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Sadly, there is no money in desktop. I wonder if anyone has numbers, but I doubt any of customers of enterprise distros specifically pay or care about the desktop side of things. And without sufficient incentives, this is the natural progression of desktop related things on linux. Canonical also pivoted away from desktop/mobile.

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I would prefer to paraphrase that "There is no money in supporting large number of desktop environments". And open source model allows to cut some costs by adopting project that is actively developed and supported by someone else. RedHat actively sponsors Gnome; it is reasonable for them to save some money by dropping KDE support. Canonical toyed with half-baked Unity and less-than-half-baked-Mir, and then saved money by completely "outsourcing" their DE to RedHat (by using Gnome). But it doesn't mean any of those projects is dead. It would mean projects will change less, become more stable, or even stagnate if there's not enough user base or developer interest. There are examples of software I use (Openbox or Shutter come to the mind) which doesn't change more or less for years. Maybe it's not the worst thing. Corporate money is driver of change, but it is often change for the sake of change - Gnome 2/3 switch or Systemd are most evident examples of that.

Here’s a suggestion: you bring together a small team of great Linux developers. You pick one laptop that is commercially available, eg Lenovo or a Dell or a Chromebook. You then put all your efforts into making an awesome dev distro for that laptop only. You resell it with the distro pre-installed and configured, and 12 months free support.

Could you make money selling it to coders? The go-to dev laptop for non-Mac users?

Nope, people would just bitch about how they refuse to buy it because it isn't exactly to their liking. Just check out any Purism or System76 thread.

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