There are two markets. The server market and the desktop market. I believe that the battle in the server market is mostly gone for every other OS, GNU/Linux has taken over the big corps. They found a platform to drop their applications on, free of charge. The Free Software movement has created spectacular software like Apache, Bind, Sendmail and others you probably know, this is a one way street.
On the Desktop market nowadays the most advanced OS is for sure Tiger. The word advanced means usability and feeling first, advanced features (like spotlight) after. KDE and GNOME are making a great effort, I believe that GNU/Linux it's increasing it's percentage of Desktop users as well. You'll see that in a few years, most state owned companies will turn their software to Free Software, which is most cases means Open Source and Linux, this will make it even more popular. There is no OS that can give the young Hacker as much as Linux (I keep the BSD's out of the conversation in purpose), it's not only the kernel source code.. it's an entire culture that it's behind this.. it's the killer features that are first released as a hard-core bad written project under Linux, feature that the advanced users can use and they like. If Linux was not created by Linus in 1992 in 1993 someone would have done it, he said so too.
We are lucky to have so many choices, and it's not fair to compare these two OS's because the one is company driven Desktop OS while the other one comes out of people who write code in their spare time for free.
My server run's Gentoo GNU/Linux for almost 2 years now, and I never faced serious issues. My desktop of choice is certainly OS X, but I'd be happy with GNU/Linux too, especially if I didn't had the money to afford a Mac. Microsoft if does not come up with something at least comparable, is doomed.
Another thing, if you look this at the long run (50-100 years from now), with the existing lawsuits and rules, I believe that every other OS except Linux is doomed. The choice will be to go Open Source or die.
by Panagiotis Atmatzidis — Jul 14
On the Desktop market nowadays the most advanced OS is for sure Tiger. The word advanced means usability and feeling first, advanced features (like spotlight) after. KDE and GNOME are making a great effort, I believe that GNU/Linux it's increasing it's percentage of Desktop users as well. You'll see that in a few years, most state owned companies will turn their software to Free Software, which is most cases means Open Source and Linux, this will make it even more popular. There is no OS that can give the young Hacker as much as Linux (I keep the BSD's out of the conversation in purpose), it's not only the kernel source code.. it's an entire culture that it's behind this.. it's the killer features that are first released as a hard-core bad written project under Linux, feature that the advanced users can use and they like. If Linux was not created by Linus in 1992 in 1993 someone would have done it, he said so too.
We are lucky to have so many choices, and it's not fair to compare these two OS's because the one is company driven Desktop OS while the other one comes out of people who write code in their spare time for free.
My server run's Gentoo GNU/Linux for almost 2 years now, and I never faced serious issues. My desktop of choice is certainly OS X, but I'd be happy with GNU/Linux too, especially if I didn't had the money to afford a Mac. Microsoft if does not come up with something at least comparable, is doomed.
Another thing, if you look this at the long run (50-100 years from now), with the existing lawsuits and rules, I believe that every other OS except Linux is doomed. The choice will be to go Open Source or die.