What is the best selling Operating System in the market?

Answer 1

As should be no surprise, it is Windows. Currently, Windows has almost 92 percent of the market, as shown at https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0. Mac has only six percent, which is a substantial improvement for that camp as it usually hovers between three and five percent. The remaining small percentage is owned by the various flavors of Linux.

From Windows, the most popular version is Windows 7 which has nearly 49 percent of the entire market to itself. This is over half of all Windows installations in the market.

Windows 10 has a little shy of 28 percent of the market but don't let that number fool you. People are not accepting it as readily as it might imply. Instead, this number was artificially inflated when Microsoft decided to do undesired "Windows 10 Updates" to Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 machines last year through their "Get Windows 10" series of supposedly-important updates. People who awoke in the morning after the machines did the updates at the usual 3am installation time set in the Windows Update control panel applet found that their machines now were running something new, different, and undesired but didn't know that they could still back out for the next couple of weeks. Once they finally learned they could get rid of it, quite often it was too late: Windows 10 had already deleted the removal package to set it back to the former version, so people were stuck with it.

So, truth be told, this 28 percent for Windows 10 should be closer to about 15 percent as those are the ones who have intentionally purchased new hardware with Windows 10 installed or knowingly upgraded to Windows 10 last year when it was free. The remaining 13 percent from the Windows 10 camp would be shared between Windows 7 and 8 (which includes Windows 8.1) with the great majority going to Windows 7 as it has always been significantly more popular than Windows 8.

Though Windows XP has been discontinued and unsupported by Microsoft since April 8th, 2014, still more than six percent of the market belongs to it. Many of these are Point of Sale systems used by businesses, older computers that users find "no need to replace as they still work," and so forth. However, this part of the market will continue to dwindle as more and more Web Browsers quit being developed for this outdated version of the operating system and the last versions that XP can use are incompatible with the newer standards and versions of HTML, CSS, and other aspects of websites designed today.

Regarding the market share for Mac OS X, not surprisingly, the majority of it is taken by OS X version 10.12 as that is the latest stable version currently available. 10.12 currently has about 3.5 percent of OS X's 6 percent of the market. 10.13, a preview release that came out just three days ago on August 14th, has been installed and used by only 0.02 percent of the market.

The share for Linux is not broken down into flavors/camps such as Red Hat, SUSE, etc., so I cannot analyze which is the leader among them. However, having only about 2.5 percent of the market, there would not be any appreciable difference between the various shares in any case.

I hope this helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to drop me a line.