[jiggy2011]

I'm not sure , if more apps move to the browser then surely the desktop OS becomes more of a commodity as long as it is able to support running the browser itself.

One thing Linux does lend itself well to is providing a kernel and basic services for interacting with hardware etc and leaving a fairly blank sheet to build other stuff on top off which could be a very basic consumer system with just a browser or a full fat dev environment, Android is a good example of this.

If all I want to do is run HTML5 apps using Chrome I can't think of a good reason to justify a $100 purchase of a Windows license , or paying more for hardware in order to run OSX.

In the future I can imagine a huge amount of the population using Linux based devices, they just won't know or care that they are Linux based devices. However I don't forsee a future in which everyone uses KDE or Unity and run only "free as in freedom" software.