for the most part, we just reported results. Please enjoy this year's Readers' Choice Awards!
Although this year the Debian/Ubuntu-based distros took the lion's share of the votes, the “Best Linux Distribution” category is a bit like “Best Kind of Pizza”—even the bottom of the list is still pizza. It's hard to go wrong with Linux, and the wide variety of votes only proves how many different choices exist in our wonderful Open Source world.
Ubuntu 16.5%
Debian 16.4%
Linux Mint 11%
Arch Linux 8.5%
Fedora 8.3%
CentOS 6%
openSUSE 5.3%
Kubuntu 4.1%
Gentoo 2.9%
Slackware 2.7%
Xubuntu 2.5%
Other 2.3%
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 1.6%
NixOS 1.4%
elementary OS 1.3%
Lubuntu 1.2%
CrunchBang 1%
Mageia .7%
LXLE .4%
Tails .4%
Android-x86 .3%
Bodhi Linux .3%
Chakra .3%
Kali Linux .3%
PCLinuxOS .3%
SolydK .3%
Mandriva .1%
Oracle Linux .1%
Android is such a dominant force in the mobile world, we decided to allow Android variants to be counted separately. So although the underlying system on some of these are indeed Android, it seems far more informative this way.
Stock Android 37.1%
Sailfish OS 27.6%
CyanogenMod 20.2%
Other 3%
Ubuntu Phone 3%
Amazon Fire OS 1.5%
Ubuntu for Android 1.4%
Replicant .8%
Tizen .8%
Samsung 29%
Jolla 26.7%
Nexus 16.5%
Other 7.1%*
HTC 7%
LG 5.3%
Sony 3.7%
Nokia 1.8%
Huawei 1.4%
GeeksPhone 1%
Amazon .6%
*Under “Other”, Motorola got many write-ins, followed by OnePlus.
Google Nexus 7 35.3%
Google Nexus 10 14.8%
Samsung Galaxy Tab 14%
Samsung Galaxy Note 9.8%
ASUS Transformer Pad 8.4%
Other 6.4%
Kindle Fire HD 4.7%
ASUS MeMO Pad 2%
Dell Venue 1.6%
Acer Iconia One 1.4%
Samsung Galaxy Note Edge .9%
Ekoore Python S3 .7%
We are a Raspberry Pi-loving bunch, that's for sure! But really, who can blame us? With the new B+ model, the already awesome RPi is getting sleeker and more useful. I'm no fortune teller, but I suspect I know next year's winner already.
Raspberry Pi 71.4%
BeagleBone Black 8.1%
Other 4.3%*
Lego Mindstorms Ev3 3.7%
Moto 360 3.4%
Cubieboard 1.7%
Parrot A.R Drone 1.7%
Samsung Gear S 1.4%
Yamaha Motif XF8 1.1%
Nvidia Jetson-K1 Development System .8%
Cloudsto EVO Ubuntu Linux Mini PC .5%
VoCore Open Hardware Computer .5%
LG G Watch .4%
RaZberry .4%
VolksPC .4%
IFC6410 Pico-ITX Board .2%
JetBox 5300 .1%
*Under “Other”, the most popular write-ins were Odroid and CuBox.
This category used to be a rating of which vendors worked the best with Linux, but thankfully, now most laptops work fairly well. So, we truly get to see the cream rise to the top and focus on things other than “it works with Linux”. It's awesome living in the future.
Lenovo 32%
ASUS 19.3%
Dell 18.5%
System76 10.6%
Other 7.9%*
Acer 4.5%
ThinkPenguin 1.9%
LinuxCertified 1.8%
ZaReason 1.6%
EmperorLinux 1.5%
CyberPower .3%
Eurocom .1%
*Under “Other”, the most popular write-ins were (in this order) Apple running Linux, HP, Toshiba and Samsung.
Dell 36.8%
System76 19.6%
Hewlett-Packard 17.5%
Other 10.3%*
Penguin Computing 9.4%
ZaReason 2.7%
Microway 2.3%
CyberPower 1.4%
*Under “Other”, most of the write-ins were “Build your own”.
Dell 31.4%
IBM 21.2%
Hewlett-Packard 19%
Supermicro 9.5%
Penguin Computing 5.9%
Other 4.7%*
ZaReason 3%
iXsystems 2.8%
Microway 1.9%
Servers Direct .7%
*Under “Other”, most of the write-ins again were “Build your own”.
