Alright, there's nothing new with this conclusion. I just thought of a bit different way of explaining why this is so. Currently the most popular GNU/Linux distribution is Ubuntu and according to distrowatch the next in line is PCLinuxOS and then openSUSE. This doesn't make Ubuntu the best distribution around, but then again it is hard to define the universal best because, and this is another known fact (or at least should be), everyone has their own definition of what is best for them.
There are, however, certain common traits which are usually accepted as good by most people by which we can roughly estimate which distribution is better than the other one, at least looked from a certain perspective. For example there is a currently popular perspective of user friendliness, which is friendliness to users who never installed an operating system - total non-geeks, non-techies, majority of windows users.
There is quite a dispute over the notion that Ubuntu, by being the most popular, is at the same time the best for these kinds of users. But in the spirit of confirming the obviousness implied by the title of this blog entry, I'd say that the opposite may in many cases be true.
So here's the theory I'm going for in this entry. When you have an open environment for innovation like we do in the Free Software world, the most popular in the field are nothing else but challenges that make the less popular want to accomplish even greater quality, not necessarily because they want to be more popular, but simply because they want to be *better* regardless of popularity, hoping that it may, as a byproduct, result in popularity as well (at some point it usually does).
What this means is that, even if Ubuntu remains the most popular distro for years to come, it may very well be that much less popular distros will out-innovate it by far, leaving Ubuntu merely implementing some of these innovations after the fact. This is not to compare Ubuntu to Microsoft, because Ubuntu innovates currently as well, and even when it does take innovations from other distros, there is due acknowledgments of their contributions. It's a different world.
So, the point is that sometimes a scale might go like this: the less popular a distro is, the more innovativeness and quality potential it has, because the more it trails the popularity of the most known one (as is Ubuntu now), the more challenged their leaders may feel to innovate.
This might be obvious in a certain context, but the bottom line is that while we don't have to fear the overarching popularity of Ubuntu (Canonical is not Microsoft and Ubuntu codebase isn't wholly owned by Canonical, but essentially by the community), there is always a good reason to consider the smaller flavors of GNU/Linux.
And you just have to go to distrowatch to check them out. They have links to reviews in distro details pages.
