They wouldn't have much to gain from fighting against other Linux distros. It would be like fighting over breadcrumbs in the consumer market. It would be pointless. Their real competitor is Windows, and they should be using marketing and partnerships with manufacturers (Dell and others) and big app developers (EA, Valve, etc) and whatever is necessary to push Ubuntu/Linux more into the mainstream.

If this is indeed their plan, though, there is a pretty big flaw in it. Why are they trying so much to get "inspired" by Mac OS, when they should be trying to get inspired by Windows, and make it easy for the many more Windows users to transition easily from Windows to Ubuntu? As a Windows user, this is why I find Linux Mint Cinnamon (also based on Ubuntu) so much easier and less frustrating to use than regular Ubuntu. Of course Windows 8 is completely changing the direction for their UI/UX from the "old Windows" style, too, so there's that, but I have no reason to believe it will be successful, yet.

Many Linux distros (Mandrake especially) spent years trying to win market share by cloning Windows and didn't get very far.

Turns out cheap looking Windows clone that can't run most Windows apps isn't really what the market is looking for.

Of course they are inspired by what Apple is doing (so is pretty much everyone now, including MS) but I think Unity/Gnome3 are different enough to stand on their own merits (or lack thereof).

I'm not sure what Canonical would get out of a partnership with Dell though , since their software is free they aren't going to get a cut on units sold.

"I'm not sure what Canonical would get out of a partnership with Dell though, since their software is free they aren't going to get a cut on units sold."

Canonical charges 20% transaction fee for each app sold http://developer.ubuntu.com/publish/commercial-software-faqs...

This isn't really anything new. When I worked for Canonical, they tended to talk about Ubuntu and avoid mentioning Linux. I don't think the point of this is to get exclusive apps, though. Sure they would love to have exclusive apps, but at the end of the day everything is still open source.

They do want apps that integrate well with Ubuntu. So if you write an app that integrates with Ubuntu One or with Unity then you're going to have a better chance of winning than if you write a plain GTK+ app. So that will probably tend to keep these apps in Ubuntu and out of other distros, but that's the extent of that and I don't think the goal of it is to keep apps out of Fedora or whatever.

Their prime target - windows users - are in general confused by the concept of Linux distributions. Calling it just Ubuntu, and having PPAs and apps (or "computer programs" as old-timers call them) just for Ubuntu (or at least, that will definitely "just work" in Ubuntu) will make it easier to get windows users.

This isn't a marketing thing or trying to lock other distributions out, it's about having a simple platform that people can make applications on without having to drink from a firehose.

Ubuntu-as-a-platform can make opinionated choices what to support. This is why when someone asks "How do I make an application for Ubuntu" you can answer with "Quickly and Python" instead of "well that depends."

It's nice to have a default.

The apps have to run on ubuntu. It would be silly to describe it as "A linux apps contest where the apps have to work on Ubuntu" instead of "An Ubuntu apps contest"

It's probably just a marketing thing. Look at ubuntu.com, there's not a single mention of "Linux" across the whole front page.

Neither does http://www.android.com/, or http://www.debian.org/ . While factually correct, I don't see your point.