Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: More than three years after its release, Windows 10 has passed Windows 7 in market share. That means more desktop computers are now running Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system than any other OS, according to Net Applications. The milestone is a nice way for Microsoft to end 2018, even though the company surely was hoping it wouldn't take this long for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 7.

It's been 27 years since Linus Torvalds let a group of people know about his "hobby" OS. OMGUbuntu blog writes: Did you know that Linux, like Queen Elizabeth II, actually has two birthdays? Some FOSS fans consider the first public release of (prototype) code, which dropped on October 5, 1991, as more worthy of being the kernel's true anniversary date. Others, ourselves included, take today, August 25, as the "birth" date of the project. And for good reason. This is the day on which, back in 1991, a young Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds sat at his desk to let the folks on comp.os.minix newsgroup know about the "hobby" OS he was working on. The "hobby OS" that wouldn't, he cautioned, be anything "big" or "professional." Even as Linux continues to have lion's share in the enterprise world, it has only managed to capture a tiny fraction of the consumer space. Further reading: Ask Slashdot: Whatever Happened To the 'Year of Linux on Desktop'?

Which Linux-based distro do you use? What changes, if any, would you like to see in it in the next three years?

Data for the month of August 2017 from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications is here, and it suggests that Linux has finally surpassed the three percent mark, quite possibly for the first time in recent years. According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August. There's no explanation for what accounted for this growth.

An anonymous reader quotes Neowin's report on the newest browser-usage figures from NetMarketShare: Microsoft Edge only commands a market share of 5.65% -- which is an increase of only 0.02 percentage points compared to last month... it only grew by 0.56% year-over-year. On the other hand, Google Chrome has continued its dominance with a market share of 59.49%. As a point of reference, this is a sizeable growth of 10.84 percentage points year-over-year... Data from another firm, StatCounter, depicts an even more depressing situation for Microsoft. According to the report, Edge sits at 3.89%... Chrome is the king of all browsers according to these statistics as well, with a market share of 63.21% -- a decrease of 0.14 percentage points compared to last month. Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari command 14%, 9.28%, and 5.16% respectively.
The firm also calculates that when it comes to desktop operating systems, Windows has 91.51% of all users, followed by MacOS at 6.12 and Linux at 2.36%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: According to data released today by Kaspersky Lab, roughly 98 percent of the computers affected by the ransomware were running some version of Windows 7, with less than one in a thousand running Windows XP. 2008 R2 Server clients were also hit hard, making up just over 1 percent of infections. Windows 7 is still by far the most common version of Windows, running on roughly four times as many computers as Windows 10 worldwide. Since more recent versions of Windows aren't vulnerable to WannaCry, it makes sense that most of the infections would hit computers running 7. Still, the stark disparity emphasizes how small of a role Windows XP seems to have played in spreading the infection, despite early concerns about the outdated operating system. The new figures also bear on the debate over Microsoft's patching practices, which generated significant criticism in the wake of the attack. Microsoft had released a public patch for Windows 7 months before the attack, but the patch for Windows XP was only released as an emergency measure after the worst of the damage had been done. The patch was available earlier to paying Custom Support customers, but most XP users were left vulnerable, each unpatched computer a potential vector to spread the ransomware further. Still, Kaspersky's figures suggest that unpatched XP devices played a relatively small role in the spread of the ransomware.

New submitter TroII writes: After Microsoft ended its year-long "free" Windows 10 offer, new installations have slowed predictably. But in an unexpected turn, October saw more new installs of both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 than of Windows 10. Compared to September's numbers, market share increased only 0.06% for Windows 10, while new installations of Windows 7 and 8.1 were an order of magnitude higher at 0.68%. According to tracking firm NetMarketShare, Windows 7 is still by far the most popular version of the OS, installed on more than twice as many computers as Microsoft's latest offering.

LichtSpektren writes: W3Counter's stats for June 2016 are in, and Linux desktop accounts for 2.48% of all web visits from tracked websites... (Android is counted separately from "Linux desktop.")
Meanwhile, NetMarketShare shows Linux with a 2.02% share of the desktop market. And StatCounter shows a more detailed breakdown of the top 7 operating systems, with Windows 7 at 42.02%, Windows 10 at 21.88%, OSX at 9.94%, Windows 8.1 at 8.66%, Windows XP at 6.5%, and another 4.06% for "Unknown" (which is roughly tied with "Other") -- beating Windows 8.0 at 3.52%. In May they also reported another thought-provoking statistic: that Firefox's browser usage had surpassed that of IE and Edge combined for the first time.

