Most Popular Computer Operating Systems 1985 - 2024 

No so strange, OS ecosystem is only apple/Linux/windows today, and gizmo take 10 bar in graph (and he differentiate mac osx and windows version)

Not really, Alot of old machines still run dos, last week I had to fix an old cnc that was running msdos and pascal

4:15 windows '95 in the late 2000's as well lol some like old software

@@amb1u5 the difficult is define "computer operating system"(and define what is linux), in my opinion only desktop/laptop should be included: appliance,industrial machines,servers,tablet, smartphone,smartwatch,smart-TV ,game console, should be excluded from "computer" definition.

@8001010 yeah if we didn't define it as PC's and laptops we would see Linux derivatives possibly dominating the market. As for what defines Linux, I would only go for the obvious as there are some obscure distros out there that are truly the bastard child of 2 or 3 parent operating systems.

It's because basically every prebuilt PC comes with it preinstalled.

ROFLAO (I'm stealing that meme). I went full penguin this year because of Windows 11.

I think that's because all major brands were installing windows latest releases not necessarily the people choice.

you literally don't have a choice, either use whatever the latest windows is or cripple your user experience with less feature rich programs in Linux or cripple your user experience with 0 control over your own device on Apple

MS made it cheap and accessible to everyone. It wasn't that people were swapping to Windows, it's that more people now had access to a PC due to MS low cost (in comparison) and ease of front end (no need to know a coding language).

Not counting how 68000 memory management was/is miles ahead of x86 and their big-endian bit register order that was a real mess. I wish that cpu was still alive today.

It’s OS/2 for me. I was really saddened when the horrible DOS based Win 3.x won the race.

That’s how I feel about AmigaOS

Did you notice that Windows ME wasn't even mentioned? Maybe they lumped that in with '98

Stable xd i remembered i need to format and reinstall windows xp 4 times each month

Umm after the many patches!

MS-DOS is immortal

i have no idea how that content creator knew that a computer is running DOS as mostly we know today the OS percentage is from internet access. I am sure that no people are using DOS for the internet.

you mean "i always come back", learn first grade english please

Why? ​@@StrsAmbrg

k@@valentinhalau3396

vista was shite, XP forever.

@@rdrhouse As someone who *actually* used Vista for several years (as opposed to just parroting memes on the internet about it), it was a perfectly fine operating system once the major bugs were ironed out and computers actually had enough RAM and processing power to handle it. It was so fine, in fact, that Microsoft would later make a few tweaks to it and basically re-released it as Windows 7. If you used 7, you basically used Vista.

@@zackakai5173 Oh Zack, you think you're the only one that had to put up with Vista and have a viewpoint on it. I'm guessing you're American, as to hold those blinkered views as a brit is just unforgivable. "once the major bugs were ironed out" and "that Microsoft would later make a few tweaks to it" sounds like a wonderfull 'out of the box' OS. You need to burst that bubble you live in and take a look at the world we live in before making such ridiculous comments.

Video was probably made by an indian that's why.

@@KC-shunting isn't it strange when someone has to ignore all relevant facts and insist they are right, shows such a lack of integrity. I can use the internet on my 1.8ghz pentium running XP that i use to control my CNC machinery, but what does that prove, absolutely nothing. No one needs to troll you as your bad enough on your own. PS., check what trolling is, you will find it fits your comments more than mine.

That was the 80s my friend, when cie forged our future we have today. The 90s was the era of Internet for everyone.

If you want to be pedantic, sure. My point was actually about how early adoption helped me to not fall behind with tech

Dude I was there, there was nothing special about it

98 -> XP -> Vista -> 7 + Linux -> 10 + Linux. Still have 10 installed but don't use it.

MS-DOS > Millenium > XP > 7 > 10 > MacOS Catalina > 10 again > Linux

I started with MS-DOS 4.01 & Win 2.1 in 1990 or 1991, throughout the years I've worked with MS-DOS 5, 6, 6.22, Win 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT4, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, skipped Vista but had to deal with it on my parents Computer. Win 7, personally skipped 8 and 8.1 entirely, worked with 10 and 11. Also I experimented with Server 2003 (Standard & Enterprise Edition as well as Enterprise x64 and Win XP x64)

I've used win98, winMe, win2k, xp, win7, win10 and win11 on my own computers. Win98 and winMe on my first hardware, which was an already used AMDk6-2 350Mhz with voodoo 3-2000. I never personally had any major issues with WinMe, but it did use a little more ram.

