Wired: Two new operating systems saw daylight this week. One entered with great pomp and pizzazz and a reasonably cheap price tag. Mac OS X 10.5, or the "Leopard", as it is known, was available to the baying queues at Apple stores worldwide last Friday, writes Danny O'Brien

The second entered with all the clumsy celebrations that a new Linux distribution could geekily muster - and an unreasonably cheap price.

Ubuntu 7.10 or, as it is known, the "Gutsy Gibbon" version, arrived on dozens of fileservers globally, to be downloaded for free. Ubuntu's development is funded by Canonical, which makes a living from providing support.

If the Leopard and the Gibbon are aimed at the average desktop user, they both badly need to attract coders with what they have underneath.

In a world dominated by Windows, the only way you can drive innovation in alternative operating systems is by tempting programmers to build fine applications on your foundations.

The strategies taken by these two operating systems highlight what is drawing coders away from the Windows platform and what might result from their innovation elsewhere.

Unlike the omnipresent (and, within Apple, omnipotent) Steve Jobs, Ubuntu's guiding light, South African Mark Shuttleworth, takes a light hand on the rudder.

As well he might, as Ubuntu's richness comes from its use of thousands of volunteers' efforts to polish Linux. The result, in the Gibbon, is a polished if sprawling attempt to present the anarchic world of Linux in a user-friendly desktop package.

While Windows dominates third-party software, Ubuntu comes "batteries included" with thousands of free supporting applications, from word processors and kids painting programs to graduate-level mathematical analysis packages.

Most importantly, the tools that let coders make other tools - development packages - are all easy to access and use on Linux. Even a journeyman programmer could be on their way to contributing to Ubuntu's repositories of software.

Apple's tyrant king does give it a unique advantage in the market, however. What is noticeable in Leopard is what's missing. You can no longer run "Classic" Mac applications on this new Mac OS X.

The various user interface dalliances of the past few years have been excised and replaced by one Jobs-approved look and feel. If you develop for the 64-bit version of the OS (giving you an increase in speed and convenience if you're a coder), you'll find much of the old, overly complicated tricks of the operating system are no longer available. That's a marked contrast from Linux, which has cruft (ie redundant or unnecessarily complicated code) in its programming corners from the early 1970s.

Sometimes learning to code on Unix systems such as Linux is like taking a complete history course in ancient computer wizard lore. Learning to programme Leopard merely requires you to wholeheartedly buy into the latest Apple gospel: no historical context is needed.

One can be spoilt for choice, too. In Linux, writing a graphical application requires you to pick from any number of competing models. Apple just offers the one highly-polished possibility.

Comparing the Leopard with the Gibbon misses the real competition for both, though. The true lord of the jungle is Microsoft's Vista. If you judged the latest version of Windows purely from the headlines it garners, you would think Vista had been a failure: there have been slow adoption curves, with some customers switching back to earlier versions of Windows.

The truth is that Vista is doing perfectly well: good enough to keep Microsoft earning record profits - up 23 per cent to $4.29 billion (€2.9 billion) this quarter. Its market penetration on the desktop still beats both Mac OS X (but only by a smidgen: all Mac OS versions have about 6 per cent of the market, according to Market Share; Vista has 7 per cent and Linux a tiny 0.81 per cent).

Towering above them all is Windows XP, with almost 80 per cent penetration.

There is a world of difference, however, between a computing universe where Windows is the only player in town and one where Microsoft has its ankles regularly nipped by two agile competitors. Both users and developers are being tempted away from Windows to dally with other systems.

With Linux, it's for the grubby chance to mess around with the details of an entirely open operating system. With Mac OS X, it's for the chance to play with a shiny toy with far less baggage than the lumbering Windows platform.

Both the Leopard and the Gibbon are exciting and exotic new animals, very tempting for creative, bored coders. Their day jobs will undoubtedly be spent feeding demand for Vista-compatible software, but if they dream, they will dream of the new alternatives. That, not market share, is the risk for Microsoft and the promise of these not-so-newcomers.