Anyone interested in Ubuntu, and Linux in general, can easily try it out with a “live CD”. What a live CD does is boot your OS from your CD drive and allows you to test drive the OS before making the switch and installing it on your hard drive. Burning a live CD is pretty straight forward, you download a copy of the desktop OS, burn the .iso file to a CD, and boot your computer from the CD drive. The last part probably would be the hardest for people not used to playing with multiple OSs before. For Macs you hold down the Option key as soon as your hear the Apple "Dong" that will bring up a selection of bootable drives from which you select the CD icon with the windows label.
As soon as your computer boots into Ubuntu you'll notice the similarities between it and both Mac OS X and Windows. Ubuntu has the advantage of pulling the best features from both of these commercial OSs and mixing them into a great looking and very functional desktop. Besides looking nice Ubuntu comes loaded with enough software for the average person to be productive out of the box. Open Office, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, has a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application which are comparable to Office. Best of all your documents will be in open standards format so no more compatibly problems with the new .***x formats from Microsoft. Besides office productivity there are included apps for music, photos, and video which cover the needs of most consumer users. However, the most important application by far on Ubuntu is the Firefox internet browser, the new "killer app" of any OS.
With the emergence of the "cloud" and people interacting more and more with web apps and on demand services through the internet, the browser has become the defining piece of software of any OS. Firefox has grown to become the largest browser by usage, and gives Ubuntu and any other linux distro a way to level the playing field against Windows. People are comfortable with Firefox's interface, and while they might be confused by other parts of Ubuntu they will feel right at home for an increasing amount of their computer usage. So what does this mean? I think this is the death of the traditional OS, not in usage or necessity but in cost.
As Chris Anderson describes in Free!, "anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs". This is now happening to the OS, and since Ubuntu and the linux community has made free as high of quality as Windows or OS X there are a declining number of reasons for people not to switch. I think this trend is evident in the explosion of netbooks being sold many with a linux operating system. The increase in linux usage will create a more lucrative market for developers to create applications for linux systems bringing over more users. This with the march forward in cloud computing, SaaS, and web applications will only render the OS more insignificant. Soon as people decide between spending hundreds of dollars on upgrading to Windows 7, or Snow Leopard they may want to consider moving to Ubuntu and starting the slide into $0 operating systems.
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