KDevelop lost by only 5 votes... yes 5 votes were all the separated our little IDE from the mega marketed IBM Java solution. I am impressed.

Bobby

i haven't looked through it all yet, but you missed how amarok absolutely crushed xmms in the poll this year. last year it was xmms with 45.83% and amarok in second with 32.15% (which is pretty good!) but this year amarok surged into the favourite's circle with 42.86% against xmms's second place showing of 28.87%.

even k3b made a showing in this category (oddly enough!) in 3rd place with 9.08%. so we took gold and bronze there =)

as for winning the desktop env nod, we received 58.25% of votes (925 / 1588) last year but 64.86% this year (1253 / 1932)

and kopete picked up a couple extra percentage points in this year's voting as well, so it's doing well in attracting more users in its category.

koffice also surged (by ~4% to nearly a littl under 12%), though not at the expense of openoffice.org which maintained it's 84%+ draw. koffice's gains came at the expense of the other "other office suites", so it looks like its settling in nicely as the second office suite of choice. doesn't look like there is much room for others to play in that space: last year they listed 7 packages, this year only 5 and one of those got zero votes.

konqueror also ripped it up, jumping from last year's 30%+ to over 51% this year! krusader also edged up one percent to land in fourth place. nautilus shed ~40% of its popularity in that poll (25.82% -> 15.93%) and even midnight commander slipped a bit (3%). venerable KFM (remember that guy from kde1? =) also (finally!) slid off the face of the earth from 11% to <1%. it's pretty easy to see where konq's 21 new points came from.

kdevelop certainly slipped, but with all the noise and effort around eclipse that was to be expected. maybe kdevelop4 will bring the glory back home? =)

and krita swept up 8% in it's first year on the poll.. nice place to start from! inkscape and blender both moved forward as well, pushing back both GIMP (-10 points) and Scribus (-3 points). looks like the open source graphics world is becoming filled with more quality options, which we certainly need!

konqueror's second place showing in webrowser was also nice since it picked up nearly 3 more points, and Qt-based Opera positively surged into 3rd place nipping at konq's heals with its 10% of the votes.

kudos to all.

1. As I mentioned earlier, similar competition in magazines like CHIP or PCWorld do not include KDE apps at all. Only those apps having win32 ports are available for voting.
2. What I would see is more fine-grained split between categories:
   • vim versus emacs is ok but its a "different market" than Kate (yeah, the split could be good for Kate, which could then beat apps like gedit)
   • Server engines like MySQL versus GUI admin frontends versus GUI desktop databases. 3 categories here. I've already asked LQ admin for such a split. Kexi, KNoda, Rekall goes to "GUI desktop databases" category. GUI admin fronteends are MySQL Admin/Query Browser, PgAdmin, KPoGre, and so on.
     
     I hope next year we'll see this change. Then a users who like, say, PostgreSQL, can pick their _real_ preference, e.g. PostgreSQL + KPoGre + Rekall.

Comparing the number of votes of Evolution, KMail and Thunderbird one sees that KMail (+31) and Thunderbird (+136) both got more votes this year while Evolution lost 104 votes. In fact Evolution is the only mail client that lost votes. All other listed clients got more votes than last year. And in percentage, in 2004 Evolution and KMail got 21.0 % and 21.8 %, respectively, while now KMail still got 21.5 % and Evo only got 11.2 %. Reading the comments you'll also see why Evolution lost so many users.

BTW, instead of listing KMail they should really have listed KMail/Kontact.