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

Yeey, less than 90% to go

[NotInHere]

linux on the desktop is imminent

Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go

[drinkypoo]

If you are more or less happy with XP you will be ecstatic with Windows 7. But what do you do after Windows 7? Linux, obviously.

Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Its looking more like "death of the PC is imminent". Win10 is a PC killer.

Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go

[AK Marc]

There was a start menu, it was just called "metro". If you don't like it, don't use it. The "start" menu in Windows was nothing other than a collection of shortcuts. If you didn't like it, you could create a start folder with the same functionality. Again, this is coming down to Wingows hater hating Windows for the customization required to get the UI you want. Isn't that the standard complaint against Linux? So if you don't want to do the work to make Windows work the way you want, but you are willing to do that for Linux, it's not the OS that's the issue. It's the user.

The only thing you couldn't get in shortcuts is the "run" box, and that requires keystrokes anyway, so just close your eyes, hit the windows key, and type what you want. You don't have to "see" metro, even if you have to use it to run a command. With "pin to taskbar" in Win10, you put your start menu on the taskbar. It's impossible to avoid Metro in 10, but you don't have to spend more than 2-10 seconds there to get anything done. type it out, and it's faster than finding it in a list. The only time it's "intrusive" is when you are on a tablet with touch, but no keyboard, in which case, it's easier to use than the start menu.

Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go

[Hylandr]

Take a look at what Amazon is doing with AWS as an example and you will see there's real truth in that statement.

Back in 95 / 97 Windows was trying to claim that NT was 'The backbone of the Internet' when the Internet had been around some 30 years prior to Windows ever getting a TCP/IP stack.

Just because your view of the Internet has been through a windows machine with the popularity of the world wide web, doesn't mean all these Internet services are provided by Windows machines, which very bluntly, suck terribly at serving web pages much less anything else.

I have been testing Korora Linux as an alternative to Windows 10. Whether it's evil or not I have absolutely no trust in Microsoft whatsoever. It is what it is.

Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go

[myowntrueself]

linux on the desktop is imminent

I've been with Linux since 1992. No kidding.

What do I use on my desktop at home and work? Windows 10.

Linux is great for servers, especially with virtualization; each VM does one thing and does it well. Theres very little complexity to deal with. The desktop is a whole different thing. There is massive complexity and variation.

Way more software gets installed on the desktop than on a server. Way more hardware gets connected to a desktop. The interactions are incredibly complex.

I had Debian 8 with a USB camera. The camera keeps disappearing. It doesn't with Windows.
I had Ubuntu 16 with VMWare workstation. One reboot, no kernel upgrade, VMWare refuses to start. Never had this problem with Windows.

Problems like this are resolvable, you CAN use Linux on the desktop. But the amount of work you have to put in to troubleshoot things like this overwhelms the experience. I don't have time for this at home nor at work. I stick with what works without me having to do a bunch of extra hours.

The value that gets added by a proprietary OS is immense, make no mistake. And the likes of Ubuntu and Fedora really aren't in the same category as Windows or OSX

Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are half the arguments for Windows 8 / 10 that the interface is so great that you need to replace it with a third party one just to make it useful?

Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there isn't an operating system that has ever existed that I was completely content with out of the box. I've customised Windows, DOS, BSD, Linux, BeOS and OS/2. The fact that Windows 8.x allowed software to override the start screen and that many pieces of software were available to do just that on day one of Windows 8 meant that it was never a problem.

With Windows 7 I remember having to install some third party software just to get proper multi-display support for the taskbar and a third party copy handler to be able to pause file operations. In addition, like all versions of Windows, I had to install antivirus, a good browser and many other programs to make it work the way I want. The question here is why do the shortcoming in Windows 7 get handwaved but all of a sudden installing a start menu replacement in Windows 8 is such a big deal?

The UI in Windows 10 is least reason it's garbage. It's spyware, adware and malware junk that is 100% controlled by Microsoft and will most likely be going progressively more crippleware/adware....unless you pay a recurring subscription fee of course.

Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go

[oddware]

Not sure where you pulled that number from, oh wait, yeah i do.

Install distro from pen drive - 15 Mins.......
update && upgrade (Only reboot once :P) - 10 Mins (Depends on internet connection, also my ISP has a repos which is free data) ......
launch "additional drivers", select graphics drivers (proprietary nvidia for me) - 10 Mins (Depends on internet connection) ......
Any further software that needs to be installed will be the same with any other OS.

Already has tons of software installed, ready to go.
Any other software can be installed using command line (my favorite) or using one of the various included "app stores" (Ubuntu Software Center for example)
Very rarely do you need to spend more than an hour to get a modern distro up and running.