Cymric wrote:
The biggest loser of this shift in core CPU usage is plain Linux.
People buying x86-compatible hardware did, until yesterday, have two choices: Windows or Linux. Windows came with the greedy hand of Microsoft, Linux came with the nerdy hand of an army of old-school hackers who couldn't agree on which hand to wipe their a55 with if their life depended on it. Now users have a truly viable alternative: the userfriendliness of OSX.
I predict a devastating blow to the market share of plain Linux, and a tremendous increase in productivity to get open source applications ported to OSX. No more arguments about Gnome or KDE, either: it will be OSX's GUI first, and the rest later.
I think you're missing the point. There is nothing to indicate OSX will be availablr for anything except Apple computers, regardless of processor.
Also, even if OSX is available to all x86 type systems, it isn't open source and never will be. There will always be a niche for free open source alternatives. Linux hasn't got to where it is by offering a better desktop than Windows, so I don't see the arrival of MacOSX as being particularly threatening. Commercial developers will post to MacOSX first, but they do that already. Open source developers will keep doing what they are doing now.
