Reading some of the comments of another Slashdot article on Windows Vista made me aware once more that the landscape of operating system adoption is shifting: the Windows slice of the pie seems to be getting smaller, at least for home users.
For one thing, people start switching to Apple. I haven't counted yet, but the amount of people you meet who casually mention that they just got their first Mac seems to increase exponentially.
Then, during the last months, it became abundantly clear that Ubuntu is becoming a serious alternative to commercial desktop systems. I've been waiting for signs of mass adoption, and while we're not there yet Ubuntu is starting to be everywhere you look, is getting mentioned in the mainstream press, and is indeed a system suitable for everybody. Grandmas use it. Hell, even geeks use it.
Or, as Anonymous Brave Guy puts it on Slashdot:
The more I read about Vista, the less I care, and I'm someone who (at present) does run XP both at home and at work, and uses some OSS for practical rather than philosophical reasons. [...] This could be the best thing to happen to open source software since forever.
The future PC market, one or two years from now, will be dominated by three operating systems: Windows Vista, OS X and Ubuntu Linux. And while those three parties vary widely in terms of their tastes and especially their means, all three of them are descendants of a long line of failed experiments and successive improvements. Emerging to find new ways to do things, new interfaces, new approaches.
There has never been such a great market situation as the one ahead of us.
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