Story

It lists some that have succeeded and some that haven't, but doesn't really get into what might distinguish distros in the first group from those in the second. To be fair, I'm not sure there's any way to do this. With any new type of product, there are usually a bunch of small players at first, and then it gets narrowed down to a few big ones with a few others coming and going around the fringes. Very often this process is kind of mysterious and there's no obvious reason why the ones that succeed and persist do so. (The people running successful companies, or OSS projects, or what-have-you, will of course tell themselves it's because they have special knowledge that others lack. They're almost always fooling themselves.) In any case, I suspect that the Linux distro world is fairly mature at this point, with the Red Hat and Debian families pretty well entrenched.