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat's new article about desktop operating systems: Windows 7 is still the king, but it no longer holds the majority. Nine months after Windows 10's release, Windows 7 has finally fallen below 50 percent market share and Windows XP has dropped into single digits. While this is good news for Microsoft, April was actually a poor month for Windows overall, which for the first time owned less than 90 percent of the market, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.

An anonymous reader writes: Six months after its release, Windows 10 has finally passed 10 percent market share. Not only that, but the latest and greatest version from Microsoft has also overtaken Windows 8.1 and Windows XP, according to the latest figures from Net Applications. Windows 10 had 9.96 percent market share in December, and gained 1.89 percentage points to hit 11.85 percent in January. Maybe it will jump even faster soon, but not necessarily for the best of reasons.

An anonymous reader writes: The effects of a free upgrade to Windows 10 are starting to trickle in. Available for just over a month, Windows 10 has now captured more than 5 percent market share, according to the latest figures from Net Applications. In just four weeks, Windows 10 has already been installed on over 75 million PCs. Microsoft is aiming to have 1 billion devices running Windows 10 "in two to three years," though that includes not just PCs, but smartphones, consoles, and other devices as well.

An anonymous reader writes: Despite support for Windows XP finally ending three months ago, the ancient OS has only now fallen below the 25 percent market share mark. To add to the bad news for Microsoft, after only nine full months of availability, its latest operating system version, Windows 8.1, has lost share for the first time. For desktop browser share, Chrome is up, taking mostly from Internet Explorer and Firefox. For mobile browsers, Safari continues to fall while Chrome maintains strong growth.

An anonymous reader writes "With the release of Windows 8.1 to the world in October, Microsoft ended 2013 with two full months of availability for its latest operating system version. While Windows 8.1 is certainly growing quickly and eating into Windows 8s share, the duo has only now been able to pass 10 percent market share, while Windows 7 seems to be plowing forward unaffected. The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 made steady progression in December 2013, gaining a combined 1.19 percentage points (from 9.30 percent to 10.49 percent). More specifically, Windows 8 gained 0.23 percentage points (from 6.66 percent to 6.89 percent), while Windows 8.1 jumped 0.96 percentage points (from 2.64 percent to 3.60 percent)."

An anonymous reader writes "With the first half of 2013 now over, Windows 8 continues to grow its share steadily but slowly, while Windows XP and Vista decline. In fact, Windows 8 has now passed the 5 percent mark, as well as surpassed the market share of its predecessor's predecessor, Windows Vista. The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that June 2013 was an impressive one for Windows 8, which gained 0.83 percentage points (from 4.27 percent to 5.10 percent) while Windows 7 fell 0.48 percentage points (from 44.85 percent to 44.37 percent)."

An anonymous reader writes "In one year today exactly, Microsoft will shut down support for Windows XP. The deadline will prove a challenge for many of Australia's largest users of IT, all struggling to migrate to new Microsoft environments." Net Applications' chart of current OS market share figures shows XP only slightly behind Windows 7, even now.

DeviceGuru writes "Although IE remains the one of the top browsers on desktops, it's being trounced on tablets and smartphones by browsers based on WebKit, including Safari, the Android Browser, and Google Chrome. Faced with this uphill battle on handheld mobile devices, Microsoft MVP Bill Reiss has suggested that it might be time for Microsoft to throw in the towel on Trident and switch to WebKit (though Reiss later decided he was wrong). But although there are lots of points in favor of doing so, there are also some good reasons not to, including security and a need for healthy competition to avoid having mobile developers begin to target WebKit rather than standards."

New submitter uCallHimDrJ0NES writes "Security researcher Mark Gamache has used Moxie Marlinspike's Cloudcracker to derive hashes from captured NTLM handshakes, resulting in successful pass-the-hash attacks. It's been going on for a long time, probably, but this is the first time a 'white hat' has researched and exposed the how-to details for us all to enjoy. 'You might think that with all the papers and presentations, no one would be using NTLM...or, God forbid, LM. NTLMv2 has been around for quite some time. Surely, everyone is using it. Right? Wrong! According to the last data from the W3 Schools, 21% of computers are running XP, while NetMarketShare claims it is 39%. Unless someone has hardened these machines (no MS patches do this), these machines are sending LM and NTLM responses!' Microsoft has posted a little guidance for those who need to turn off NTLM. Have fun explaining your new security project to your management, server admins!"

