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Usage share of operating systems

relative market adoption of operating systems

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ783944
Source-derived summary

The usage share of an operating system is the percentage of computers running that operating system (OS). These statistics are estimates as usage data is difficult to obtain and measure. Reliable primary sources are limited and data collection methodology is not formally agreed upon.

Devices connecting to the World Wide Web log which operating system they are using, and so are an approximate measure of OS usage among consumer devices. As of December 2025, among all devices Android, which uses the Linux kernel, is the world's most common operating system to connect to the web with 34.9% of the global market, followed by Windows with 29.98%, iOS with 16.81%, macOS with 2.03%, and other operating systems with 9.06% total.

Between different classes of devices:

For smartphones and other mobile devices, Android has 72% share of traffic, and Apple's iOS has 28%.

For desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft Windows has 62.16%, followed by unknown operating systems at 18.75%, Mac OS at 14.58%, desktop Linux at 3.09%, then Google's ChromeOS at 1.42%, as of June 2026.

For tablets, Apple's iPadOS (a variant of iOS) has 51.23% share and Android has 48.61% worldwide.

Of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers, all since November 2017 have used Linux.

The global server operating system market share has Linux leading with a 63.1% market share, followed by Windows, Unix and other operating systems.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Usage share of operating systems” as relative market adoption of operating systems. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Usage, share and operating.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2025, 2026, 2017—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Usage, share and operating providing the first useful test.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q783944. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2026 and 2017.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Usage share of operating systems” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.