Using Windows 7 is pretty dangerous nowdays cause of lack of security updates many malicious programmers can write a virus where with a command from the internet can infect with ransomware,or malware all the computers using windows 7 connected on the internet.

Best thing about AmigaOS: Amiga owners made Mac owners look less arrogant by comparison.

I was an OS/2 developer and it blew any Windows version away, you could do real time data collection and compression on a 486 while still using it as a desktop PC. After using OS/2 2.0 I could never be happy with a MS desktop until Win2K came out a decade later.

@@GaryCameron I used os2 when I was an ibm employee in the late 90. I fully agree. Also Lotus Notes was brilliant.

@@MultiCappie beauty is for those who have eyes to grasp it

crap os :D pc is better! :D (yes this shit is still going strong in 2024!)

Win 95, 98 and Milenium were actually DOS addons. Not actual systems. Not many people know but NT windows have still build in DOS emulators. When black window sometimes pop up when you install things on Windows 10... that is DOS.

​@@TheRezro Partially correct. For win95, 98, and ME, they indeed ran on top of MSDOS. Part of the reason for MEs instability was the removable of most of the dos components without a proper replacement. For NT based Windows though, including XP, vista, 7, 8, 10, & 11, there is no MSDOS. That black window that pops up is simply a command line interface, not the MSDOS operating system.

@@Bateluer Correct. Many people call any command line interface "DOS" like they call any vacuum flask a "Thermos". But unlike the Themos flask, DOS was not the first OS to have a command line interface, any more than Gates invented computers, and that interface has since been left far behind except in emulations.

Badest Win10 best Win XP

@@jurgenbachmann5920 You never used windows 1. Total crap.

Yes: the Internet and Smartphones.

N00t N00t

woo hoo!

Only TUX...

The way Windows has been going I can totally see it taking the permanent second spot within the next 5-10 years.

ldk, for me compiling was a necessity for me (because HP and their broken laptop 8BB3 motherboard quirks ie. bugs that they wont fix), and I don't really find fun. It is for the first time, but then It gets annoying.

Sure, the comparison could have included all linux implementations, but then around 2015 and onward the graphs would be meaningless because everything else combined would account for less than 1% of the market share

You can categorise things in different ways. When talking market share, it makes perfect sense to separate Linux (as in desktop Linux, or GNU/Linux) from ChromeOS and Android which are very different systems, despite using the same kernel.

Windows NT/2000 did exist as Workstation and Server versions. This changed with Windows XP/2003 And "Linux" is not an OS. 99% of the people think about a distribution around the real "Linux" kernel

Already switched a decade ago. Windows is now pretty much just my 'Xbox" partition.

They need to sort out the basic stuff like Scanner and external drive access. and a hot drive swap fault

At home: Linux only!

I use Arch btw

which year is that going to be

Windows 2000 is basically the same thing

@@DaScareCrowNo, 2000 was upgrade to NT and Me was upgrade to 98.

Windows ME was so bad that it never amounted to anything. I would've been surprised if it made it up on the chart.

I worked in a computer shop for many years. All our computers that we built came with 98SE. Absolutely the best OS at the time.

Hahaha I wondered about it as well 🤣. Apparently it was so bad that never became a thing 😅

At least the Amiga had games. What's fun about a Mac? Closed system with almost no games.

Obviously, you never owned amiga

@@chezchezchezchez Why you say something like this? I did own, and I own today several Amigas...!

i tried linux repeatedly throughout the years. i couldn't use it for anything but the most basic of basic things because there was nothing on it. so, i went back to windows.

Touched Linux for the first time in 2015 when I was in Grade 5, on a server... Then tried it a few times on my laptop since 2018 but soon switched back to Windows each time, until finally settled down in Linux in 2021 and now all of my computers run Linux.

