The use of the linux desktop & notebook distro's is rising gradually all the time, and doesn't boom cause the general population (users of most pc's & notebooks) doesn't go for the best but for the most common.
On the other side, in the industry we see that free software has won & merged with proprietary software rather well, just look at the numbers at netcraft, google, wikipedia, tivo, all those devices, robocar's, the us army and what not else.
I don't agree that gnu/linux (or bsd or ....), are not inventive and triying to copy stuff from microsoft, just look how and where they are used.