2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners

The polls are closed and the results are in. You can view the detailed results here, but I’ll include a list of winners at the end of this post for convenience. This was the ninth annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards and we’ve set a record for participation each and every year. We once again had some extremely close races and a couple multi-year winners were unseated this year. KDE, which had won Desktop Environment of the Year every year we’ve had the MCA’s, was finally unseated… by Gnome (in a very close race). There’s quite a bit of interesting information in the data, so I recommend you check out the detailed results. You can also view the full results of previous MCA’s if you do a search.

The complete list of the winners is as follows (percentage of votes received in parentheses):

Desktop Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (30.13%)
Server Distribution of the Year – Debian (24.24%)
Security/Forensic/Rescue Distribution of the Year – BackTrack (43.48%)
Database of the Year – MySQL (60.81%)
Office Suite of the Year – OpenOffice.org (90.76%)
Browser of the Year – Firefox (65.21%)
Desktop Environment of the Year – Gnome (41.96%)
Window Manager of the Year – Compiz (23.10%)
Messaging App of the Year – Pidgin (48.74%)
Mail Client of the Year – Thunderbird (53.48%)
Virtualization Product of the Year – VirtualBox (67.43%)
Audio Media Player Application of the Year – Amarok (38.81%)
Audio Authoring Application of the Year – Audacity (77.26%)
Video Media Player Application of the Year – VLC (46.05%)
Video Authoring Application of the Year – FFmpeg (21.94%)
Multimedia Utility of the Year – GStreamer (32.84%)
Graphics Application of the Year – GIMP (66.48%)
Network Security Application of the Year – Nmap Security Scanner (29.85%)
Host Security Application of the Year – SELinux (39.26%)
Network Monitoring Application of the Year – Nagios (51.11%)
IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year – Eclipse (23.28%)
Text Editor of the Year – vim (35.29%)
File Manager of the Year – Nautilus (24.92%)
Open Source Game of the Year – Battle for Wesnoth (15.45%)
Programming Language of the Year – Python (27.59%)
Backup Application of the Year – rsync (48.99%)
Open Source CMS/Blogging platform of the Year – WordPress (45.20%)

If you have feedback on how we can improve the Members Choice Awards, let us know.

UPDATE: Here’s a very nice user-contributed summary of the top 5 nominees in every category. Thanks Wesley.

OStatic has also covered the results.

–jeremy