A seemingly inaccurate report provided by one independent firm indicates that this may be the year of Linux on the desktop, while another company’s says that Linux has actually lost market share.
With the advent of the new month, statistical reports for the market share of operating systems and browsers have started to arrive. Last month’s data indicated that Windows 10 was increasing in terms of market share while Windows 7 was continuing to fall.
However, this month’s reports paint a rather confusing picture regarding the actual state of Microsoft’s latest operating system, largely due to the conflicting data presented by two separate firms.
According to NetMarketShare, all major versions of Windows, including Windows 7,10, XP, and 8.1, faced a decline in terms of market share. While this wouldn’t be very strange in itself, what really makes the statistics dubious is the fact that they indicate that this could finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, with the «Others» category meteorically rising from 7.84% to 13.04%. Given that this category usually changes by less that 0.5 percentage points each month, these figures appear to be an anomaly rather than indicative of an upcoming trend. As such, it is important to take this month’s figures provided by NetMarketShare with a truckload of salt.
On the other hand, StatCounter appears to be relatively more accurate this month, indicating the continuation of the same trend that we have seen in the previous months. Windows has lost some market share while Apple’s macOS has gained some. Even more interestingly, Linux has fallen from 1.79% to 1.66%.
The firm has also divided the 83.26% market share of Windows relative to individual versions of the operating systems as well, which can be seen below:
Using simple arithmetic (44.09 / 100 * 83.26), where 44.09 is the Windows 7 market share, and 83.26 is the total Windows market share, it is easy to calculate that Windows 7 has fallen even further to 36.71%. On the other hand, Windows 10 has shown growth and risen to 32.64%. At the same time, Windows 8 / 8.1, and Windows XP command market shares of 9.69% and 3.48% respectively.
It is important to note that this data from both the firms is derived from their partner websites and tracking codes, and as such, may not entirely depict the actual situation. However, ignoring the weird fluctuation in NetMarketShare’s data and considering the figures provided by StatCounter — which also boasts relatively more partner websites than the former — it is safe to say that Windows 10 is still steadily increasing in terms of market share.