@@matthewbarabas3052 „there was nothing on it“? Its up to you to put things on it. But only things you really need…

@@matthewbarabas3052 Have you tried Linux Mint?

@@thorstenl.4928 one consenquence for a very, very, obscure desktop OS is that there would be nothing on it. compared to windows, or even a mac. whens the last time you tried using a windows phone? how many things are on that?

Linux older Than chromeOS.

@@deltalebg ofc

ChromeOS is Linux-based.

@@rodrigozimmermann2258 nah it Fake u Can use linux on chrome OS but it isnt based on linux

@@rodrigozimmermann2258 I know, but it altogether is a different user experience.

Nice!

Linux Mint has been my main OS for almost 20 years, I have a mac mini m1 chip with lated Mac OS but I use it about 5 %of the time.

Did the same, only I'm running Arco Linux, which is basically a bit more user friendly Arch, 100% compatible with Arch, pacman and everything. Bugs that exist on Windows for years were gone the second I booted up, I was like "SO IT WAS MICROSOFT'S FAULT AFTER ALL!!"

Hey ! I don't use Linux OS but ReviOS who a simplified OS of Microsoft target to the gamers

I went full Penguin this year. I jumped from Windows after reading the Windows 11 TOS, and seeing all the spyware Microsoft put on it. Shutting down Cortana completely was difficult enough in Win10; Windows 11 takes it to a whole new level. Now that Steam's Steamdeck is doing well, I think we're going to see a big growth spurt in Linux. Pretty much all of the games on Steams will run on Linux using their Proton emulator; works seamlessly. I'm currently running Fallout 4 on Mint with absolutely no performance issues. I don't do the dual boot thing; tried that once and lost a whole drive due to MBR corruption. However, I do run a copy of Windows 10 on VMWare which I use for development. Eclipse just can't compete with Visual Studio, and unfortunately, I've not been able to get Visual Studio to run with Wine yet.

The title of this video should be Desktop OS, because Linux would be at the top.

@@StuartJit wouldn’t, windows has always dominated but it doesn’t mean it’s better in every way.

@@shadedisplayed It definitely would, when considering the total install base. Even when looking at smartphones alone there are more Android devices (1.6 billion) than windows installations (1.4 billion). I wouldn't be surprised that linux would be at least 10x the competition when considering all installations like TVs, general smart devices, Servers, Smartphones, Docker Container, VMs... But on Desktop windows is still on top.

I am more asking why it wasn't more poplar before the 2000s compared to others.

@@tuxflyer Before Ubuntu introduced automatic hardware detection to the Linux world, Desktop-Linux installation was only for computer scientists. I tried to install SUSE in the late 90s. Because the Internet was too slow, you needed 5 CDs. And durring the installation you had to keep changing CDs. The order was not CD1,2,3,4,5 but something like 1,2,3,2,3,1,4,5,2... The installation process installed almost all the software available for the system and it took hours and always ended with a cryptic error message. Linux was not very accessible for beginners back then. I don't like Ubuntu anymore, but I have to admit, that Canonical has done a lot to make Linux more popular and fun.

@@jantack7186 so, you are young 😀 I started with 1.44" disks. There was a copy station in one of our local book stores where you can get the disks created. 44 of them were required for the default distribution (an early version of SuSe). And you always prayed that none of them failed. Nightmare having one disk corrupted after a 2 hour installation.

I found DOS 3 the most productive for me. 2-colour hercules graphics card, black and amber. No needless fiddling with graphic UI to distract me all the time, because default themes always bother my eyes.

Да. Все верно!

