I'm one year in and hell yes. I wonder if Red Hat realize what they have here. Not just in silverblue but in Fedora.
I read a quora answer that estimated the Windows OS development budget at around 18 billion dollars, based on salaries. Imagine if Red Hat invested 2bn into Fedora to make it the Firefox of the desktop OS world. Just a 10% share is very significant against Microsoft.
They've come so far with so little, on the back of thousands of open source packages. That money could be used to keep those projects alive, and to sponsor them while they're being developed. Red Hat employees are already involved in a lot of them.
I'm not sure any company, Microsoft included, really cares about the personal desktop/laptop OS market at this point. Maybe Apple, but only because it's bundled with the hardware, which is what they really care about. Microsoft and IBM care far more cloud platforms and enterprise users. Until Fedora comes out with something like Active Directory, SCCM, Sharepoint, and the Office Suite, businesses will continue to overwhelmingly use Windows.
And most of those people will use Windows at home, too, if for no other reason than to not have to learn how to use two different desktop systems.
You're conflating development budgets and marketing budgets.
Redhat could invest 200bn into Fedora or any other project, and still people won't switch to it because even if it's "better" by some arbitrary metric, it's not what people are used to.
It's definitely possible, but it looks like Linux is more likely to gain popularity via WSL than via Fedora or similar.
I read a quora answer that estimated the Windows OS development budget at around 18 billion dollars, based on salaries. Imagine if Red Hat invested 2bn into Fedora to make it the Firefox of the desktop OS world. Just a 10% share is very significant against Microsoft.
They've come so far with so little, on the back of thousands of open source packages. That money could be used to keep those projects alive, and to sponsor them while they're being developed. Red Hat employees are already involved in a lot of them.