cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1250407/windows-drops-under-60-in-global-desktop-os-share-for-the-first-time-in-years
Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide - June 2026
| Desktop Operating Systems | Percentage Market Share |
|---|---|
| Windows | 56.61% |
| Unknown | 21.45% |
| OS X | 11.89% |
| macOS | 4.48% |
| Linux | 4.36% |
| Chrome OS | 1.21% |
Source: Statcounter.
I don’t think something that lists 21% as “Unknown” should be taken seriously.
Year of the unknown desktop?
Im also weirded out by it but could they mean like windows 8, 7 and xp?
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With such high number of unknowns, I don’t think we can trust the stats.
Eh, it sounds like a statistics error. “Unknown” jumped up as soon as Windows went down, and I don’t think they lost 15% market share in only one year.
This “study” is awful. Wtf is Unknown? I run multiple websites. It’s consistently at 75% Windows. My website is globally. The % is lower in the US.
Since this is based on web analytics, I suspect most of the ‘Uknown’ traffic is AI bots and other scanners, so I’m not sure how that really affects the data.
I guess technically they are generally linux based, but not a desktop OS.
They really should try harder to ID the unknown(s).
1/5th of the entire survey is unknown. That’s an awful lot of grey area to be making such a claim. We have no idea how many of those are using windows.
I’d be more inclined to trust the Steam hardware survey over this.
Statcounter, huh. I’m guessing “unknown” means Windows 11 but they haven’t updated their software to recognise it yet.
Unknown OS growing massively.
…on the notoriously unreliable Statcounter.
My wife has been eyeing a new laptop and sick of the constant copilot Microsoft garbage, looked at the entry level MacBooks for the first time.
Macbook neo is good from what i know. But if you dont want mac you could buy a windows laptop and install some linux distro on it
I mean… There’s gnome. It’s awful. But still better than Mac. :)
The fact that the macOS usage is still only half as much as OS X after ~6 years is pretty incredible to me, especially since Intel macs have still been supported until the end of this release cycle
over a fifth of all os’ are unknown?
Wonder what percent is bots.
Perhaps Windows users are finally learning about privacy and hiding their identity.
