results: Debian-user's favourite FLOSS
Hi debian-user,
Here is a summary of the mini-poll that I conducted recently on Debian-user:
Firefox and GIMP reign as per my expecations, just like they did last
year. I was however surprised that there weren't any Krita, Mono,
Beagle, Tomboy, or Banshee fans, with users sticking to Vim, xpdf,
XMMS, and Mutt.
The most interesting category proved to be that of 'misc utilities'
which revealed users' inability to stay away from stuff like grep,
sudo, wget, and ssh, while the process monitor of choice happened to
be top.
As many would expect Writer from OpenOffice.org (OOo) was the
favourite word processor, aptitude took the package manager title
(followed by APT), MPlayer taking the honours for favourite video
player, and K3b taking those for disc-burner. I was surprised to find
gnumeric nearly having a tie with the mighty OOo's Calc. Gaim, very
popular with Windows users, happens to be a favourite instant
messenger.
Great honours were granted to essential utilities, Linux, GCC, Xorg,
GLibc, and Bash.
The title for the poll was "What's your favourite FLOSS", yet many
people found it irresistible to leave out their non-free favourites,
which is okay (just to encourage developers to develop free superior
alternatives). This was most notable with the pdf-reader category
where the winner happened to be Acroread, probably gleaned from
Marillat's ever-handy site.
Here's the raw data (in brackets is no. of votes):
audio editor:
* audacity (8) -> last year's winner
* sox (2)
audio player:
* xmms (9)
* Amarok (4) -> last year's winner
* Rhythmbox, cdcd, mpg123, Totem, beep-media-player, moc, Kaffeine, xine (2)
cd-ripper:
* abcde, grip (6)
* sound-juicer (5) -> last year's winner
desktop OR window manager:
* GNOME (8) -> last year's winner
* KDE (6)
* Fluxbox (5)
* Xfce4 (4)
* FVWM, IceWM (3)
DBMS:
* MySQL (4) -> last year's winner
* PostgreSQL (3)
development:
* Python (9)
* GTK+ (4)
* GCC, G++ (3)
* PHP (2)
* Perl, GCC, Emacs (2)
disc burner:
* K3b (12) -> last year's winner
* X-CD-Roast (4)
* wodim, gnomebaker (3)
* growisofs, nautilus-cd-burner cdrecord/wodim, brasero (2)
e-mail client:
* mutt (13)
* Thunderbird/Icedove (7) -> last year's winner
* kmail, Mozilla (4)
* Sylpheed (3)
* Evolution (2)
file archiver:
* tar, Ark (2)
file manager:
* MC (7) -> last year's winner
* Nautilus (7)
* Konqueror (6)
* bash (5)
* Thunar, emelFM (3)
* worker (2)
finance:
* gnucash (4) -> last year's winner
* KMyMoney (2)
ftp client:
* gftp (6) -> last year's winner
* ncftp (4)
* llftp (3)
* Konqueror, Nautilus, ftp, yafc, vsftpd (2)
image editor:
* GIMP (21)
* ImageMagick (3)
* Krita, Inkscape (2)
image viewer:
* GQview (9)
* gthumb (8) -> last year's winner
* xzgv, eog, ImageMagick, qiv, digikam, feh (2)
instant messenger:
* Gaim (11) -> last year's winner
* centericq (3)
mathematics:
* bc, Octave , gnuplot (3)
misc utilities:
* grep (19)
* sudo (16) -> last year's winner
* wget (16)
* ssh (10)
* lsof (7)
* less (6)
* Bash, ls, su, locate,sed (4)
* screen, cat, awk (3)
* cut, eject, dpkg-www, meld, du (2)
p2p:
* aMule (3) -> last year's winner
* bittornado, KTorrent, rtorrent, gtk-gnutella (2)
package manager:
* aptitude (16) -> last year's winner
* apt (13)
* synaptic (7)
pdf-reader:
* xpdf (13)
* evince (8)
* kpdf (4)
* gpdf (2)
spreadsheet:
* OpenOffice.org Calc (14)
* gnumeric (13)
system monitoring:
* top (13) -> last year's winner
tag editor:
* easytag (5) -> last year's winner
* ex-falso (4)
* id3v2 (3)
terminal emulator:
* gnome-terminal (9) -> last year's winner
* xterm, Konsole (7)
* rxvt, xfce4-terminal (3)
* mrxvt, mlterm (2)
text editor:
* vim (15)
* gedit (9) -> last year's winner
* Emacs (9)
* nano (7)
* vi (4)
* gvim, Kate, cream, mcedit (2)
video player:
* mplayer (17) -> last year's winner
* VLC (7)
* Xine (6)
* Totem (5)
* Kaffeine (4)
* KMPlayer (2)
web browser:
* Firefox (21)
* Epiphany, Mozilla/Seamonkey (6)
* dillo (4)
* Konqueror (3)
* links, links2, Lynx, elinks (2)
word-processor:
* OpenOffice.org Writer (15)
* abiword (9)
* LaTex (3)
* lyx (3)
* kword, ted (2)
(unreleased):
* Gnu Hurd (3)
(great honours):
* Linux (12)
* GCC (11)
* GLibC (10)
* Bash (10)
* Xorg (11)
* Debian (3)
misc:
* games [ nethack (4) ]
* 3D animation [ blender (7) ]
* video manipulation [ mencoder (2) ]
* web-server [ apache (3) ]
non-free:
* ftp client [ sftp (2) ]
* pdf-reader [acrobat-reader (9)]
* text-editor [ pico (2) ]
* web-browser [ Opera (4) ]
note: There are shortcomings in this poll even though I tried hard to
represent the truth as presented by the data. As Kevin Mark mentioned,
we need a better method in the future.
a favourite quote of mine: "Let knowledge grow from more to more and
thus be human life enriched" from Encyclopedia Britannica
Reply to: