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To me, the fact that the major distros have adopted systemd is strong evidence that it is probably better.

Raises the question, better for whom? Systemd seems to make some things easier for distro maintainers, at the cost of fucking shit up for users and admins.

That said, Debian's vote on the matter was essentially 50:50, and they're going to keep supporting SysV init. Most distros are descendants of Debian, so there's that. Redhat switched for obvious reasons (having the main systemd developer on their payroll and massively profiting from increased support demands).

With Debian and Redhat removed, what remains on the list of major distros?

Yeah.. strong evidence...

1. Slackware has spawned lots of distros (including SUSE)
2. Enoch spawned the Gentoo line of distros (and Gentoo is the current base of ChromeOS).
3. The Arch family started independently
4. The on-the-rise Alpine Linux was independently started

So by lineage alone I'd argue there are more than two major categories.

Distros that help Linux in the REAL WORLD.

Linux Mint (Desktop)
SteamOS / SteamMachines
Ubuntu (debian -> ubuntu -> ?)
CentOS (back office)

http://futurist.se/gldt/

This shows graphically the distributions in the Linux world.

This is how I base my decision on distros, by the commitment and origin base.

Website of that picture: http://futurist.se/gldt/
Seems to have stalled a bit lately...

When viewing this picture, zoomed out, one can easily see that Debian is by far the most successful parent distribution.

It wasn't what? Debian was preceded by MCC, TAMU, SLS, Yggdrasil, Slackware and maybe others, but it was definitely one of the first.

Source: http://futurist.se/gldt/

Uh - a substantial fraction of Linux distros out there are derived from Slackware: http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.02/gldt1202.png

W95 was horribly instable, I completely agree, an utter cock-up. But Linux in 95 barely existed -- very little hardware support, very few applications, and a very few users - who all knew what they were doing because you had to in those days. Linux was a vastly more stable, but it was also being used by experts on a very small subset of working hardware, for a very small subset of uses. Part of Linux's relative stability was that it did not attempt the coverage of 95.

It just wasn't a like-for-like comparison yet. We should be reluctant to compare them, and if we do then we need to be very clear on how different they were, because most people on /. now don't know this.

On that note, here's the timeline link - http://futurist.se/gldt/

RH4 came out in 96. If we're going to quote versions in front of the young'uns, then we ought to say RH2 for 95.

http://futurist.se/gldt/2011/04/05/gnulinux-distribution-timeline-11-4/

You may as well just link to the original source (which is a bit more up to date).

... the lack of support for SVG is one of the reasons why the GNU/Linux distro timeline keeps PNGs in addition to SVGs even though they are inferior (file size and hyperlinks).

Yup, indeed. One more Linux distribution for Smartphones.

Look like the explosion of Linux Distros that we saw slready is happening all over again on the smartphones.
Well, if history has taught us anything, we already know how it will end :
the majority of them will either collapse or get restricted into some special niche.
only a few of the old timer will stay (probably Android among them ?)

On the upside, that's one more Linux-kernel-based system being sold out there. Just showing that it's a perfectly viable solution.

And perhaps, after a while, as you suggest, constructors will start to realise as you said that each one rolling it's own telephony-stack and -userspace is a waster of ressource, and perhaps will see some coordinated effort going on for core telephony components.
(Just as currently lots of core component of modern distributions are developed in a centralised fashion. DBus comes as an example).