First, it's really not the case that only Ubuntu and OpenSUSE work on the desktop. You may have run into issues which YOU were unable to solve, but those issue

First, it's really not the case that only Ubuntu and OpenSUSE work on the desktop. You may have run into issues which YOU were unable to solve, but those issues may also have been specific to your laptop hardware configuration. It is well known that certain laptops tend to work better with Linux than others, in fact Im running Fedora on a Lenovo right now and it works great. So, is the desktop really irrelevant? Depends, different distros have different priorities. To date, Linux on the desktop has not shown mainstream appeal, but it does seem to gain more and more users every year. If you really insist on being obtuse regarding the reasons for poor Linux desktop support, the primary answer is that Linux has a long history of being a very good server OS. Security, stability, speed, price and customization are all reasons that is true. There is limited time in the day, and so one thing must be prioritized over another. Most linux distros choose to prioritize server development over the desktop experience, because that is where their primary user base is. Other teams made different choices. Why, at the start of this year, I tried to install various Windows versions on my rack server using a USB drive. Only Windows Server 2012 worked. Why is this? Is the server really that irrelevant to Microsoft? This is not a bug report though, I'm just wondering what the institutional reasons are.