A couple of weeks ago you had a chance to ask Canonical Ltd. and the Ubuntu Foundation founder, Mark Shuttleworth, anything about software and vacationing in space. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. Make sure to look for our live discussion tomorrow with free software advocate and CTO of Rhombus Tech, Luke Leighton. The interview will start at 1:30 EST. The Next Frontier?
by eldavojohn

We've seen Linux go from servers to supercomputers to smartphones in a very explosive manner but not as pervasively on the personal computer. What, in your opinion, is the next frontier for Linux and is that frontier part of Canonical's future?

Shuttleworth: The really interesting opportunity is to unify all of these different kinds of computing. Let's make one OS that runs on the phone AND on your supercomputer. We're close to that now - we know Ubuntu makes a great cloud OS and a great server OS and a great desktop. So I think the next frontier is to create a seamless experience from the embedded world to the cloud. And yes, that's very much what we are focused on at Canonical.



How to succeed on the desktop?
by paulpach

Linux is a huge success in mobile. Linux is a huge success in servers (and Ubuntu in particular seems to be doing very well in servers, congratulations). But Linux on the desktop seems to be going nowhere fast as far as market share is concerned. In your opinion, what would have to happen in order for Linux to start gaining ground in the desktop?

Shuttleworth: The mobile world is crucial to the future of the PC. This month, for example, it became clear that the traditional PC is shrinking in favor of tablets. So if we want to be relevant on the PC, we have to figure out how to be relevant in the mobile world first.

Mobile is also interesting because there's no pirated Windows market. So if you win a device to your OS, it stays on your OS. In the PC world, we are constantly competing with "free Windows", which presents somewhat unique challenges.

So our focus now is to establish a great story around Ubuntu and mobile form factors - the tablet and the phone - on which we can build deeper relationships with everyday consumers. All the major PC companies now ship PC's with Ubuntu pre-installed. So we have a very solid set of working engagements in the industry. But those PC companies are nervous to promote something new to PC buyers. If we can get PC buyers familiar with Ubuntu as a phone and tablet experience, then they may be more willing buy it on the PC too.



Tablets
by thePsychologist

Hi Mark! It seems based on your blog and other sources that an Ubuntu tablet is definitely planned and should be in the works at least sometime in the next year. When do you think consumers will be able to walk into any decently-sized electronic store and pick up an Ubuntu-based tablet?

Shuttleworth: No pre-announcements here, sorry!

But yes, we've said clearly that the phone and tablet are key stories we need to tell by 14.04 LTS. So I hope that by then you'll know when and where to expect it in-store :)



Oracle certification
by hawkinspeter

Will Ubuntu ever be a certified platform for running Oracle databases?

Shuttleworth: That's not really something I can say "yes" to ;)

We do know that there are some very large Oracle databases running on Ubuntu, and the people running them get all the support they need from Oracle. If you're a large Oracle shop, call them up and ask for support on Ubuntu. But of course, with Oracle's own Linux now in the market, Oracle is unlikely to promote another Linux until they change strategy.

Nowadays, we get asked about this very rarely - people seem to have moved to care a lot more about Hadoop and some of the newer big-data options than they do about traditional SQL. And of course Ubuntu is by far the most popular OS for large big-data deployments. Perhaps for that reason we are not pushing Oracle very hard ourselves - we've met a few times and their reaction has been some corporate equivalent of .



Re:A couple of questions
by cheesybagel

Why doesn't Ubuntu include Android emulation so people can run their vast catalog of Android apps on their laptop, tablet or the like?

Shuttleworth: Because no OS ever succeeded by emulating another OS. Android is great, but if we want to succeed we need to bring something new and better to market.

If we said we aimed to run Android apps, then two things would happen. Every developer that potentially cared about Ubuntu would feel it was OK to just write an app for Android. And every bug that would be specific to our implementation of Android's APIs would of course be a bug for us to fix, not a bug for the app developer. So, we won't do that.



Touch-a-touch-a-touch me...
by Count Fenring

Unity, like most other operating system visual shells, is moving in a decidedly touch-oriented direction. Has this actually proved beneficial in pushing forward an OS that's primarily in use on servers and workstations? Have users (as a percentage of total OS users, or as a percentage of total Linux users) risen or declined since Unity was introduced?

Shuttleworth: Unity positions itself to be *ready* for touch-only platforms like the tablet and phone, but the desktop flavour of Unity is optimized for the desktop. That's why we have such great support for keyboard navigation and hotkeys, why we have menus and indicators that you really need a mouse and keyboard to use. Yes, we have big app icons. But so have some desktop shells for 15 years (before the NextStep Dock, even).

