R is the de facto statistical package in the Open Source world. It's also quickly becoming the default data-analysis tool in many scientific disciplines. R's core design includes a central processing engine that runs your code, with a very simple interface to the outside world. This basic interface means it's been easy to build graphical interfaces that wrap the core portion of R, so lots of options exist that you can use as a GUI.

Duo Security has released CloudMapper, an open-source tool for visualizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments. When working with AWS, it's common to have a number of separate accounts run by different teams for different projects. Gaining an understanding of how those accounts are configured is best accomplished by visually displaying the resources of the account and how these resources can communicate. This complements a traditional asset inventory.

Sometimes kernel developers can work in parallel for years without realizing it. It's one of the inefficiencies of a distributed system that tends to work out as a benefit when you have enough contributors to be able to spare the extra labor—it's sort of a "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" kind of thing.

Read on to see how the desktop environment contenders fared in this week's Readers' Choice Awards category. Here's the breakdown (the contenders below were nominated by readers via Twitter):