Windows 10 is back on the up-and-up in terms of how many users it has, according to the latest figures from one big analytics firm – although it’s Linux which has been making the most headway among desktop operating systems over the last couple of months.
In fact, according to the figures from NetMarketShare for May 2020, Linux has hit an all-time high of a 3.17% share, a big leap from two months ago in March when the OS was hovering at 1.36%.
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If you look at the historical figures from NetMarketShare as far back as they go (four years), while Linux has spiked occasionally to get close to 3% – hitting 2.96% in September 2017 – it has never actually crept over the 3% mark until now.
Even so, we wouldn’t get too carried away with the enthusiasm here, given that Linux generally bobbles about around the 2% mark by NetMarketShare’s estimation – but still, this is some impressive recent upward movement, and it’ll be very interesting to see if it continues.
Back to Windows 10, and as we mentioned, Microsoft’s operating system has recovered from the pretty big fall it experienced in April 2020, where the OS dropped from 57.34% the previous month down to 56%.
With these latest figures for May, however, Windows 10 more than recovered that ground, with an increase that propelled it up to 57.83%.
While both Linux and Windows 10 increased their desktop operating system market share, macOS fell slightly, dropping from 9.75% down to 9.68% (although that’s so little, it’d be foolish to read much into it). Chrome OS (which Chromebooks run) has a 0.4% market share, incidentally.
Alarm bells (again)
Certainly the most alarming statistic concerns Windows 7, which despite being well out of date now, having reached its end of support in January 2020, is still being used on 24.28% of PCs out there according to NetMarketShare.
That’s alarming, but not really surprising given that a very similar scenario played out with Windows XP, with folks refusing to migrate from an OS they liked. It’s also true that Windows 7 is well-liked, and some of its hardcore followers are dead against moving to Windows 10 for various reasons (a lot of which are privacy-related, although Microsoft has made moves to address these flaws since the launch of Windows 10).
Other folks may also be reluctant to make the upgrade to Windows 10 given Microsoft’s reputation around breaking bits of its newest OS pretty much constantly. Although that argument rather flounders when you consider the risks being run by staying on Windows 7 without any vital security patches (which are no longer delivered when an operating system goes past its end-of-life date).
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Via Wccftech
