Linux is a fantastic OS, moreso considering it’s free.
The relatively few companies behind it (Novell, Canonical, RedHat) don’t stand to gain a whole lot by advertising it - at least not unless they’re prepared to put forward a combined marketing effort.
The reason is, an ad in favor of any Linux distribution is pretty much an ad promoting any and all Linux distributions. There’s no “Linux” operating system company - there are dozens, hundreds of them, tiny and large, and there are new ones springing up all the time - each dedicated to a specific interest area for their creators (with the exception of the few commercial companies named above who are trying to win over the corporate desktop space and/or the corporate server space).
Linux is not like the Mac OS, or Windows. It’s an extensible, fluid, malleable, almost infinitely variable set of elements that can be applied to make an OS-based tool to achieve pretty much anything, from the tiniest embedded systems to super mainframes running hundreds or thousands of virtualized computers. No “real” company could have the money or the self-interest to target an audience that diverse. There’s no embedded micro-windows OS, despite all Microsoft’s money, and there’s no Windows for massively parallel super-computers or mainframes.
Enthusiasts can do it - and usually without much (or any) money. They can dream up this universe of special-purpose, as well as general purpose instances of Linux (and the excellent BSD’s and QNX and all the other “alternative” and open-source OS’s).
Personally, I’m glad there’s no clear “winner” in the Linux race - if there were, they’d feel the need to start killing off the competition, to remain the winner.
I believe Linux should be free, and it’s regrettable that companies like RedHat, Novell and so on can co-opt the excellent work of some truly generous enthusiasts, like Linus, Stallman, et al, and in some cases have made pretty good money standing on the shoulders of others. I won’t say that these products won’t likely get even better faster with the kind of funding that Novell, RedHat and Canonical can pour into its improvement, but at some point, someone is going to try to close the Open Source idea down, out of corporate self-interest. We saw it happen with that tempest in a teapot a few years ago, it may happen with Microsoft starting to sniff around the Linux camp, smiling and wanting to play nice, offering the occasional tidbit - but it will come with a hefty legal string attached (there’s one to watch out for… I feel it in my bones). Hands off, Ballmer! Let it be!
It’s great that Linux is guided by the GPL and a set of open source principles based on sharing, helping and not restricting and winning. A set of principles that a whole bunch of people can uphold somehow gives me a lot more faith that something free will remain free. Putting those principles in the hands of corporate management? We always seem to see those same businesspeople ending up admitting that principles in a business context are just another commodity that can be sold, disposed of, ignored or hushed up until nobody remembers there ever were any principles, or that anybody had any.
Linux proves that there are other things of importance in the world than making money, like enthusiasm, generosity of spirit, innovation for its own sake, quality, cooperation, competition to make things better (not to eliminate competitors) and that the success of Linux really can’t measured in dollars or units sold. How do you sell something free?
We owe a tremendous thank-you to the thousands of dedicated, brilliant people around the world who have added to Linus Torvald’s little OS kernel, resulting in such excellent tools to be used in so many diverse ways.