JuiceSSH 26.7%
Other 24%*
Waze 16.3%
feedly 14%
Google Goggles 7.9%
Ayat 7%
Navfree 6.7%
Memrise 1.7%
QuizUp 1.3%
FreedomPop Messaging .6%
*Under “Other”, the most popular votes were (in this order) OsmAnd, F-Droid, ConnectBot, K-9 Mail, Google Maps, Google Now, Tasker, Wifi Analyzer, AirDroid, KeePassDroid and Titanium Backup.
WordPress 34.7%
Drupal 25.3%
Joomla! 11.1%
MediaWiki 10.5%
Other 10%*
Alfresco 4.3%
WebGUI 1.3%
ikiwiki 1.1%
eZ publish .7%
Wolf CMS .4%
Elgg .3%
Blosxom .2%
*Under “Other”, the most popular write-ins were (in this order) DokuWiki, Plone, Django and Typo3.
When it comes to Web hosting, it's hard to find a company that isn't Linux-friendly these days. In fact, finding a hosting provider running Windows is more of a challenge. As is obvious by our winner (“Other”), the options are amazing. Perhaps a “Worst Web Hosting” category would be more useful!
Other 22.8%*
Amazon 22.5%
Rackspace 13.1%
Linode 10.4%
GoDaddy.com 6.5%
OVH 5.6%
DreamHost 5.4%
1&1 4.8%
LAMP Host 2.9%
Hurricane Electric 2.6%
Liquid Web .6%
RimuHosting .6%
Host Media .5%
Savvis .5%
Blacknight Solutions .4%
Netfirms .4%
Prgmr .4%
*Under “Other”, the most write-ins went to (in this order) Digital Ocean (by a landslide), followed by Hetzner, BlueHost and WebFaction.
Firefox takes the gold this year by a significant margin. Even if you combine Chrome and Chromium, Firefox still takes the top spot. There was a time when we worried that the faithful Firefox would fade away, but thankfully, it's remained strong and continues to be a fast, viable, compatible browser.
Firefox 53.8%
Chrome 26.9%
Chromium 8.1%
Iceweasel 4%
Opera 3%
Other 2%
SeaMonkey .8%
rekonq .5%
dwb .4%
QupZill .4%
Dillo .2%
If I didn't know firsthand how many hard-core geeks live among us, I might accuse Kyle Rankin of voting fraud. His beloved Mutt e-mail client doesn't take top spot, but for a program without any graphical interface, third place is impressive!
Mozilla Thunderbird 44.4%
Gmail 24.7%
Mutt 6.8%
Evolution 5.5%
KMail 5.3%
Other 3.2%
Claws Mail 2.2%
Zimbra 2%
Alpine 1.8%
Geary 1.7%
SeaMonkey 1%
Opera Mail .9%
Sylpheed .4%
Audacity 69.1%
FFmpeg 10.8%
VLC 9.7%
Ardour 4.9%
Other 1.9%
SoX 1.3%
Mixxx 1.1%
LMMS .7%
Format Junkie .5%
We figured VLC would take top spot in the video player category (see below), but it was a bit of a surprise to see how many folks prefer it as an audio player as well. Perhaps it's become the one-stop shop for media playback. Either way, we're thrilled to see VLC on the top.
VLC 25.2%
Amarok 15.3%
Rhythmbox 10.4%
Clementine 8.6%
MPlayer 6.1%
Spotify 5.9%
Audacious 5.5%
Banshee 4.6%
Other 4%*
XBMC 3.1%
foobar2000 3%
Xmms 2.4%
DeaDBeeF 1.2%
MOC .9%
cmus .8%
Ncmpcpp .8%
Guayadeque .6%
Mixxx .4%
MPC-HC .4%
Subsonic .4%
Nightingale .3%
Decibel Audio Player .2%
*Under “Other”, Quod Libet had the most write-ins.
VLC 64.7%
MPlayer 14.5%
XBMC 6.4%
Totem 2.7%
Other 2.7%*
Plex 2%
Kaffeine 1.9%
mpv 1.6%
MythTV 1.6%
Amarok 1.4%
Xmms .3%
Daum Potplayer .2%
Clementine .1%
*Under “Other”, most write-ins were for SMPlayer.
This is another testament to the geek factor when it comes to our readers. We didn't specify “non-linear editor”, so by a transcoding technicality, VLC eked out a win in the video editing category. Well played, VLC, well played.
VLC 17.5%
Kdenlive 16.4%
Blender 15.1%
Avidemux 13.2%
OpenShot 13.2%
Cinelerra 7.5%
PiTiVi 4.9%
LightWorks 4.8%
Other 4.7%
LiVES 1.4%
Shotcut .6%
Jahshaka .4%
Flowblade .4%
In a category that used to have few options, Dropbox still takes top spot, but the margin is closing. It's hard to argue against Dropbox's convenience and stability, but hosting your own data on ownCloud gives it quite a boost into the second-place spot.
