Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide

Desktop operating systems ranked by worldwide market share, measured by StatCounter from page views recorded across its network of participating websites. Windows holds 66.47 percent, macOS 12.46 percent, Linux 3.86 percent and ChromeOS 1.23 percent.

The four systems named here total 84.02 percent. The remaining share — nearly 16 percentage points — is not a fifth operating system but traffic StatCounter cannot classify, which is worth stating plainly because it means these figures should be read as shares of identified traffic rather than of all desktop computers in use.

Within what is classified, the concentration is stark. Windows holds 79 percent of the identified share, and macOS at 12.46 percent is roughly a fifth of Windows. Linux on 3.86 percent and ChromeOS on 1.23 percent are small in this measure, though Linux's desktop share understates its position elsewhere: it runs the overwhelming majority of web servers and effectively all of the world's fastest supercomputers, neither of which generates the kind of consumer page views this metric counts.

The measurement method shapes the result in ways worth understanding. StatCounter counts page views, not devices, so a machine used heavily all day contributes more than one switched on twice a week, and a system whose users browse less is undercounted. Corporate networks that block trackers are underrepresented, and the sample is weighted toward the countries where StatCounter's participating sites are popular.

Comparable figures from other sources — shipment data, telemetry from operating system vendors, enterprise surveys — differ by several percentage points in both directions. The direction of travel matters more than any single month's value, which is why this series is most useful when read over time.