First Windows that worked properly. However history could have been different if Apple licenced Mac OS 6 / 7 to others in early '90s

@@mladenmatosevic4591 Apple couldn't just license Mac OS, even if they wanted to. They exclusively used Motorola CPUs, which uses not only a completely different instruction set from x86, but is also a RISC CPU - reduced instruction set. It would have been a massive undertaking to port Mac OS to x86, and on top of that, it would have threatened their business of selling computers. Macs primary non-education use is for professional multimedia production. If for the same price, you can get a PC with more powerful hardware, run Mac OS, and use the Mac software you require for your multimedia business, why wouldn't you? No doubt, there would have been specialty machines built for these users. I guess history would have been different in that some people today would be talking about Apple as if it was Edsel. Also, I have to disagree about 95 'just working'. IMHO, for Windows, it was XP Pro, and for Mac, it was OSX. They were both kind of crashing dumpster fires before then, in my experience. I don't know about Mac OS filesystems, but going from FAT32 to NTFS on Windows may be the single greatest improvement in Windows. You know, not having to re-install Windows every 3-6 months or so, because Windows crashed, fell down a flight of stairs, and broke its dick. Something that didn't happen with DOS, btw. NOTE: XP Pro still was a terrible pain in the ass in 1 respect. Network printers. Finally in Vista, that was sorted out. NOTE: I'm specifying XP Pro (and not XP Home), because XP Pro was built off of Win NT, while XP Home was built off of Win 9x, leading to much better reliability with XP Pro. No idea why Microsoft did it that way, although they realized the error of it before Vista. Although, notably, Win 95 did come with TCP/IP drivers, so you could play Quake over the Internet. Instead of just playing Doom over a LAN with DOS.

You mean Windows 3.x, right? Win 95 was just a polished version for the masses but Windows 3.X was the true turning point where you left the command prompt and got an actual GUI. It's just that at that time only geeks cared for that or had PCs to begin with. By the time Win 95 came out it was common for average joes to have computers.

So does win 95 and 98

No, Widows only used DOS for file system. It had its own API, process control, memory mangment etc.

​@@Frahamenno, they were complete operating systems that did not rely on the user having a DOS.

@@okaro6595 Well technically that's the definition of DOS, it is used to manipulate files on the disk, and it doesn't do much fancier things than that. :) So obviously Windows would not rely on DOS regarding those fancy things.

I started my career (not in IT) using MS-DOS and a colleague demonstrated Windows 2 to me. He opened a DOS terminal, typed WIN and hit return, and the screen did a little fancy (for the time) graphics, then I could point to an icon to start Word rather than typing 'Word' (or was it 'winword'? I can't remember). Left me feeling entierely underwhelmed :D

Dont let "popularity" fool you, its nothing. There are operating systems not on this graph at all that you couldn't live your normal life without. For example IBM's z/OS currently runs at least 80% of the world's financial transactions

@@kevinstefanov2841 discord is on another world more popular than guilded, while guilded is on another world more advanced (and fully free) than discord. This applies to many other social apps, cars, airplanes and everything else. All the lies marketers give us, selling their products and making us believe just because they sold the most, they are the best, lol

amiga, commodore, kinda sad, but life goes on

Not exactly... I'm still using (among others): C64 KERNAL, Atari 8-bit, Amiga DOS, TOS, classic MacOS (mostly 7.x), RISC OS etc...

@@KrzysztofMlynarski as daily drivers, of curse, on production machines😅

Still best Windows ever

No, 2000 was better.

@@user-by3cp5ri4b 2000 was a server system

XP stood for a decade!

You mean the most popular

That's my experience too

nothing will ever beat xp

At the time, Microsoft was high on antitrust and forced OEMs to always preinstall Windows, no matter what customers wanted (otherwise they didn't get *any* licenses). And MS counted sales, not installations or usages. This is how they achieved "82%".

@@stephan5353 Same with iCrap, before they switched to the Intel CPUs ...

@@stephan5353 dont forget win xp was always free to download if u know what i mean

XP was a evolution in the computer OS world. People get to know more about PCs and internet only because of XP. XP was also highly customizable in comparison to any other OS released even today.

What is missing on that chart are all the VMs in the world running Linux as backend server for some Internet services...

We don't talk about windows 11

The claim is correct. Windows 10 will be the last Windows _people_ will ever use, because they'll be migrating to Linux before 2025-10-14 (2032-12-31 if LTSC).

@@r.a.6459 I don’t plan to ever use Linux, so I think the claim isn’t really valid. Same for most of the world. Maybe not China if they decide to dump Microsoft for control and censorship reasons

@@r.a.6459 As a Linux guy, I think you're being a little optimistic to put it lightly, but I'm hapy for the market gain. Still, it is kinda lead by the Steam Deck and Chrome OS that help to change the perspective of Linux being difficult.

