The number one distro is Ubuntu, as I thought. Gnome won the best desktop, also as I thought, but now I am also thinking if this will be the last time that will happen for a while (assuming “Unity” and “Gnome” are not the same thing in a comparison like this). I had voted for “Enlightenment because it may be the best non-Gnome desktop that is not essentially Gnome with a screwdriver driven through it in a few places, because by the time this survey comes out Gnome will have gone over the cliff, IMHO. I’m actually thinking: A window manager that knows about the four or five apps I use all the time, and a nice command line.” … how perceptive of me.

Related to our ongoing discussion of Browser Wars, Firefox won as best browser, but with Chromium a runner-up. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Chromium is the actual winner right now, if the poll were to be retaken.

Skipping past several other products, the best digital photo management tool was DigiKam (a KDE app) with Picasa as runner up. I’ll have to give DigiKam another look. Picasa is OK but not native and it scares me a little, though the photo finishing features of that application are impressive. It can find and fix red-eye on a house fly.

The Gimp won as the best graphics tool with Inkscape as a runner up, but really, these apps should be in different categories. The former is mainly pixel-based, the latter vector based.

The best cloud file storage system was, as expected, Dropbox which, if you are not using, you should. (Click here to get on board with that!) The best backup solution was rsync, a good choice, but again, backing your stuff up on the cloud and a second computer/drive via Dropbox is really the way to go. (It is basically like rsync but they do the work for you.)

The best programming language is Python.

The best web hosting company is “other” … which should be a lesson to you, GoDaddy.

The best Linux book is Linux in a Nutshell, which I agree is pretty good.

Nvidia wins for best graphics chipset.

I’ve only mentioned a fraction of the applications which were opinionated upon. Click here to see the rest.