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Posts published in “Polls”
For the second year in a row, Arch Linux wins both rounds in our poll to determine the winner of our Readers’ Choice Award for Best Linux Distro.
The FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Awards Poll
The readers of FOSS Force have made their voices heard and for the second year in a row you have chosen Arch Linux to be the recipient of the FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Award for Best Linux Distro. The recipient was determined by the results of a poll that opened on January 30 and closed at noon EST today.
The selection was a two part process that began with a qualifying poll in which readers could suggest distros to be included in the just ended final round of voting. The final round asked the question, “Which of the GNU/Linux distros listed below would you choose to win the FOSS Force ‘Best Desktop Distro’ Award for 2016?”
This year, both rounds of polling set records for our site. As they like to say after political elections, voter turnout was very heavy.
Arch Linux wins the qualifying round for the second year, followed by Linux Mint. In addition, eight distros qualified by write-in votes to be included in our final round. Now it’s time to get out the vote in the all-important final round to determine the Best Linux Distro according to our readers.
The FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Awards Poll
Through our qualifying round of voting, you have decided the final slate of candidates for our annual FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Award for Best Linux Distro. At 11 a.m. EST, final round voting began to determine which desktop Linux distro gets the prize for this year’s award.
Admittedly, there’s not much at stake here; the winning distro receives nothing more than bragging rights and a heartfelt symbolic pat on the back from our readers — which has to count for something.
Who’s going to get bragging rights this year? Last year it was Arch. The year before it was Ubuntu. Call out the troops and get bragging rights by making your favorite our “Best Linux Distro.”
The FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Awards Poll
Update: The voting on the first “qualifying” round of our Best Linux Distro poll closed on Saturday, January 28. We have replaced that poll in this article with the Best Linux Distro final round poll. Results from the first round of polling can be found on our Completed Polls page.
It’s time to start the process of choosing the FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Award winner for Best Desktop Linux Distro for 2016. This is the third outing for our annual poll, which began in a March, 2015 contest that was won by Ubuntu, which bested runner-up Linux Mint by only 11 votes. Last year we moved the voting up to January, in a contest which saw Arch Linux as the overall winner, with elementary OS in second place.
Just like last year, this year’s polling will be a two round process. The first round, which began early Friday afternoon when the poll quietly went up on our front page, is a qualifying round. In this round, we’re offering a field of 19 of the top 20 distros on Distrowatch’s famous “Page Hit Ranking” list. Those whose favorite distro isn’t on the list shouldn’t worry — your distro’s not out of the game yet. Below the poll there’s a place to write-in any distro that’s not in the poll to be tallied for possible inclusion in the second and final round of polling to follow.
The FOSS Force Poll
While it’s good to know that voters in our poll are aware that software patents remain very much a threat to free tech, the small number of people who voted might indicate a lack of awareness on the issue by newcomers to FOSS.
Another poll with results that aren’t a surprise. In this poll we wondered if you thought that software patents remain a threat to Linux and FOSS. Yup, you do. The results were pretty lopsided and not at all difficult to interpret.
Software patent abuse would seem to be on the decline if the amount of ink being given to the subject in the open source press is used as a metric. But as the old TV commercial used to ask: Is it live, or is it Memorex?
Five or six years ago the major GNU/Linux and FOSS news aggregators were filled with stories about software patents. These days, not so much. Does this mean that the threat posed by patents is actually less now than in 2010, or have patents simply not been getting the coverage they once did?
The FOSS Force Poll
The results of our “Apple vs. the FBI” encryption poll are in. Most of our readers agree with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s decision to stand up to the FBI.
Often when we run a poll on FOSS Force, the results only go to confirm what we already know. Our latest completed poll is an example. What we got was exactly what we expected. You don’t think the makers of encrypted devices, or encryption software, should help the G-Men get inside — not even with a warrant.
The FOSS Force Poll
Our latest poll indicates that our reader’s would support legislation that would prohibit tracking by advertisers.
Back on February 15 when we ran an article calling for a ban on advertisers’ practice of tracking users who just happen to drive by an ad, much less click on it, we ran a poll to find out what you think. Actually, we were pretty sure we already knew what you thought. You tell us everyday, either in the comments section to our articles or by blocking ads here on FOSS Force. The poll was mainly to put some numbers to what we already knew.
The poll was pretty straight forward. “Should advertisers and ad agencies be forbidden to track users as they surf the web?” we asked. There were three answers offered, “Yes,” “No” and “With exceptions.”
As far as FOSS Force polls go, the numbers were pretty low on this one. In all, 143 of you took the poll, a minuscule sampling by any measure, but with conclusive results: You’re completely against having your journeys through cyberspace tracked.
Publishers of WordPress sites using the ‘Poll, Quiz & List by OpinionStage’ plugin, might want to check for unexpected advertisements.
FOSS Force has learned that the popular WordPress plugin “Poll, Quiz & List by OpinionStage” has been placing advertisements within photographs included in online quizzes that have been created using the plugin. The plugin is used by over 10,000 WordPress sites to create quizzes, polls and list articles.
Publishers using the plugin are not being made aware that ads are being placed on their sites unless, perhaps, they visit the plugin developers’ website and go to the “Pricing” page, where the developers say information about the policy is available. I say “perhaps” because we have been unable to find any such notice on this page. We discovered the issue on Sunday when considering whether to manually migrate the single FOSS Force Quiz created using the plugin to another quiz app we’ve since adopted as our default.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
The FOSS Force Poll
Our latest poll indicates that many FOSS advocates will end up purchasing a Ubuntu tablet when they become available in March.
Granted, you’re a special audience with a special interest. For the most part you use Linux, and not because you’re a mooch and it doesn’t cost you anything, but because you recognize it as the best that’s available. Certainly it doesn’t hurt that it’s free and open source software. Indeed, you probably think that’s what makes it best, as you most likely see FOSS as the best software development model.
You use GNU/Linux on your desktops and laptops, and most likely use Android on your mobile devices, mostly because it uses the Linux kernel and at least claims to be open source. But you know the difference between OSS and FOSS and would like nothing better than to be able to run GNU/Linux, real honest-to-goodness FOSS, on your phone or tablet — especially now that Firefox OS has been removed from the shelf.
That’s what we figured going in with our latest poll. It was an educated guess, for sure, but it turned out to be correct.
The FOSS Force Poll
A few weeks back when Ken Starks wrote an anecdotal column on an experience with a false positive from Avast antivirus on GNU/Linux, we started thinking. We run antivirus on our LAMP servers with the intent of protecting poor suckers on Windows, but on our Linux desktops and laptops? Pretty much, no. Some of us had tried the open source ClamAV at one time or another, mainly out of curiosity, but none of us had stuck with it. To our knowledge, until Starks wrote his column none of us even knew anybody who had ever run proprietary AV on Linux boxes.
Did any of it work? Who knows? But as an old friend of ours used to say, “We have to do something, even if it’s wrong.”