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.

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!

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