Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

Anyone who says M$ Vista is good, must be kidding. It was one of the most anticipated OS's recently, however it did not make it. Still most people prefer to use XP over Vista, for what ever reasons.

Apple did a good job with leopard, even the M$ Vista was very much influenced by it; no matter how much M$ tries to deny that. Thats on the desktop end. As for the servers, *nix and others are rapidly gaining over this market too. Most of the very high end markets are still dominated by *nix like the HP Superdome servers. This is one area where M$ has been struggling and will continue to loose.

The case with desktops is changing as well, where better and stable OS's have come into play. Most importantly at a time when corporate and enterprise applications are moving to web based solutions, dependency on a specific OS for desktop is slowly fading away. Adding to that with the recent developments into the desktops on *nix based OS's like Linux has given it a good exposure and acceptance into the home users as well. With benefits like having a more secure, stable and customizable platform.

With applications contributions by the open source community, no longer one is limited to one OS anymore. There is FREE applications today that can cater to almost all areas. In the recent 2 years or so the acceptance of OS's like the Mac OS X and Linux has had a good uptake even in Maldives and I assume will continue to do so more. I like to believe this is a new start of an end of one dominant OS ruling over our desktops and the future is good. Still a lot of people don't understand what FREE software means , it does not mean its only FREE but it means FREEDOM too. Furthermore I guess this same concept is started to spread all around the world, and slowly we might see a huge decline of Windows users in a near future. This is very possible.