This reported 3% is thanks to uncountable coder-hours devoted by crowds of volunteers, and employees at many companies, notably but not at all limited to Canonical, Red Hat and Collabora, and put into developing massive, explicitly Linux-on-desktop software packages like the KDE and GNOME projects, Wayland, X.org, freedesktop, Cinnamon, Budgie, Xfce, (many more that I can’t think of or list here), and the numerous distro developers and maintainers at Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Arch, etc. who put effort into packaging and keeping fresh these softwares for end-users to download for (mostly) free, competing against for-profit operating system desktops from Microsoft and Apple that have significant advantages in OEM bundling and testing, marketing, system incompatibility both intentional and inadvertent.
That so many people put so much effort over multiple decades into producing a range of products that earn many of them no profit whatsoever and which has barely made a dent in the marketplace it competes, for over two decades, is a testament to optimism about the human spirit, ideology, stubbornness, and the kind of pride and satisfaction of a service rendered for public consumption that is almost alien to modern capitalism.
This reported 3% is thanks to uncountable coder-hours devoted by crowds of volunteers, and employees at many companies, notably but not at all limited to Canonical, Red Hat and Collabora, and put into developing massive, explicitly Linux-on-desktop software packages like the KDE and GNOME projects, Wayland, X.org, freedesktop, Cinnamon, Budgie, Xfce, (many more that I can’t think of or list here), and the numerous distro developers and maintainers at Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Arch, etc. who put effort into packaging and keeping fresh these softwares for end-users to download for (mostly) free, competing against for-profit operating system desktops from Microsoft and Apple that have significant advantages in OEM bundling and testing, marketing, system incompatibility both intentional and inadvertent.
That so many people put so much effort over multiple decades into producing a range of products that earn many of them no profit whatsoever and which has barely made a dent in the marketplace it competes, for over two decades, is a testament to optimism about the human spirit, ideology, stubbornness, and the kind of pride and satisfaction of a service rendered for public consumption that is almost alien to modern capitalism.