Free is too expensive (Economist)

- it's expensive for non-enterprise users compared to Ubuntu
- CentOS has had problems releasing security updates quickly enough
- Scientific Linux is not well known and sounds to an ordinary users like it is too techie

The idea of targetting a distro is reasonable, and Ubuntu is already the target to some degree, but the other 30%+ of the Linux world would be left out if this was the only target.

Ubuntu tends to require the latest OS version for some hardware support, yet imposes very disruptive 6-monthly updates generally - the LTSs are really no more stable than the other versions these days, so it's just luck if you end up on an LTS as the version that works for your hardware. In fact hardware regressions are the fly in this model - Ubuntu's quality is sufficiently variable and hardware-dependent that it's hard to predict which version will work well on a given PC.