Readers' Choice

Best Domain Registrar

Jill Franklin — Sat, 03 Mar 2018 17:15:00 +0000

This week's category is domain registrars—see who wins!

Here's the breakdown:

Namecheap: 22%
Gandi 17%
GoDaddy 11%

Namecheap is an independent domain registrar founded in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall. He launched it with the idea that "the average people of the internet deserved value-priced domains and stellar service." Now with more than 5 million domains under its management, Namecheap has become a leader in both the budget-domain and web-hosting spaces. No hidden fees and a general sense of honesty and transparency from Namecheap are reasons cited by Linux Journal readers for their devotion to the company.

Who to watch for: Gandi, in a close second place, comes in as another favorite. Linux Journal reader Mathieu T. commented, "I am currently moving everything to GANDI. Easy to use and clear interface, and a reactive support."

Be sure to check back and vote in the next poll!

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Best Web Browser

Jill Franklin — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:21:43 +0000

by Jill Franklin

Take a look at the rankings for this week's Readers' Choice category.

Best Web Browser:

Firefox: 57%
Chrome: 17%
Chromium: 7%
Vivaldi: 6%
Opera: 4%
Brave: 3%
qutebrowser: 2%

When the Firefox team released Quantum in November 2017, they boasted it was "over twice as fast as Firefox from 6 months ago", and Linux Journal readers generally agreed, going as far as to name it their favorite web browser. A direct response to Google Chrome, Firefox Quantum also boasts decreased RAM usage and a more streamlined user interface.

One commenter, CDN2017, got very specific and voted for "Firefox (with my favourite extensions: uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript, and Firefox multi-account containers)."

Who to watch for? Vivaldi. Founded by ex-Opera chief Jon von Tetzchner, Vivaldi is aimed at power users and is loaded with extra features, such as tab stacking, quick commands, note taking, mouse gestures and side-by-side browsing.

Be sure to vote in our next Readers' Choice poll: Favorite Domain Registrar.

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December 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Readers' Choice

Shawn Powers — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 18:32:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

The Best of the Best

I love the Readers' Choice issue. I jokingly say it's because all the work is done by the community, but honestly, it's because I love hearing the feedback from everyone. Year after year, I inevitably learn about a new technology or application, and I'm usually surprised by at least one of the voting results. It's also an "unthemed" issue, which means our articles can be from any discipline in the Linux world. Welcome to the Readers' Choice issue of Linux Journal.

Reuven M. Lerner starts us out this month with the modern-day equivalent of virtual name-based Web hosting. Multitenant programming allows a single server and/or application to serve multiple clients while keeping the cross-pollination of data from taking place. SaaS isn't a new concept, but Reuven shows how to peel back the cloud layer and see what goes on behind the scenes. If you're a Web developer, you won't want to miss it.

I've written several articles through the years on SSH, which I like to think of as the Swiss Army Knife of command-line tools. Dave Taylor talks about an equally powerful tool this month, namely the find command. It seems like a simple concept, but with its various options, find can be a powerful addition to any Bash script.

Kyle Rankin talks about something I've never been able to get the hang of doing. He discusses the virtue of using the hjkl keys as opposed to arrow keys while editing text files. Every once in a while, you'll run across a computer that supports only the old-school method for moving the cursor around, but for Kyle, that old-school method is his preferred mode of operation. I have to admit, I'm a little jealous. I can play a first-person shooter with the "wasd" keys, but for some reason, my brain just can't get used to "hjkl". If you have no idea what I'm talking about, be sure to read Kyle's column.

I boldly go where no Shawn Powers has gone before and touch on development of all things. My entire IT career has been one where I've avoided programming. Recently, I had a need to create a Web-based interface for a user, and I learned PHP. Granted, PHP isn't the most modern or powerful programming language, but if you're like me, it might be the perfect intro to development. I urge anyone who hates programming to read my column. It might surprise you how much fun writing code can be.

Chris Jenks has a cool article in this issue where he teaches us to hunt rogue access points in a network. There obviously are apps for Android that will do basic scanning, but Chris goes a lot further and discusses passively gathering data, looking for even hidden SSID networks. If you have a need to track down rogue access points, but fear sneaky users are hiding their tracks, Chris' article is perfect.

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Coolest Things You've Done with Linux

Shawn Powers — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 06:41:47 +0000

by Shawn Powers

In our 2014 Readers' Choice Awards, we asked readers to tell us the coolest thing they've done with Linux. There were so many great responses, but we didn't have room for all of them in the magazine, so we're listing more of the best ones here. Enjoy!

Building my procmail pre-spam spam filter back in mid-late 90s.

450-node compute cluster.

7.1 channel preamp with integrated mopidy music player.

A robot running Linux (for the Eurobot annual competition).

A song. Trust me that's awesome.

Accidentally printed on the wrong continent.

Adding an audio channel to a video while also syncing it.

Adding missing features to an existing program.

Air Conditioning.

Analyzed NASA satellite data with self-written code.

