Although it is a bit difficult to design distributed systems, they are being enormously popular in the current time because of following reasons :

Resources sharing Sharing of software resources( libraries, database), Hardware resources e.g printer, hard disk, becomes easy in distributed systems. A Diskless workstation can share the memory and other resources of a server.

Beter price-performance ratio Rapid increase of processing power, reduction of price and increased communication networks has lead to beter price – performance ratio.

Shorter response Times and higher throughput
Due to job migration within several idle processing units compared with centralized system the response Time is high and the throughput quite high. But in distributed systems it gives shorter response times and high throughput. It can be achieved using replication, resource sharing.

Higher reliability Refers to the degree of tolerance against errors and components failure. MulTplication of storage devices and processors in a distributed systems allow maintenance of multiple copies of critical information within the system. Also it is possible to have Redundant execution of important computation.

Extensibility and incremental growth Its Easy to add extra hardware and software's as needs arises. Open distributed systems the designed with a property extensibility and incremental growth.

Better fexibility in meeting users needs Different processor can perform working depending on user demands. Ordinary processor can perform ordinary data processing while high performing processor can perform complex jobs like complex scientific computation.