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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.

5 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Yeey, less than 90% to go by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Insightful

    linux on the desktop is imminent

    1. Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go by Hylandr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
    3. Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go by myowntrueself · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    4. Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go by oddware · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.