They didn&#x27;t disappear, they changed name to Mandriva. Can&#x27;t talk about other people, but I remember when it went about in popularity people that used linux already mostly deemed it as too windows-like for their taste. Me included. Windows people didn&#x27;t like lack of applications they used and games. So it was in that weird limbo between two worlds where neither wanted to use it. Probably the greatest mistake was that they marketed it towards home&#x2F;desktop users. Game somewhat changed with SUSE, at about the same time, that pushed their distro to corporate environments (and was helped by a fact that Linux himself used it quite often). Only a couple of years later (5-7) would we see Ubuntu and a bit larger array of desktop users applications which were around.