Microsoft sucks, Microsoft Windows sucks, and Microsoft Windows Phone sucks. With Valve bringing gaming to Linux you can expect the Windows desktop to die off quickly. Not the desktop, mind you, but the Windows one. They still have a decent grip of office software, but office software sucks anyway. Death to that evil beast!

How many do you think are going to switch to linux? How many already have (IBM is a big one that has switched)?

One of the big reasons keeping people from (personally) switching was games. Many productivity applications already have a usable alternative on linux.

How about the multitude of governments and school districts across the globe?

Steady stream of people switching. It's only a matter of time.

Such things exist for opensource software.

It's so cute to see people discussing this death without actual arguments, just cos'.. Windows mustdie

In Russian IT world you can sometimes hear windows referred as a "mustdie"(мастдай).

Nevertheless.. Windows phone market share growth rapidly. I see no reason for that to change anytime soon. And the worst thing to happen to Windows desktop, is it to become a niche OS. Which is inevitable also, but I can not imagine Windows to disappear from the market any sooner than 20yr+. Most likely not even in a century.

I do not think it will EVER disappear , but there IS a change and it's going to happen slowly.

ValveOS SteamOS is basically just a Linux distribution that Valve will maintain. More than that, they are also supporting Steam on Ubuntu Linux (and in the future, probably other popular distros). Other unsupported distros still work, but aren't officially supported. IOW, as far as games support is concerned Linux is Linux is Linux in the long term.

Businesses don't care about games, but I didn't say that they did. I pointed out that office software will keep businesses tied in, albeit it sucks and users would be better off abandoning it, but they don't know any better so such is life. For the most part, businesses don't really have "desktops" anyway. They have "workstations". It's merely semantics, but the main difference is that the workstation probably only runs a few applications. Applications that could be replaced with free and open source ones. That is easy. The hard part was replacing games.

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Once Linux is running in the homes users will get used to it. Suddenly the switch at work won't be so daunting or scary. Progressively it will become ideal to switch the work machines over too.

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With regards to support, that is mostly a virtual promise in the Windows world anyway. Unless you're a big player spending 5 or 7 figures on licensing you aren't likely to get much in the way of support. Resources are limited. The downside is that a proprietary vendor actually prevents you from hiring anybody else to fix a problem or add a feature, or doing it yourself, for that matter. An open source one encourages you to fix it yourself if you want to, or find a better price for the support. It also encourages problems to be found and fixed sooner. It's basically all win for business to change to open source. Change is never free, but in the long term it will be better for the whole planet.

The only reason they got somewhat decent multi monitor support on nvidia cards to begin with was because of windows 7 requiring some extra features. They claimed they couldn't implement XRandR 1.2+ properly due to a lacking kernel feature. Turns out, no, they were just being stupid, and didn't want to do the work required unless windows wanted the same feature set.

If you want better multi (3+) display support you go intel or amd, period. NVidia's has always been a rather large joke. Sadly at the moment, nvidia has smoother 2-3 display gaming support. But AMD is working on its (driver) issues with frame timing.

Exactly. Their excuse was that they needed some kind of open kernel api to get things to behave properly. I can't remember the exact thing they were looking for.. But it sounded like an excuse to me.

Except by using Windows, even without buying it, you're still showing application developers that writing only for Windows is a viable option. Third-party developers don't care if you buy Windows, they care that they can spend less time worrying about portability.

So in effect, you're still helping Microsoft.