Windows Desktop Market Share Drops Below 90% (venturebeat.com)

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.

Comments

Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go

[suupaabaka]

A few months ago, I was doing some work on the PC when my sister-in-law was visiting, and she happened to walk past and glance at my screen. Noticing it looked quite different to what she was used to, she asked me about it and I gave her a quick run-down of the OS (Linux Mint). When she went home, she asked me to help her install it over the phone, and now she uses it as her daily OS. Her partner's starting to show interest too, apparently.

I'm hoping Linux snowballs. Free software (and I mean both definitions of free) can really only be beaten by quality, and I think Linux is rapidly bridging that quality gap.

Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go

[NotInHere]

I've installed Linux on my sister's aging laptop, as a replacement for the XP she had before. I'd warned her multiple times that XP was going EOL and that she should jump to an alternative, and after some time of nagging she agreed that I can put Ubuntu on her Laptop. Unfortunately the WiFi driver didn't work and the new shiny (and expensive!) printer she bought a few weeks earlier didn't have any Linux driver support at all, so she wasn't very happy with it.

Recently she bought herself a new laptop, she didn't want me to replace the pre-installed Windows.

Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go

[chipschap]

I do find oddball problems in Linux, but I've been able to solve nearly all of them. One was with a so-called "WinPrinter" that relied on stuff within Windows to initialize it --- but I did find a Linux substitute and got it to work.

I had one problem with a USB wifi adapter. It was really odd in that it had worked for the longest time but then a kernel update killed it. I could have regressed my kernel to get it to work again (or done some patching) but I hardly ever used it and just let it go.

Yes, I admit using these devices would have been easier on Windows. But I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 99+% of everything I've tried works with Linux without extra hassle.

Above, someone commented that Linux was never intended to be mainstream. I interpreted that as a criticism, but actually it isn't. Linux has a certain audience. I don't see anything wrong with that. But my wife uses Linux and if she can, anyone can ... with the caveat that someone else (me, in her case) sets it up and supports it.

Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go

[oddware]

The problem is you pay for software that you then have modify/hack to get it right, and then fight the OS just to stop it from spying on your.....getting your monies worth for sure /s

Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go

[Tough Love]

It is market leader in the server world, having a market share of 100% in supercomputers,

100%??? I call bullshit. it has 100% of the top 10 and the vast majority of the top 500 but Linux most definitely does NOT have 100% marketshare in supercomputers.

OP pretty much got it right, it's actually 99%. Check for yourself.