Desktop OS Market Share Worldwide by Month

The below graph represents the monthly distribution of the desktop OS market share worldwide, starting from January 2009 to the recently completed month. Interestingly, the world's top 3 desktop operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) dominate the 97.12% of the market, leaving other OSs to compete for the remaining 2.88% of the market.

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The above graph represents the monthly distribution of the desktop OS market share worldwide, starting from January 2009 to the recently completed month. Interestingly, the world’s top 3 desktop operating systems Windows, Mac OS X and Linux dominate the 97.12% of the market, leaving other OSs to compete for the remaining 2.88% of the market.

World’s Top Desktop OS by Market Share: In-Depth

RegionWorldwide
SourceStatCounter
Graph ID438
DurationJan 2009 – Apr 2020

Microsoft’s Windows OS continues to dominate the desktop OS market worldwide since its launch in 1995. Globally, approximately 76.52% of all desktops/laptops run Windows operating system as of April 2020. However, the usage share of Windows OS declined nearly 2.93 percent point when compared to April 2019.

Apple’s Mac OS X is the world’s second widely used desktop operating system, despite being used only on Mac devices. The market share of OS X increased an appreciable 4.94 percent point, from 14.05% in April 2019 to 18.99% in April 2020.

Meanwhile, Linux OS remained the third widely used desktop operating system globally. The Linux desktop market share stood at 1.61% as of April 2020, as against 1.63% in April 2019 and 1.71% in March 2020.

The usage of Chrome OS on desktop computers has always been less than 1%. In April 2013, Chrome share in global desktop OS market was 0.02%, which increased to 1.12% in April 2020.

About Operating Systems: Additional Information

An operating system (OS), in its most general sense, is a program that manages hardware and allows a user to run other programs on a computing device.

While the research in the field of Operating System started in 1950, the first major breakthrough came only in 1962 when the first recognisable modern Operating System was built. Atlas Supervisor was the first program that successfully managed hardware to provide a controlled environment to various programs.

Almost every device that contains a processor is controlled by the Operating System nowadays. While there are many companies who have either launched or working on their own Operating System, there are three tech giants who dominate the global Operating System market.

Desktop Market is completely controlled by Windows OS created by Microsoft. In the last 3 decades, Microsoft introduced various versions of Windows OS, latest being Windows 10 OS. While almost every other company work on Windows OS, Apple has got its own Mac OS.

In the mobile space, Google’s Android is the undisputed king due to the strong app ecosystem and availability to other smartphone manufacturers. Unlike Android, Apple has decided to keep its own operating system for mobile devices, named as iOS, restricted only for devices made by the company itself.


The above graph is a part of Dazeinfo GraphFarm – the most trusted source of hundreds of thousands of market graphs. Our team of researchers mines millions of data points every month to bring the most updated and validated set of data points representing the comprehensive view in a graphical format. From mobile to e-commerce, from Retail to healthcare, from startups to SMEs we have carefully designed thousands of graphs for those who value and understand the importance of data visualisation.

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