Lately, the page-hit rankings have provided a particularly vivid illustration: , which didn't even appear in the site's top 10 when I late last year, is now in the No. 4 spot for rankings over the past six months, behind only , , and .

With an average of some 1,630 hits per day, it also continues on an upward trend.

It's not uncommon for individual distributions to shift up and down slightly on the list over time, of course. Still, this is quite a big jump. If nothing else, it makes me want to give Mageia another look.

A Wealth of Desktop Choices

Longtime Linux fans no doubt remember that Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux that was launched in late 2010. Whereas its is a commercially run distribution--now at No. 27 on DistroWatch--the Mageia project is community-based and nonprofit.