The crazy branches of the Linux family tree.

Sometimes it's fun looking at what happens in the Linux community.
I remember when RedHat pissed everyone off by killing their desktop version. That spawned many work alike desktop Linux replacements, including Mandrake and Connectiva. Mandrake was the Ubuntu of it's day. The alternative to the big guys, fiercely loyal users. Then they merged with Connectiva and became Mandriva. Aside from the terrible new name, they kept on putting out a decent distro. I hadn't really paid much attention to them and they became Mageia while I wasn't looking. Meanwhile RedHat got their hat out of their butt's and sponsored Fedora which they should have done in the first place.
Distro watch is a vast archive of Linux history. It's funny to see the hundreds of Linux distributions. I remember when there were no distributions, a Linux install was a whole days work maybe two back then and none of these sissy GUI tools and administration shells. It was all command line.
Anyway I remember when the first distro wars broke out because suddenly you had TWO choices. Slackware or Debian. After spending a few days downloading floppy disk images and copying them to floppies, you were ready for an install marathon.
Then came RedHat and SuSE and things really started to multiply and get crazy after that. Now we have hundreds of Linux options to choose from. Life is good, mostly.
If you look hard though, you'll see that the only real long term survivors are Debian, Slackware and SUSE, and RedHat in a different way. They've churned away as other distributions come and go.
Currently we're having a similar crisis in desktop window managers and UI concepts. I'm sure this will settle down too. It will settle down eventually and we'll have at least a handful of good options to choose from.
Linux, it's quite a wild ride.

Meanwhile, as all this has happened, other OS's have come and gone, risen and fallen. DOS got eaten by Windows and replaced. OS/2 like Caesar got stabbed by it's best friend in Microsoft's Brutus.
NeXT came and went, with other's picking the good parts off the carcass. AmigaOS had it's chance to shine and was left in the crib to die while it's parents shot up in the living room. BeOS reached for the stars and burned it's wings on the sun. The big UNIX's have retreated from PC's and Linux. Some dying, others consolidating. The survivors better for the competition. Now mobile is dominating, and trying to merge with desktop. The early offspring being pretty deformed and retarded. But it will happen I'm sure and lead to great things.

Through it all, Linux will carry on. Slowly taking over more and more markets. I have no doubt that by the time we finally build the Enterprise, there will be a fight over if it should run Spaceship Linux or Warp Linux.