14 DAY TRIAL // They say Linux is the best alternative to Windows for a number of reasons, and it’s no secret that there are plenty of users who actually jumped ship and went the open-source way just because of that.
But last month's statistics show that Windows continues to be the dominant desktop operating system out there, and what’s more, Linux isn’t posing any threat just yet despite the number of users who are making the transition.
Specifically, Windows is once again above the 90 percent historical threshold that it has been holding for so long thanks to a pretty successfully month of August.
Net Applications claims Windows is currently at 90.52 percent, up from 89.79 percent the month before. Windows’ worst month was April this year, when it dropped to 88.77 percent, but the OS has been recovering ever since.
Linux and Mac OS X
Linux, on the other hand, is still super far behind with a share of just 2.11 percent. And what’s more, Linux is even dropping in terms of market share, as statistics show a decline from 2.33 percent it had in July.
But Linux is overall performing quite well, as it has now managed to maintain its share above 2 percent, so there’s definitely an increase brought by the number of users migrating from Windows.
Apple’s Mac OS X can be considered a bigger threat to Windows if we’re looking only at market share data, with the platform currently said to be at 7.37 percent. But just like in the case of Linux, Mac OS X is on the decline, as it dropped from 7.87 percent in July and from no less than 9.57 percent in April 2016, which coincidentally or not was Windows’ worst month.
Overall, while Linux is growing, it’s still not a deadly rival to Windows, and it’ll still take many more years until this at least can happen. But given the fact that Microsoft is not at all willing to give up on this fight, and Windows 10 is getting improved substantially with every release, it’s going to be a very difficult struggle for Linux to get closer to Windows.