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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the cloudy-with-a-chance-of-Windows dept.

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.

11 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 suupaabaka · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go by Anon-Admin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ok, I gave a Fedora CD to the windows guy at work that manages the desktops. He is always saying how easy it is to install Windows. He grabbed an engineering workstations with a 6 core processor, 128g of ram, and high end graphics card. Put the CD in, it asked him 4 or 5 questions and installed. The whole process took less than 20 min and everything worked including the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Pro.

      He was in shock and said "That would have taken me 4 or 5 hours with windows!"

      He then grabbed one of the older Dell laptops they give out to the office staff and put it in there. It installed in 20 min and recognized everything including the WiFi card. He admitted that he grabbed that laptop because it is a pain to get windows to work on it and was amazed that linux just installed, came up and worked as expected.

      So, He was not a Linux Zealot, he was the windows desktop guy. I did nothing but watch, and he did everything.

      Linux has come a ling ways in the last 10 years, I have been surprised as just how easy it is to install. You no longer have to be a computer wiz to install it.

    5. Re:Yeey, less than 90% to go by chipschap · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    6. Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go by oddware · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    7. 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.
    8. Re: Yeey, less than 90% to go by Tough+Love · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    9. 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.

  2. So what's replacing it? by negRo_slim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And why is Windows 3.11 seeing such an uptick in use?

    --
    On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days