Dropbox 30.5%
ownCloud 23.6%
Google Drive 16%
rsync 8.3%
Other 7.5%*
Amazon S3 6.6%
SpiderOak 4.4%
Box 1.8%
Copy 1%
AjaXplorer .3%
*Under “Other”, the most write-ins went to Younited and MEGA. Many also said things like “no cloud is the best choice/my files stay on my storage/local only”.
I rarely play games, so every year I look forward to this category to find the most popular options for those few times I do. I'm personally tickled to see NetHack so high on the list, especially considering the opposition. There's just something about wandering around random tunnels that appeals to the old-school DnD player in all of us.
Civilization 5 26.5%
Other 23.5%*
Team Fortress 2 8.7%
NetHack 8.4%
X-Plane 10 7.1%
Dota 6.1%
Bastion 5.4%
Scorched 3D 3.7%
Destiny 3.6%
Ultima IV 1.9%
FreeCol 1.8%
Kpat 1.4%
FreeOrion 1.1%
Ryzom .9%
*Under “Other”, the most write-ins were (in this order) Minecraft, 0 A.D., Frozen Bubble, Battle for Wesnoth, Portal and Counter Strike.
Other 23.5%*
Clonezilla 18.9%
Dropbox 14.3%
Bacula 11.7%
rdiff-backup 9%
CrashPlan 8.5%
Amanda 5.6%
Back In Time 3.2%
luckyBackup 2.1%
Tivoli Storage Manager 1.7%
Symantec Backup Exec .9%
Areca-Backup .5%
Storix .3%
*Under “Other”, the most popular answer was “my own scripts” or “rsync”, followed by BackupPC, Duplicity, Spider Oak, rsnapshot and Deja Dup (in that order).
I think the relationship with Vagrant has helped Oracle's VirtualBox significantly in popularity. Yes, Vagrant works with other virtualization platforms, but since it so seamlessly integrates with VirtualBox, I think it gets quite a boost. Virtualization is such an efficient and reliable way to implement systems, bare-metal solutions are almost a thing of the past!
Oracle VM VirtualBox 33.4%
VMware 22.3%
KVM 21.1%
XEN 5.7%
QEMU 5.3%
OpenStack 4.9%
Other 4.2%*
OpenVZ 1.7%
Linux-VServer 1.3%
Symantec Workspace Virtualization .1%
*Under “Other”, the most write-ins went to Docker, ProxMox and LXC, in that order.
Nagios 27.1%
Wireshark 20.7%
htop 12.3%
Zabbix 10.5%
Other 8.6%*
Zenoss 6.2%
Munin 3.4%
PC Monitor 2.8%
New Relic 1.9%
Opsview 1.2%
SaltStack 1%
NTM (Network Traffic Monitor) .7%
xosview .7%
Manage Engine .5%
FlowViewer .3%
Circonus .2%
SysPeek .2%
*Under “Other”, most write-ins went to Icinga and OpenNMS.
It was interesting to see Git take top spot in this category, because although it certainly would work to use standard version control on configuration files, I always assumed it would be used alongside tools like Chef or Puppet. If nothing else, the DevOps movement has taught crusty old system administrators like myself to treat configuration files like code. Version control is incredible, and it seems as though most readers agree.
Git 39.4%
Puppet 17.2%
Ansible 8.9%
cron jobs 8.8%
Subversion 7.6%
Chef 5%
SaltStack 5.4%
Other 4.6%*
CFEngine 3%
*Under “Other”, most write-ins went to NixOps.
Nmap 21.9%
Kali Linux (formerly BackTrack Linux) 18.4%
KeePass 15.6%
Tor 13.9%
pfSense 6.5%
Tails 6%
Netfilter 4.9%
Metasploit 4.8%
Other 3.7%
AIDE 2.4%
OSSEC 2.1%
Python 30.2%
C++ 17.8%
C 16.7%
Perl 7.1%
Java 6.9%
Other 4.6%
Ruby 4.3%
Go 2.4%
JavaScript 2.4%
QML 2.2%
Fortran 1.4%
Haskell 1.4%
Lisp 1.2%
Erlang .6%
Rust .6%
D .4%
Hack .1%
*Under “Other”, most write-ins went to Scala, PHP and Clojure (in that order).
Python is incredibly powerful, and it appears to be a favorite in both the scripting and programming categories. As someone who knows Bash and a little PHP, I think it's clear what I need to focus on as I delve into the world of development. Meaningful whitespace, here I come!