On balance, I think Ubuntu's share of users has continued to rise, based on trends in hard-to-fake sources like Wikipedia traffic logs. Unity is by far the most widely used shell on Ubuntu, despite the depressed-hipster "can't live with unity" meme. And the fact that the other DE's that are shooting for the future are adding bits and pieces of the Unity design suggests that we're on a good track. I'm rather proud of introducing several ideas before they showed up in MacOS and Windows, and I think we have more in the pipeline like that.

Unity was TWO big changes. First, there was the set of changes themselves. That's always hard - there's no way to change huge chunks of the big open source desktop in one fell swoop and get it all perfect in less than six months. So 11.04 was hard, it got better steadily, and it's really fantastic now. And second, there was a cultural shift. Ubuntu shifted towards leadership rather than simply integration. We thought design was important, we talked to the folks responsible for all the current DEs at the time, and they didn't seem to understand what was going to be the reality of personal computing - a highly mobile oriented world. So we led, and I'm glad we did, even though it is hard to do that.

It was very frustrating for us to essentially feel blocked from contributing - design or code - in the existing free desktop communities. It was weird when it became more productive to collaborate with KDE than with the core GNOME maintainers. But we couldn't let petty politics stop us - we're the only company that really cares about the desktop, and even though it hurt to be pushed out of the nest of existing partner communities, sometimes you have to decide to fight for what you believe in. And we did.



Losing its Lustre
by Skunk

Do you feel that Ubuntu might be losing its way amongst the more technical users with some of the decisions that are being made? For example, forcing a beta-level UI onto users for 3 versions of Ubuntu from 11.04-12.04, integrating paid search results from Amazon etc. Linux Mint, which is rapidly growing in popularity, would seem to be a backlash against Unity and is a splintering of Ubuntu (in fact the vast majority of packages are identical to Ubuntu). Do you therefore feel that Ubuntu's popularity has reached its peak and is at risk of stagnating or declining?

Shuttleworth: We are all at risk of stagnating if we don't pursue the future, vigorously. But if you pursue the future, you have to accept that not everybody will agree with your vision.

The raw numbers suggest that Ubuntu continues to grow in terms of actual users. And our partnerships - Dell, HP, Lenovo on the hardware front, and gaming companies like EA, Valve joining up on the software front - make me feel like we continue to lead where it matters.

The Linux distro market has always been highly fragmented and ideological. Nothing new there.



Do you get tired of all the bickering?
by olau

It's evident Canonical and you personally as dude-in-charge have received a lot of flak over the past years, especially as you have started producing more software in-house rather than relying on upstream. Linux seems to attract a horde of vocal fans that aren't afraid to complain when things aren't going their direction. Does that get on your nerves or have you learned to live with it? Are you happy as dude-in-charge-of-product?

Shuttleworth: Yeah, I've been quite astonished at the level of vitriol and paranoia that pervades some of the opinion-fests that pass for discussion and debate in the FLOSS community. And quite disappointed that more folk don't appreciate that we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shift the world towards a much more open platform than ever before, but that nasty flaming of individuals who lead that effort, whether its me or anyone else, is totally counter-productive.

I made the commitment to Ubuntu because I had opinions about how free software should steer itself to being the standard way people to software, and I felt that it was pointless to have opinions and not be willing to stand by them with personal skin in the game. If you're not willing to do real work to achieve the outcome you believe in, then you're just another empty vessel with an opinion. And as the saying goes, opinions are like assholes - everybody's got one. What matters is the people who are willing to knuckle down and do real work to make a difference.

And Ubuntu has attracted a very large number of those - not just the folks who you'll find in the headlines, but an astonishing number of great people who just help out because they can and they care. If FLOSS does get over the hump of common acceptance, it will be because of those (often unsung) heroes, not because of the big mouths of ideologues.



Balance between software freedom and usability?
by Bradmont

Ubuntu has made decisions that have been less than popular with the Free-software only crowd. Personally, I benefit from these decisions, for example, via easy access to Nvidia and Broadcom drivers on my laptop, but I also see the importance of the other side of the argument. What is your short- and long-term perspective on including restricted drivers and non-free software in Ubuntu? Is your approach simply pragmatic, do you hope to bring long-term change in industry practices by making free software a viable and important desktop platform, or something else entirely? Thanks!

Shuttleworth: Well, I feel the same way about this as I do about McCarthyism. The people who rant about proprietary software are basically insecure about their own beliefs, and it's that fear that makes them so nastily critical.

If your way of seeing the world IS genuinely more productive, effective, efficient, insightful and usable, then you should be confident that you will win in the long term, and folk who dabble in a different way of working will come to realize that you're right eventually. If FLOSS really is a better way for Oracle to do their thing, then the more we get them doing with FLOSS, the more likely they are to promote the people who are successful around that approach.

