Which distros are likely to become more popular in the coming year and why?

Also, what do you think are the main reasons behind success of a linux distribution?

The average distro tends to become more popular around the time of a new release.

How do we know the popularity? The Distrowatch page is very easy to fix: look at the suspicious way in which Mageia shot up to second place when there was no publicity for it! And the number of hits only reflects current newsworthyness, not actual use: you might hear about something, check out some reviews via Distrowatch, and decide "not on my computer!"

Distrowatch "rankings" aren't an indication of anything more than the number of times distrowatch readers download a particular distro from distrowatch. It's liek Alexa web rankings. Those rankings only include site visits from peopel who install the Alexa toolbar in IE. A very skewed and distorted view.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Linux-Distribution> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Most major distributions are very stable now. Also, most give choice for desktop that can be used (kde, gnome, LXDE, xfce). Most are regularly updated. Most support the average hardware well. So, finally it may just come down to availablity of applications and ease of their installation in a distro. So ubuntu and ubuntu based distros are likely to continue to be top in popularity amongst regular computer users who try linux.

According their explanation, the number is the average hits per day for a distribution page on distrowatch, with each IP addresss allowed only one hit per day.

Since most sites offer linux applications in deb & rpm formats, a wine-like application for installing deb and rpm files will be very useful.

Yep. After looking over a review today, I took a look at Linux Mint's and Snowlinux's DW pages -- neither of which I have any intention of installing/using at this time. Never bothered to click on the DW pages for the distros that I'm actually running here.

Well, a good guess would be the distros that have very few users at the moment. So, it would be very easy for a distro that has no users currently (for example, a distro that hasn't yet had its first release) to have a massive increase in user numbers. Why? Well because they don't have any users.

Another possibility would be any distro to which people bailing out of existing distro go to. So, if, for example, you think that Gnome's currently unpopular interface will become even more so, any distro that stays with with the 'old fashioned' Gnome interface would be a likely destination.

As. more generally, a few people seem to be becoming disaffected with Ubuntu, anywhere that they might go to, such as Mint, has a chance.

Any distro specialising in a GUI that becomes more popular (Bodhi, I'd guess, as there is a big release of E17 due, Lubuntu for LXDE, for example, which must be another reasonable bet for increasing popularity, probably XFCE would be in there, if there is a 'big' release forthcoming, but I'm not sure if there is one of those due within 12 months).

Please do say how any of this could help.

It is good to know which distribution is on the rise for longer term so that one does not have to change distribution every few months. The biggest factor is likely to be available applications for any distribution. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari..._distributions the number of precompiled packages vary widely even amongst major distributions. Accordingly, some distros are trying "debianization" etc (http://puppylinux.org/wikka/debianization) so as to use larger repositories. A wine like application which can install deb or rpm packages in any distro will be very popular. Packagekit (http://www.packagekit.org/) is also interesting.

So, you'd like to adopt a distro that you don't like because other people are going to use it, and you'd like to go for a currently unpopular distro to do it. OK, whatever approach you want to take (it is all about freedom) but don't blame anyone else if it takes you up a blind alley.

Maybe I am not able to make my point clear. It appears that finally there will be only one or two widely used distributions and that will depend on software authors providing applications in their format. All other distributions will remain for small specific groups of users only. This will be helpful if someone does not want to change his installation every now and then.

I think that the world of Linux distributions will continue to have high entropy for many years to come. There is no market force that stops people from creating new ones, and others fade away at random. The ones that have money behind them will stay in the top 20 or so---others will just keep churning around.