In the end, Haff said, it comes down to economics and revenue. "How many consumers are going to pay for a desktop Linux for their home?" he asked. "Very few. It's not like the consumer desktop market is very big anyway, and then you take the group that's willing to pay for it, that's a tiny, tiny slice indeed."

"My take here is that Red Hat has Fedora, and that home users can perfectly well run Fedora," Haff said. "I guess this is generating a little buzz that Red Hat isn't creating a consumer desktop. But they never have. This isn't really changing anything."

Dana Gardner, an analyst with US-based Interarbor Solutions, agreed. "It's not compatible with their business, and it's not going to make them any significant dough," Gardner said.

Other recent developments in the fledgling desktop-as-a-service marketplace could also be playing a part in Red Hat's strategy, Gardner said. In that marketplace, vendors including Desktone, MokaFive and Citrix Systems are building systems that allow multiple users to work from one instance of an operating system, reducing the number of operating system licenses that are needed, which lowers revenue for OS vendors.

"What they're doing is kind of turning the economics" around, he said. "The timing and the economics have shifted. This makes perfect sense."

The Red Hat announcement is a bit ironic because it comes less than a week before Ubuntu is unveiling its latest 8.04 editions of its free consumer desktop and enterprise server operating systems on Monday. Ubuntu gains revenue by selling support for its operating systems through its commercial sponsor, Canonical.

Ubuntu has had some modest success with a sales effort by computer maker Dell that includes desktop Ubuntu Linux offered on a select number of Dell machines.

The Red Hat announcement also comes the same week that Curl, which builds software to create rich internet application (RIA) features for Web sites, debuted its installer that now supports Ubuntu Linux on the desktop. The new Curl 6.0 installer will allow Ubuntu desktop users to see RIA rendered code on their machines. Curl added the installer in part because of growing customer demand for desktop Ubuntu support, the company said.