So I think Linus has been very smart to have a broadly permissive attitude to proprietary drivers in Linux, for example. He can still give a company the finger for being uncollaborative, but note that he was not being ideological about licenses, he was focused on the quality of engagement - about getting stuff actually working. That strikes a good balance in the kernel, where we want the core to be pretty definitively copyleft, but its good to let hardware companies dabble in non-free drivers if that's what they think is best. If we're right about the benefits of FLOSS, they'll get there in due course. That's why I was so happy to have Canonical leading a lot of the work around ARM Linux - those guys were all investing a lot, inefficiently, and we thought that if they tried a better way, they would like it and grow around it, and now Linaro is a lovely success story.

If you think you'll convince people to see things your way by ranting and being a dick, well, then you have much more to learn than I can possibly be bothered to spend time teaching.



Cool hack
by vlm

Describe a hack that you personally participated in that you find cool. Not you paid someone to ... or I once saw someone else ... or you bought something cool that ... I mean traditional hack like "identify problem" "flash of insight in ur brain" "minutes to days of sweat using techie tools" "something cool now exists, lookit". I don't care about the subject as long as its vaguely slashdot style technical and you think its cool and the slashdot audience would think its cool. The coolest hack is not necessarily the biggest or most famous, either. Maybe you have a hobby where you personally programmed the worlds coolest Christmas light display on your house, or you handmade a truly elaborate model railroad fully articulated draw bridge, I donno, whatever floats your boat. TLDR just tell your hack story, and make it cool.

Shuttleworth: I love design - and especially in combining ideas in ways that make them both better. A recent project was figuring out how we want to fit our phone, tablet and desktop stories into one coherent whole. I quite like the solution we came up with. Tell me if you like it after 14.04 LTS ;)



Governmental Roles In Space?
by eldavojohn

Since you like to comment on both government interaction with businesses and seem to be interested in space travel, what is the appropriate level of the government's role in space? Can you define what is too little and what is too far? What, if anything, should each nation regulate? Are nationalistic programs and races good for space travel or should it just all be privatized and given a sort of 'international waters' anything goes freedom?

Shuttleworth: The national space missions should be exploratory and seeking to push back boundaries, not crowding out the basics. I think the agencies failed to recognize that they could facilitate private sector activity in areas they pioneered, so we got stuck in agency-monopolized access to low earth orbit for decades. That is changing now, and the real win will be that agencies get lower-cost lift and certification and training options that let them plan the really pioneering missions of tomorrow - Mars and the outer planets.

Regulation is good for established markets - I generally like to see governments regulate hard to achieve efficiency and level playing fields in markets. What gets broken is government actors that participate directly, as Fannie and Freddie do in real estate in the US, for example. But I'm not a libertarian (apart from a brief spell in student days) - I've seen far to much corrupt and nasty behavior by corporates that act in a very narrow set of interests.

So, when you take that trip to low-earth orbit, or parabolic firecracker ride courtesy of one of the space tourism operators, you'll be glad of a regulatory framework that aims for passenger safety. And the professional astronauts, who don't really give a hoot about personal safety beyond the obvious "don't be an idiot with my life", will be glad for the access to deep space that they would get courtesy of a vibrant market in the "easy" stuff.

bonch writes "Chrome was recently called the world's no.1 browser, but Microsoft is accusing the source, StatCounter, of using flawed methodology. When a user enters a search in Chrome, the browser preloads an invisible tab not shown to the user, and these were being counted by StatCounter. Net Applications, another usage tracking group, ignores these invisible tabs and reports IE at 54%, Firefox at 20.20%, and Chrome at 18.85%." Whereas the saturation of MSIE is totally organic, right?

bonch writes "According to a report from NetApplications, which has measured browser usage data since 2004, Oracle's Java Mobile Edition has surpassed Android as the #2 mobile OS on the internet at 26.80%, with iOS at 46.57% and Android at 13.44%. And the trend appears to be growing. Java ME powers hundreds of millions of low-end 'feature phones' for budget buyers. In 2011, feature phones made up 60% of the install base in the U.S." Looking at the linked chart, it looks Java ME's been ahead of Android for all of 2011, too, except for the month of October.

redletterdave writes with news that Google Chrome is in the process of surpassing Firefox to become the second most popular web browser. Pinpointing the exact time of the change is difficult, of course, since different analytics firms collect slightly different data. The current crop of media reports were triggered by data from StatCounter, which shows Chrome at 25.69% and Firefox at 25.23% for November. Data from Net Applications shows Firefox still holding a 4% lead, but the trends suggest it will evaporate within a few months.