My thoughts exactly.

If upgrades get too costly, perhaps we might see 1% - 3% of people migrating to other operating systems like Linux or RISC OS

Fixed that for you

According to this 2011 report there must be over 500,000,000 Win 7/8/8.1 machines by now, plus a large number of XP ones. Out of a total of 125 billion still in use.

1%-3% of 500 million is 5,000,000 to 15,000,000.

That's a huge number of user machines. Even if there were that many disgruntled owners who were capable of a switch away from Windows and its pervasive application software, we have to consider how many would feel it worth it, and how many wouldn't have at least one and possibly several other people breathing down their neck and saying "No way!"

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

...Out of a total of 125 billion still in use.

That's 17 or so for every man, woman and child on the planet. Seems rather a large number, perhaps there's a decimal point-less error

I'm using one that has to count. Frequently I have its predecessor on most of the day. Sitting behind it on the desk is the Vista machine that I stopped using only a couple of weeks ago as it was getting messed up by some HTML5 stuff.

Lying on the second bedroom floor is the one preceding the one that is currently on most of the day. I use it occasionally as it has some data and programs that I don't want to transfer to this one, (which has a 256GB SSD and nothing else), and that never got transferred to the intervening one.

Four active here, with just lil' old me!

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 16-Aug-15 23:46:09)

As I said before, a lot of it depends on the Steam Box and Valve - if they can aggressively promote it and get Linux known as a gaming system, then a fair few may change.

Hopefully Valve will make it easier/easy to install on a PC as well, which will all help.

Unfortunately, though it looks like Valve dont seem to have much interest in anything at the moment...

The only OS that could knock out Windows on home computers would come from google. Which isn't to say it couldn't have a unix/linux base.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 17-Aug-15 12:50:44)

Apple could do it if they offered more cost effective devices. But then OS X is a Unix off shoot as well.

It needs to be on more powerful machines - or allow installation on PC's. At the moment ChromeOS is... underpowered and too online orientated to be of much use.

In reply to a post by MrTAToad2:

It needs to be on more powerful machines - or allow installation on PC's. At the moment ChromeOS is... underpowered and too online orientated to be of much use.

Yep, certainly is, i know you can use it offline and as soon as you get back online it will sync the files, but for me that is too much relying on a service that could be cut or charged for at any time.

Like what is stopping Google from charging per GB?
I prefer to have my storage off line to be honest, but then I never really have got into this cloudy stuff.