Linux Insider investigates why some Linux distros just disappear

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in linux on (#3EV)
It's long been the case that the world of Linux distributions offers at least one compelling choice for virtually every taste and purpose, but -- much like those dissatisfied with the weather in New England -- users who don't see a distro they like need only wait a few minutes. The open source nature of Linux means that users not only can fork and create entirely new distros of their own at will, but also take advantage of others' efforts to do so -- and those efforts are ongoing.

What makes one distro last and another give up? Linux Insider takes a closer look.

TFA doesn't really do much to answer the question (Score: 2, Insightful)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-25 18:16 (#6D)

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.
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