An interesting comparison:

2017 would be a big year for Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin is somewhere nearby $4000 on [2017-08-13 08:37], and it wouldn't surprise me if it reaches $5000 sometime before November (the deployment of "the 2MB part"). Beyond the price bubble (which is on its way), it's highly possible that more hard-forks would show up at the end of the year, and the price of the longest POW chain (the Bitcoin by its definition) might fall back to $1200-$1500.

3 potential possibilities for the next six-months from my perspective:

Segwit2x wins (> 80%). Bitcoin starts a new era to scale periodically. Core(and the LN side chain solution) would be marginalized to be an enterprise-level solution provider.

The future of Bitcoin development would be directed by "the Knights of the Round Table".

New BIPs would be more business-driven than tech-driven (which is a "maturity sign" to Bitcoin). Three (or more) forks live peacefully and separately. Bitcoin would become a more generalized concept of Bitcoin Family spectrum distribution. "the Family" consists of Core, btc1, Bitcoin ABC, etc...

It would be a quite different model to "Linux Kernel and Distributions", since there isn't a single "root" to drive the development and longterm vision. Core wins (> 80%). The primary blockchain is locked at 1MB limit and fully controlled by Core. It's highly possible that Core is (and would be) the most strong dev-team on the planet.

It's very likely that new emerging forks would make mistakes (especially when they are moving away from the most sophisticated implementation)

Core would try its best to exploit any chance of vulnerabilities of the alternatives to strive to survive.

Gu Lu