It's hard to tell. Perhaps in the next 10 or 20 years if Microsoft fails to deliver good OSs.

Those with expertise with computers will, as they do nowadays.

Average people won't, because there is no such thing as "Linux", there are 100s of distributions, all of them claiming to be the right one, and all of them containing different set of bugs.

As soon as it won't require any more effort to install than Windows, and will have compatible alternatives for most of the properitary file formats,
AND it will have a decent development platorm.

No idea. Most of the distributions I tried looked exactly the same, and contained mostly the same applications.
BTW, on launching Firefox, it gave me a kernel panic. No, thanks.
I'll wait and see.

My computer experience is mostly with .NET and web development, but I always try to keep up with most other alternatives as well.



Well, I think this is the part really worth discussing:
1) Lack of cooperation, and willingness to help and understand each other.
Most of the Linux people hate the competing distributions more than they hate Windows, for no real reason.

1/a) There is no "Linux" operating system, just hundreds of "distributions", none of which are complete, and all of them claims that is is the best.
It is hard to choose, and after trying out 2 of them (Ubuntu and Fedora) which were equally as buggy, I just didn't bother.

1/b) One of the most important people behind it keeps on arguing about the name of the OS, which is understandable from a personal viewpoint, but it just confuses the average people.

2) Almost complete lack of top-of-the-line development environments and platform.
Most people who develop for Linux still argue about whether to use C or C++ (or some weird interpreted scripting language), while development is WAY easier on Windows.

2/a) While actually, anyone can create a stunning UI for WPF in no time, Linux developers usually assemble their UI with tools similar to (but less functional than) VB6's form editor from 10 years ago. Or WORSE, they create the UI from code.
(Although Qt's QML looks very promising.)

2/b) Most people consider Java and .NET properitary crap not worth caring about, any of the two offers faster, easier and friendlier development experience than native code.
Not to mention that I can run the same code (without recompiling) on any architecture, with the promise of being optimized for that, too.
(Fortunately, Mono is going to change that one day.)


That's it.
All of the above is my personal opinion, and I don't intend to offend and flame anyone with it. If you disagree or think I'm uninformed, I'll be glad if you correct me.

And BTW, I love the freedom that Linux promises (this is why I bought the N900, after all), but I can't use it for any work on my PC.