Linux overtakes Mac OS in global market share

Latest figures from netmarketshare reveal sudden surge in Linux install-base

Open source operating system Linux has overtaken MacOS for the first time in terms of global marketshare of operating system.

The latest figures from netmarketshare.com show that the install-base for Linus Torvald's creation has leapt in popularity recently, being installed at the time of writing on 4.83 per cent of desktops globally.

This moves it ahead of Apple's Mac OS X 10.12, which stands at 3.8 per cent.

However, this apparent sudden uptake in Linux could be inaccurate, as netmarketshare extrapolates its figures from a sample of 40,000 websites.

Other OS marketshare services have yet to report similar figures, although Linux has been growing steadily for some time.

What seems less in doubt from netmarketshare's statistics, is that the desktop OS market is still dominated by Microsoft, with Windows 7 enjoying 46.22 per cent, and the more recent Windows 10 on 28.65 per cent.

And Microsoft's share of the market doesn't end there, with Windows XP still holding on to 5.51 per cent, despite going out of support on 8th April 2014.

In July of 2017, the Ubuntu Linux operating system was made available via the Windows Store, enabling it to run alongside Windows 10.

This is the latest sign of the increasingly close relationship between Windows and Linux.

The new Ubuntu for Windows runs in a Sandbox. SUSE and Fedora are also lined up to run in a similar way.

The Ubuntu installation offers its own command line utilities, but perhaps most useful is that it has full access to the file system of the Windows machine meaning it can share all media and documents.