@@JoseInATux i use windows 11. with the proper third party fixes(mostly just the start menu), its inarguably better than 10.

A lot of infrastructure still use UNIX because of its ability to run pure data storage without the need for GUI.

I think bsd would count as unix-lile, and there are bsd desktops.

Mac OS X (now macOS) is based on BSD, a UNIX system, and Apple even got certification with the Open Group to say that macOS is officially a UNIX operating system. Linux is the main successor to UNIX for servers and despite being a fresh rewritten OS is conceptually similar and it is easy to port software from UNIX to Linux. Now Linux is the most used OS for servers and smartphones, but it is not as common on the desktop.

​@@jaythejay10Meu sistema principal é o BigLinux sistema operacional incrível, seguro e lindo.

I found it fascinating that the oven at the Olive Garden I worked at ran on UNIX. so many appliances still use it.

by the way, I'm good By the way, I also use arch

By the way. Me too

Me 2 btw 😂

I use Arch linux for being used in my Steam Deck

Me 3 btw

Да, было только две великих винды - 95 и хрюша. Остальное калейдоскоп говна

@@iMetmor про семёрку забыл

@@iMetmor2к была лучше XP, ну а 95 - это весомый качественный скачок с 3.х

What Linux distro was around in 1997 and which one did you use?

@@ranchocommodorereef First I had something around 1994 from many floppy disks, maybe it was Debian? It was 386, 4MB RAM, it was swapping a lot. Then I soon switched to Red Hat Linux 4.x. Currently on Fedora + CentOS-7 and considering what next after CentOS-7, probably CentOS Stream.

​@@ranchocommodorereef Slackware and SuSE, though not entirely sure about SuSE.

FYI You can't play all games

​@@gfhdlskcan't play them all on windows either.

Thank you very much @james4flix925! Do you mean number of internet connections or internet usage based on devices such as computers, smartphones, smart appliances, servers?

@@CaptainGizmo internet usage PC Vs smartphones

Watched at 0.25x speed. Turned a 7:30 video into a 30 minute video.

Industrial computers that still work but all the original programmers retired and the source code is lost, so everyone is afraid to upgrade.

"there are a number of computer operating systems I have used over the years" Same for me: VMS, CP/M, DOS, MS-DOS, Macintosh (early MacOS), UNIX, OS X, Linux, NeXt, the whole MS range till now Windows 11. I liked UNIX the most and miss it still today. Also early MacOS versions (the first "windows") were revealing.

Which one was your favorite?

Come to Linux. As you can see in the last years is growing and a lot of distro are quite stable and you can do a lot of things. Unless you're some specific user that needs specific Windows programs, you'll be totally fin with Linux

Same here but...I put the Windows 11 kit in the Windows 10 iso and bypass the Windows 11 requirements so now I'm using the updated Windows 11.

I'm also running windows 10, I meed the criteria for Windows 11 but I don't want even more spyware so I'll probably use some Linux with Proton as I only play video games on windows anyway...

Mostly old hardware as it was omnipresent. I skip that Win 95/98/Mi were based on DOS and all new NT Windows still have DOS emulators.

Every os less pc comes with an free dos & alot of machines are working with a realtime os and a based ms dos such machines have a life time of 25 or more years because with modern os you dont get through the driver layer or you need to pay license fee for every single os.

Unbelievably high or unbelievably low?

Infrastructure systems still run MS-DOS, for a variety of reasons. It's... complicated.

@@xitheris1758 The reason is simple. It work and is cheap. A centrifuge do not really need Win 5000 with orbital laser.

And if one looks at the architecture and history of both MS-DOS and NT an argument can be made that they are both Very proprietary versions of Unix.

Is Windows 11 a very big update od Windows NT 3.51?

@@scotthaskin1432 As opposed to a more mainframe-like architecture, where files are record-based, rather than byte-based. The mainframe variant would have been useless on the desktop.

