But you will note in the cost column that the ones making money are on windows/mac. Its possible to sell commercial software on linux, just not desktop software

But you will note in the cost column that the ones making money are on windows/mac. Its possible to sell commercial software on linux, just not desktop software as such. Between the small and very fragmented marketshare between the distros there is a pretty strong user distaste for commercial offerings. Which means the headwinds for a successful product are a lot worse. If one wants to create a new filemanager/whatever a far better plan is to target windows/macos as the primary offerings/focus rather than linux in the beginning. I guess some of that is application specific (ex a git frontend might work) but one better have a reason other than "I like linux" if they want it to be something other than a hobby.