Usage share of desktop operating systems

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Usage share of desktop operating systems. Source: Median values from Usage share of desktop operating systems.      Windows XP (68.12%)      Windows Vista (22.53%)      Mac OS X (4.88%)      Windows 2000 (1.19%)      Linux (1.11%)

This is a list of collections of statistics showing the usage share of the most popular desktop and notebook operating systems.

The information is derived from web browser user agent strings, rather than sales information or surveys. This is not entirely reliable because:

• web browsers do not always provide accurate information to web servers.
• the sites reporting may be specific to a particular operating system.
• many computers are blocked from browsing to some classes of sites by firewalls or filters.
• some computers are not connected to the Internet.
• some computers run more than one operating system simultaneously (virtualization) or at different times (multiple booting).
• the methodology (lists of sites, determination of operating system, counting sessions, unique visitors, page hits, or site hits) may be unrepresentative of the universe of computers.
• one computer may be counted multiple times, others not counted.
• clients using one OS may be running a session on another computer using a different OS.

Operating systems are included if they appear in the sources cited and achieve a minimum share of at least 0.1%.