A recurring (stupid) question:

"What is the most used operating system in the world ?"

And as usually, the FALSE answer comes at once: "Windows is used on more than 90% of overall computers, Apple being second".

Totally false, and since years.

First, the question is "What is the most USED operating system", not what is the most SOLD operating system ! The most used OSes are free of charge, so they don't appear in financial/commercial statistics.

Second, this false answers considers a computer is something that has a keyboard, a screen and a mouse. This is totally false. Most of the computers are embedded (in your car, your TV set, your washing machine, your Set-top box, your mobile phone, your DSL modem, and so on).

Here are the numbers:

Let's compare the size of the embedded system market, mobile devices (tablets/smarphones/...) market, Internet-connected servers, ... to the desktop/laptop market, to see if the total domination of Linux (including Android Linux) in the IoT and smartphone devices puts Linux as the overall most used OS in the world:

How many IoT devices are there ?

According to data from IoT Analytics., there are about 7 billion internet-connected devices.

How many smartphones devices are there ?

According to GSMA real-time intelligence data, there are now over 5.13 Billion people with mobile devices worldwide.

How many tablets are used in 2018 ?

Estimation of tablets used at least once a month in 2018: 1.28 billion.

How many desktop and laptop computers (PC) are there in the world in 2018?

2 billions PCs running in 2014.

259.39 million PCs sold in 2018.

"Between 1970 and 2014, around 3.5 billion personal computers were shipped."

How many computer servers are there in the world ?

75 millions servers (2014).

So the IoT and mobile devices market represents more than 13 billions devices, to be compared to the remaining (laptops, desktops, servers computers), about 2 billions (only) devices.

So the IoT (embedded devices) is widely dominating the amount of running devices, and Linux runs on 72% of it, and as the second largest market is the mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, ...) and Android (a Linux variant) runs on 85% of the devices, the result is there:

Linux is far the most used operating system in the world. No need to add the 500 most powerful supercomputers (top500.org) or the Internet web servers.

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