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Does anyone knows where I can find some statistics how many percent each OS takes out of 100% users out there?

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  • is it wrong that i really wanna tag this [lies-dmn-lies-statistics] ?
    – quack quixote
    Nov 25, 2009 at 6:32
  • I know, I have hard time believing that there is less then 1% of Linux out there, what kind of BS is that? I think Linux is getting more and more popular, small businesses start using it more, a lot of net books have Linux as a choice, today servers being sold with Linux, definitely there is a demand for it and if there is a demand for it then it's gotta be more then 1%!
    – alexus
    Nov 26, 2009 at 5:17
  • and another thing, come on even w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp states IE6-IE8 37.5% which is Windows Firefox takes 47.5% which is at least Windows/Linux/MAC which is ~15.8% (equally divided), Chrome is 8%, so far that's Windows only, Safari 3.8% and Opera 2.3%. Which it tells that even though Windows most likely biggest right now but non -Windows world is more then 1% by about to 45.5%
    – alexus
    Nov 26, 2009 at 5:25
  • w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp states 4.2% for Linux, which is more then wikipedia says under 1%
    – alexus
    Nov 26, 2009 at 5:37
  • You're playing really fast and really lose with your numbers, and you're making boatloads of assumptions. The assumption that Firefox users are evenly split between the 3 OSes is dubious. The assumption that the machines used to visit W3Schools constitute a representative sampling of the overall installed base of personal computers is even worse. Skepticism regarding the 1% figure is fine. But your personal perception of Linux's popularity is not a reason for it.
    – Lawrence Velázquez
    Nov 26, 2009 at 9:07

3 Answers 3

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Two sources are wikipedia and w3counter. They both use web browsing statistics to glean information about what OS's are actively in use. From wikipedia:

There is little published information on the usage share of desktop and laptop computers. Web client information (see below) is often used as a proxy for this, but many such computers are not used for web surfing. Web client stats suggest that Microsoft Windows has a 93% share, Apple Mac OS 5% and Linux 1%, but the estimates are believed to have a heavy US bias, among other problems.

usage pie chart

Here's and example of how these stats can be wrong:

At home I use mostly Linux & when I used KDE, plenty of sites refused to display anything when I visited using Konqueror. Typically they believed the page would not work viewed in my browser & they threw up an error page. My solution? Konqueror allows you to specify a 'Browser Identificaton' - essentially I lie to every site I visit. I claim to be using IE 6+, Windows XP. Everyone wants to display web pages to me now ;-)

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  • Most of the statistics are based on the browser usage and are not accurate. If you take a typical data center, they have thousands of Linux based machines (I think except for Microsoft) and these are not counted in the browser based metrics. These metrics show the OS share from a end-user perspective and not the total overall market share.
    – Praveen Sripati
    Sep 13, 2011 at 6:55
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There is no solid way to know 100% at all.

There are many sites that have conflicting data, you really just have to Google "Operating System Trends" or similar keywords.

Here is one article I found (August 2009)

alt text

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  • Where did you find that graph?
    – DaveParillo
    Nov 25, 2009 at 0:13
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    I would guess w3counter.com ;)
    – phoebus
    Nov 25, 2009 at 0:28
  • You'd think, but no. At least I didn't find it there. Thanks Wil for adding the link! Good article.
    – DaveParillo
    Nov 25, 2009 at 0:47
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I use MarketShare this site lets you see pretty much everything.. from OS to Browser and search Engines. Try it out..

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