Python 37.1%
Bash/Shell scripts 27%
Perl 11.8%
PHP 8.4%
JavaScript 6.7%
Ruby 4.9%
Other 2.1%
Lua 2%
vi/vim 45.6%
Emacs 11.6%
gedit 11%
Nano 9.5%
Kate 8.8%
Other 8.1%*
Geany 4.1%
joe 1.3%
*Under “Other”, a large amount of write-ins went to Sublime.
Docker is clearly our winner here, and rightly so—what a game-changing technology. It's nice to see Jolla/Sailfish get some love as well. We love Android, but having a choice is a vital part of who we are as Open Source advocates.
Docker 28%
Jolla and Sailfish OS 19%
LibreOffice 7%
ownCloud 5%
Steam 5%
Zenoss Control Center 5%
Raspberry Pi 4%
Git 4%
Apache Cordova/OpenOffice/Spark/Tika 3%
Ansible 2%
Elementary OS 2%
OpenStack 2%
Zabbix 2%
CoreOS 2%
Firefox OS 2%
KDE Connect 1%
NixOS and NixOps 1%
Open Media Vault 1%
This is my favorite new category for the Readers' Choice Awards. Imagine attending a Linux conference and asking everyone the coolest thing they've done with Linux. That's basically what happened here! We've listed a handful of our favorites, but for the entire list, check out our Web site: www.linuxjournal.com/rc2014/coolest.
Note: the most common answers were “use it”; “rescue data/photos/whatever off broken Windows machines”; “convert friends/family/businesses to Linux”; “learn”; “teach”; “get a job”; “home automation”; and “build a home media server”. The following list is of our favorite more-specific and unique answers, not the most common ones.
Building my procmail pre-spam spam filter back in the mid-late 1990s.
450-node compute cluster.
7.1 channel preamp with integrated mopidy music player.
A robot running Linux (for the Eurobot annual competition).
Accidentally printing on the wrong continent.
Adding an audio channel to a video while also syncing it.
Analyzed NASA satellite data with self-written code.
Annoyed the cat remotely.
Automated my entire lighting setup in my house to respond to voice and my mobile apps.
Automatic window plant irrigation system.
Bathroom radio.
Brewing beer.
Built an application that runs on the International Space Station.
Built a system for real-time toll collection for a major toll highway system.
Built our own smartphone.
Built Web-based home alarm system on Raspberry Pi.
Cluster of Raspberry Pis to crack encrypted office documents.
Controlled my Parrot drone.
Controlled the comms for 186 Wind turbines.
Controlling my Meade Telescope with Stellarium under Linux.
Converted my old VHS family videos, using a laptop more than ten years old.
Created a mesh network in the subarctic.
Created an ocean environmental sensor buoy with radio data transmitter.
Discovered new planets.
Fixed a jabber server in Denver, USA, while in a hotel lobby in Amman, Jordan.
Got Linus' autograph on a Red Hat 5.0 CD.
Hacked my coffee machine to send me a text message when the coffee is ready.
Introduced my daughter to Lego Mindstorm EV3.
Monitor the temp and humidity of my wine cellar and open the doors when too hot or humid.
Replaced the controller in my hot tub with a Raspberry Pi.
Scripted opening and closing of a co-worker's CD tray every 15 seconds for four days.
Used an LFS system to move ACH transfers for a national gas company.
Flushed my toilet from another city.
Remote chicken door.
Web-based sprinkler controller for 16 stations on a Raspberry PI (also control the pool and yard lights).
Chaining SSH tunnels together to get from work to home via three hops due to restrictive network settings.
Built a system that monitors a renewable energy installation with two fixed solar arrays, a two axis sun tracking solar array and a wind turbine. Production and weather data are displayed on a Web site in real time.
Back in the days of modems, I had my computer call up my girlfriend every morning, so she would wake up and go to work.
Used a Wii controller, through Bluetooth with my Linux computer as an Infrared Camera, to detect the movement of my daughter's Fisher Price Sit and Spin Pony, and to control a video game.
Note: this category was write-in only, and many people listed more than one tool. Many people also answered “my brain”, “my fingers”, “my computer” or “Linux itself”, because we failed to specify that it be a Linux tool. Thus, figuring out the percentages for this category was nearly impossible. The list below gives the answers for the most-popular “Single-Most Important Linux-specific Tool You Use At Work”, in order.
SSH
Vi/Vim
Git
LibreOffice
Emacs
Bash
Terminal/Shell
Eclipse
While this entire list is full of awesome and useful tools, my needs line up with the majority of readers. SSH and Vim are my bread and butter. Someday, those Emacs people will see the light.