And lo, the flames did roll in.
Another fantastic controversial Reg article. Amazing how many people are willing to argue religion on the internets, isn't it? I think I'll join in.
As others have pointed out, Ubuntu's strength lies in the package management system, and only a real enthusiast (with time to burn) is going to bother installing something that's not yet available via said system. Or trust an unpatched release, for that matter.
As still others have pointed out, Windows still rules the desktop. This isn't likely to change until the much-marketed 'Cloud' actually starts to mean something. Windows may be big, slow, and unimaginably bloated, but everyone and their grandma can use it. Unfortunately, the assumption in the world of Management seems to be that Windows servers can therefore be adminned (properly) minus Clue and must be better. So Linux/Unix will never be ousted from /that/ sphere.
Me, I'm just damn glad my job doesn't require me to use any office apps except for viewing files.
Except for LookOut, which will be disappearing just as soon as I get the chance to bring our email back in-house.
Nice one, Ted. Keep 'em coming!
PS: Incidentally, this myth of the OS dying is a pet peeve of mine. It isn't dying. It's just becoming less visible to the user. In the Cloud context, you'll still need an OS of some sort to run Cloud terminals on. In the virtualisation context:
Time was, the OS was a thin layer of APIs and libraries that everything else could talk to the hardware through without worrying about the details, and all the user saw was the UI (graphical, text-based, whatever). Then it got a GUI and a 'consistent user experience' (mainly a Windows and Mac trait, but desktop Linux will doubtless get there eventually too). Now virtualisation and paravirtualisation have come along, with the idea of virtual appliances, and we're back to the nice thin layer of hardware abstraction again, which is invisible to the user.
So if you mean 'the big shiny consistent GUIs that the user sees are being replaced with infinitely-variable, often-crap web sites and apps', then yeah, the 'OS' is dying. In any other sense, it's just the usual cycle of reincarnation combined with vendor waffling.
Give it ten or twenty years and we'll be moving back towards monolithic platforms and consistent GUIs again.