I believe that the reason that Ubuntu is winning the server market is because it won the desktop market. Ubuntu is on most production servers because devs are more familiar with Ubuntu than alternatives
since they use Ubuntu on their desktop. That's certainly the reason why I use Ubuntu or Debian on all the production servers I've spun up.
I'm sure Ubuntu is well aware of this issue, and of course they're also dog-fooding Ubuntu Desktop, so while progress may slow, I highly doubt it will stop.
In fact it might just speed up, since for the last few years they've been focusing their efforts on Unity 8. Now even though they'll be spending less resources on the desktop, the resources they do spend won't be disappearing into an unreleased project like Mir & Unity 8.
You're lucky. Until very recently, I had to work on CentOS 5 which was very frustrating. To make it more bearable, I compiled from source and installed modern versions of non-server software for personal use, e.g., Vim, GNU screen, Bash, etc. At home, I'm happy running Lubuntu on my laptop.
Indeed. Look at Microsoft. While the home desktop is not their primary focus, they still defend their position there as it is a pitch point when selling their products to corporations.
This with the argument that as potential employees are already familiar with Microsoft products from home use, they do not require as much up front training.
I'm sure Ubuntu is well aware of this issue, and of course they're also dog-fooding Ubuntu Desktop, so while progress may slow, I highly doubt it will stop.
In fact it might just speed up, since for the last few years they've been focusing their efforts on Unity 8. Now even though they'll be spending less resources on the desktop, the resources they do spend won't be disappearing into an unreleased project like Mir & Unity 8.