Schools have traditionally used Macs because Apple has always been very generous with educational discounting.
I'm sure the 1 laptop per child program turned to Ubuntu because of costs...but also because of security concerns. MS is a huge target. The vast majority of viruses are written for MS products. They're the biggest target...and not really that well liked anymore...nobody likes a big bully, and they've been caught in various anti-competitive behaviors of late.
Brazil has vowed to move all government computers away from MS, and onto Linux.
Business, as you pointed out, are reluctant to move to something new, due to deployment costs, and learning curves...but realistically, hardware costs, and support costs are a big reality as well. Vista is a VERY hungry OS, and computers made literally just a couple years ago may not have the capacity to run it, without considerable hardware upgrades. One of the things that's so nice about Linux is that it's more efficient than even XP...let alone Vista.
If companies can defer the costs of upgrading thousands of computers, maybe the deployment costs of Linux are suddenly not so scary.
I see Apple taking more of a market share, based largely on the successes of their other consumer products, the iPods and the iPhone, which are many people's introduction to the Apple "experience"...but I also see Linux taking a bite out of Vista's potential market share, since its hardware requirements are far more modest, it's more stable, and more secure, and OH YEAH; FREE.
I could be wrong, but that's just my impression.
I'm sure the 1 laptop per child program turned to Ubuntu because of costs...but also because of security concerns. MS is a huge target. The vast majority of viruses are written for MS products. They're the biggest target...and not really that well liked anymore...nobody likes a big bully, and they've been caught in various anti-competitive behaviors of late.
Brazil has vowed to move all government computers away from MS, and onto Linux.
Business, as you pointed out, are reluctant to move to something new, due to deployment costs, and learning curves...but realistically, hardware costs, and support costs are a big reality as well. Vista is a VERY hungry OS, and computers made literally just a couple years ago may not have the capacity to run it, without considerable hardware upgrades. One of the things that's so nice about Linux is that it's more efficient than even XP...let alone Vista.
If companies can defer the costs of upgrading thousands of computers, maybe the deployment costs of Linux are suddenly not so scary.
I see Apple taking more of a market share, based largely on the successes of their other consumer products, the iPods and the iPhone, which are many people's introduction to the Apple "experience"...but I also see Linux taking a bite out of Vista's potential market share, since its hardware requirements are far more modest, it's more stable, and more secure, and OH YEAH; FREE.
I could be wrong, but that's just my impression.
My dad's new HP laptop has Vista, and from the play that I've had with it I can say it feels nor looks nothing like OSX.
Karrot-X on the other hand. 