Annoyed the cat remotely.

Asterisk PBX.

Attached a temperature sensor to a Raspberry Pi and showed the saved data on a Web site.

Automated a BitTorrent server, file server and media streamer, built from miscellaneous server parts.

Automated a forensic laboratory.

Automated my entire lighting setup in my house to respond to voice and my mobile apps.

Automated my photo studio.

Automated video transcoding.

Automatic window plant irrigation system.

Automobile maintenance log written in C/C++ using Qt3 and MySQL.

Aviation monitoring with a cheap USB SDR.

Bacnet integration of weather data.

Bathroom radio.

Brewing beer

Build a Linux smart home.

Build an application that runs on the International Space Station.

Build my own distro from scratch.

Build my own kernel, write a device driver.

Build my own www2e-mail server.

Build your own everything server.

Building a multi-retro-gaming console with a Raspberry Pi.

Built a MythTv server.

Built a mini-music hosting server for the office.

Built a system for real-time toll collection for a major toll highway system.

Built a video management system.

Built electro-mechanical games.

Built fully automated, scalable, high-traffic production Web sites.

Built my first Linux box from scratch.

Built my own DVR using LinHES.

Built our own smartphone.

Built a Web-based home alarm system on a Raspberry Pi.

Building a monitoring solution with 1wire and a Raspberry Pi.

CNC controller.

Changed the OS on my phone.

Chrome casting.

Clone VMs, though I'm looking at building an HTPC soon with Ubuntu + XBMC.

Cluster of Raspberry Pis to crack encrypted office documents.

Colossalcast.sh, a script to get images from a Web site a see them in my image viewer.

Completely replaced Microsoft products in my personal life.

Computational fluid dynamics.

Configure LXLE distro for enterprise.

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Readers' Choice Awards 2014 Poll

LJ Staff — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 18:55:32 +0000

by LJ Staff

The 2014 Readers' Choice Poll is now closed. Thank you to all who participated, and please see our December issue for the results!

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December 2013 Issue of Linux Journal: Readers' Choice

Shawn Powers — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 17:59:08 +0000

by Shawn Powers

As we wave a fond farewell to 2013, we close out the year with one of our favorite issues. I know, I often tease about being lazy and having the readers write the Readers' Choice issue, but I only do that because it's absolutely true! Seriously though, this is one of our favorite issues because we get to hear from you. Some of your feedback was expected, some was a little surprising, but it was all appreciated. If you want to see how you line up with your fellow readers, you can skip ahead to the Readers' Choice article, but if you do, you'll be missing out on tons of great content!

Reuven M. Lerner, for example, gives us his annual summary of the most interesting books he's read. Whether you're looking for a nice holiday read or want to make sure you haven't missed any gems this past year, Reuven shares his insight from his library. Dave Taylor follows up with another column on the library of tools available in the ImageMagick suite. If you need to edit photos, especially in an automated or bulk way, the command-line image editing tools Dave describes are invaluable.

SSH is a tool just about every geek knows well. There are countless tutorials for creating SSH key pairs for adding security (and convenience) to server logins, but that same layer of security comes with the danger of stolen key files. Kyle addresses the issue of SSH security while keeping as much convenience as possible. SSH Agent may be the best of both worlds: convenience and security. I follow Kyle's article with a how-to for implementing LVM. Logical Volume Manager adds convenience and expandability to your system with far less complexity than it might seem. If you've ever been scared of LVM, be sure to check out my column.

Jim Hall helps point out the warts in open-source software this month with his article on usability testing. If you're tired of hearing how hard the GIMP is to use because of its interface, Jim's article will interest you. As longtime geeks, it's often easy to overlook an interface's shortcomings. This article helps us take off our rose-colored glasses and see our programs for what they are.

We also had the opportunity to interview a Linux user, musician and developer: Australis. I always love to meet folks who use Linux on a daily basis for their livelihoods, and Fred Mora had the fortune of interviewing the indie artist. If you like to hear how Linux and open source can influence and empower artists, you'll really enjoy the interview. I know we sure did.

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Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards 2013

LJ Staff — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 21:03:25 +0000

by LJ Staff

Voting for the 2013 Readers' Choice Awards is now complete. Please visit us in December for the results!

Thanks!

Your friends at Linux Journal

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Readers' Choice Awards 2013

LJ Staff — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 15:00:00 +0000

by LJ Staff

Voting for the Readers' Choice Awards will begin on August 26, 2013, so please check back at that time to cast your vote.

Thanks!

Your friends at Linux Journal

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2012 Readers' Choice Awards Survey

LJ Staff — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:09:25 +0000

by LJ Staff

Voting in the 2012 Readers' Choice Awards is now closed. Thank you for participating. Results will be published in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal.

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Vote Now: Readers' Choice 2011 Awards

LJ Staff — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:39:07 +0000

by LJ Staff

The 17th annual Readers' Choice Awards are now closed.

Thank you for participating!
Your friends at Linux Journal

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