[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Business_p...
If you're gaming on Linux and you buy a game:
The creator of the game gets a cut, the publisher gets a cut, Valve takes it's cut, NVidia/AMD/Intel got a hardware purchase in there at some point, the porter (Feral or whoever) gets a cut.
The Linux distro gets .... absolutely zero. On top of that when things break, people blame the distro. I was at Canonical when we founded a community run PPA to maintain fresh Nvidia drivers, and we couldn't even secure the funding for _3_ GPUs for volunteer developers, we had to apply for community funds. All that so a handful of volunteers can do _years_ of free engineering work that is clearly Nvidia's job. They wouldn't even spot us 3 GPUs for the effort!
It's sad, there are people on the Ubuntu desktop team that have been busting their asses for 15 years trying to make the desktop a thing. It's just not a sustainable unless people were overwhelmingly buying a ton of linux games.
That's because it is often the distro's fault. That's one of the reasons it has been historically such a goddamned pain to port software to Linux: there are bunch of distros and no standards you can rely on. It's a non-platform.
EDIT: And even if you have better QA and the distro is rock solid, when that binary blob Nvidia gives you that your engineers can't fix breaks, you'll still get the blame.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. When MS was getting sued for underspecing system requirements during the Vista era, one of the interesting bits that got revealed to the public during the trial is a chart of Vista crashes/lockups by source:
https://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsib....
The biggest single source? nVidia at just under 29%. Another 9.3% was attributable to ATI (now AMD). Only about 18% were directly attributable to MS itself. Video driver crappiness was reportedly a huge motivation for Microsoft's switch to the WDDM video driver model.
Valve: Here Linux, you finally have lots of video games, no silly BS, they just work.
Ubuntu: Oh shit Linux might get popular, quick, we better break the video games!
Valve: ...
Canonical makes no money supporting Linux gaming. Their customers, their actual paying customers, want servers. So that's what Canonical is going to focus on.
Ubuntu, too, has made some rash decisions at times. They cling to their sluggish developer-unfriendly Unity UI, randomly kicked out ffmpeg from 14.04 for political reasons, among other things. These kinds of rash decisions cost them every single time.
At that time RedHat was the king of Linux desktop, and “the year of Linux desktop” was predicted multiple times.
But in retrospective, I think that RedHat did a good move. Where is Mandriva/Mandrake Linux today? Even SuSe which is doing fine, didn’t have the growth of RedHat.
It was sad for users hoping for the year of Linux desktop that never materialized; but a good business decision for RedHat.
Android is the Linux phone. 3 billion people are running a Linux kernel in their pocket right now.
It did happen, just that it didn't unfold in the way that RedHat users originally imagined.
The Linux kernel isn't exposed to app developers, only OEMs writing drivers.
Google could switch it for something else tomorrow and beyond Google itself and the driver writers, no else would notice.
Same applies to ChromeOS.
As for Apple platforms, with each release POSIX APIs become less relevant with Objective-C/Swift/C++ replacements for them.
So it is pretty much a pyrrhic victory.
Ubuntu is pretty far from that. I still have to do quite a bit of command line fuss to setup and maintain my Ubuntu system. Fine for me as a dev, but not fine for mass adoption.
That's the main reason "Amazon Linux" exists.
Red Hat is a lot more than Linux, but that revenue disparity is huge, and I bet they are licensing out RHEL to everybody who buys other stuff from them.