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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Going back to why Canonical dropped it, I'm pretty sure that's because they are giving up on the Linux desktop in general.

Indeed, Canonical had the same realization as Red Hat ~2000-2003: there is no money in the Linux desktop, there is a lot of money in enterprise services and support.

Since Canonical has to make a profit, it is smart of them to drop unprofitable projects such as the phone.

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And now Ubuntu has passed Red Hat in the # of servers metric because devs like me choose their Linux server OS based on familiarity with the Ubuntu desktop OS.

On the other hand, Red Hat's revenue is steadily growing[1] and there are very few RHEL desktop users. Fedora is probably also less popular than Ubuntu and its derivatives.

[1] https://investors.redhat.com/financial-information/financial...

I'd be very surprised if Ubuntu's revenue wasn't increasing at a much higher rate than Red Hat's.

Interesting question. Some data points that I could find.

Canonical: 2009: ~30M, 2013: 65.7M, 2016: 103.3M

Red Hat: 2013: ~1.4B, 2015: ~1.8B, 2016: ~2.1B, 2017: 2.4B

Consequently: Canonical 2013-2016: ~1.57x, Red Hat 2013-2016: 1.71x.

So, their revenue seems to be increasing at a slower rate and Red Hat's revenue is almost twentyfold that of Canonical. Moreover, Red Hat is operating on a quite large profit, while Canonical is on a loss.

Thanks, the last Canonical revenue figures I could find were the 2013 ones.

While I agree this should be a column in the ledger tracking their costs and benefits, this is a hard sell to an accountant.

You're right, but I'd just like to plug Debian for servers — it's a really well-made distro, put together for sysadmins by sysadmins in large part.

And it's pretty wonderful on the desktop too!

Red Hat continues to invest quite a bit into Linux desktop. Many of the Gnome developers work for Red Hat.

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