@@scotthaskin1432 Yeah sure - in the same way that Coca-Cola is "a very proprietary version" of Bud light ;) Actually, DOS was designed to be as compatible as possible with CP/M, and NT has quite some VMS ideas in the kernel - Dave Cutler had designed VMS, wanted to do an improved version but DEC stopped him, and then he got a call from Microsoft ... BTW, MS did a Unix-like OS that could run on an 8086 CPU, it was called XENIX and was later merged into SCO Unix. (SCO used to be the good guys.)

don't forget dos based windows

Only 100 kinds to choose from.

@@markae0 Realistically it's closer to something like 5. Vast majority of Linux distros are super niche/specialized, no longer maintained or not suited for desktop PC.

@@markae0 This is a red herring. There are just as many Windows versions if you count *all* of them, but only very few are relevant to the end user. Same with Linux.

Linux has already won, but nobody noticed. I am betting you have more Linux machines at home than anything else: your router, your firewall, your NAS, your TV, your set-top box, all your Android phones and tablets, and probably your car infotainment system: chances are everything runs some flavor of Linux.

the video is about single user personal computers, and Linux literally won all the other markets

UNIX I guess.

Linux and BSD are the best server system

Does anyone know someone who uses macOS for servers? Me neither.

Internet systems and just if not more importantly smart phone OSes.

The problem I see is that the cloud servers and such would hardly make a dent if they are compared to the OS, assuming you treat 1 PC = 1 server. But they are not really comparable.

​@@kariolm2579you are really wrong. There are so many servers and they are nearly exclusively running Linux.

@@redcrafterlppa303How many? Because PCs most likely near billion if not exceed it.

@@kariolm2579 i couldn't find a direct number but an estimate based on number of data centers (8.5 million) and average number of servers in a data center (1 million) making it 8.5 trillion which of 80-90% run Linux.

linux on top in Web Server category because it is free. but in Enterprise business Windows Server is still in top. People in business needs a propriety software to get support in time of needs, not an open source.

Are web hosting companies not considered enterprise?

not so. In web hosting, everything information their is ready to be shared, not so critical. in web hosting, the costing is low, linux is suited for, because it is free.

@@marshawk9766 idk, i'm not a pro, but if i would do something i would use linux

@@marshawk9766 even Microsoft use Linux as servers.

This is because of Steam Deck/Steam OS

Valve has done a lot for Linux. Thanks to them and the Proton project running windows native games on Linux has become nearly a non-issue and the ease of gaming has always been a major thing holding many home-pc owners back.

Things will get real once we get to 10%

Technologies moved forward, and TCP/IP won MS NetBEUI, due to its scalability and routing DNS won WINS.... I used NetBEUI to TCP/IP on a router...but it was 100 years ago. Yes, NT was good. By the way, NT stands for New Technology in MS perception. IPX SPX was basic for NetWare...

Stability?? I was an IT guy back then and there was plenty of pc to redo....Well it was more stable than 95 but not 98!!

and by the face people are still alienated by increasing scale of telemetry

Best OS ever. Well, at least the most fun 😊😊😊

Try MorphOS on G4 / G5 (OLD) PowerMac or ArOS on x64 CPU

Why not?

If BSD doesn't count as UNIX then what does?

I only upgraded from XP because of software issues. I'm on 7 now, have been for years, but it's now back to software issues. I can't upgrade my suite of Serif Infinity of Photo, Publisher and Designer because the new version doesn't have Win7 support. For now, I'll live without the latest.

Especially the windows XP installation music is a work of art!

It’s technically based on FreeBSD. But in general there’s a bunch of other parts of it like the Darwin layer that make it pretty distinct from Unix. They also had a compact version of classic MacOS as a subsystem for running legacy apps.

OSX/macOS is legally a fully certified UNIX but it makes sense to have it as separate for the intent of the video

see? nobody cares

Technically Android is also part of the Linux family and most smartphones nowadays run on Android.

@@orkhepajyou care

Interesting the Linux growth as the number of cloud and AI compute severs grow. Windows is becoming the dumb terminal. Full circle as Fibre, 5G and space based internet progresses.

@@favesongslist windows is not a terminal , you are dumb