[danudey]

Sure, but all of those desktops and laptops, in businesses and homes, usually come with operating systems, be they Windows or OS X.

On top of that, personal computer sales are stagnating and tablet and mobile markets are growing; if Ubuntu really wanted to get on the money train, that's probably a better place to go. There's no money in Linux Desktop any more than there's money in Windows Desktop, which is to say not much at all.

The only PC-related industry that might be worth focussing on is laptops or tablets-as-laptops (e.g. Surface), but there's a huge amount of engineering work to be done on hardware support, battery life, etc., and most of the Windows 8 tablet hardware is garbage. Without creating their own Surface-type product (and having an actual market for it), it would be difficult for them to control enough to ensure proper support.

Compare that to servers, where companies will shell out $3-10k per server for new servers (or hundreds of dollars a month). If you can add in some kind of premium support, management system, cloud something, etc. and charge a minimal amount, the money would be significant. Heck, give Amazon customers the option to opt in to a $1/mo support upgrade and that would be a decent income stream from people running their own servers who aren't highly technical.

[Alupis]

That is the entire point I"m making. You cannot go to the store and buy a Linux-based desktop nor laptop. Companies (and most home users) don't want anything to do with Windows 8, but are being forced off XP. This is the ideal opportunity to capitalize on such a market and make Linux Desktop's common-place.

Out of all the Linux vendor's and distro's, Canonical is the closest at achieving common-place... yet, they have stopped short at such a critical time.

Of course tablets are popular, so are phones. Both markets are more fierce than desktops due to massively low price-points and some companies (looking at you google) willing to sell their tablets at a loss.

Companies spend $3-10K on server hardware, not the OS. When you buy big-iron servers, it's actually very common-place to get a Linux OS already installed, or no OS so you can install your preferred distro. Server Software (the OS) support contracts absolutely make money... but so does desktop software support contracts.

Your assertion that desktop industry is not worth focusing on is not true. Tablets and phones are getting more popular, but desktops and laptops are not going anywhere anytime soon.