Linux Watch: June 2020 Edition

It's been a while since I last blogged about OS user market share numbers.

In large part, the absence was due to boredom. Very little was changing month to month; with Windows 10 having finally passed Windows 7 in user share, no other tech blogs were writing about the subject, either. MacOS and Linux were stealing users from Windows for a while, but that trend slowed, then stopped, and then reversed itself. Increasingly, it looked like the personal computing paradigm that we'd lived with for twenty years was about to cement itself in place for the next twenty.

But an odd thing has been happening over the last couple of months. Linux, which had retreated allthe was to 1.36% user share just a few months ago, has been gaining ground rapidly, erasing all of its user share losses of the past year and then some.

Plus ça change...Microsoft proves, once again, that they refuse to learn from past mistakes

I had to shake my head at this report from betanews:

Windows 7 may be an aging operating system, but there are still plenty of individuals and organizations using it. With the end of support date of January 14 fast-approaching, Microsoft is getting twitchy and is eager for everyone to upgrade to Windows 10.

Having already started to notify Windows 7 hangers on that support is due to come to an end, the company is now ready to get a little more aggressive. If you haven't moved on from Windows 7, soon you will see full-screen notifications warning you that "your Windows 7 PC is out of support".

The messages are due to be displayed from the day after support ends. So when January 15 rolls around, anyone who has doggedly stuck with Windows 7 will find that they not only have no support and no security updates, but also that they are pestered by an invasive message delivered by a program called EOSnotify.exe.

[...]

The good news is that it will be possible to dismiss the message and opt to never see it again.

Where do I even start with this shit?

Steam continues to confound

If there's one thing about the OS market share numbers which has remained reliable from one month to the next, it's that Steam's numbers almost always move in the opposite direction from the OS market over all, and last month was no different. That's right -- Windows lost overall market share among Steam users, with MacOS and Linux both posting gains, all of which is backwards when compared to the broader OS marketplace.

As expected, Windows 10 continued to gain while other Windows versions lost ground, pretty much as one would expect given that gamers are the one group that continues to buy new PCs, all of which come with Win10 installed. I wasn't expecting MacOS and Linux to be gaining in popularity among Steam users, though; one can't help but wonder if Steam Play/Proton isn't playing a role there.

But I'll be honest: I have no real idea what this might mean, if anything. I'll keep watching, though, in the hope that some sort of clarity emerges from the statistical soup.

Watch this space...

A new normal?

It's the first of a new month, which means that NetMarketShare's new OS market share numbers are out, and the predictable drumbeat of the coverage is all about how Windows 10 is gaining at Windows 7's expense.... even though Windows 10 gained more than Windows 7 lost last month. Never underestimate the extent of tech media's devotion to the pre-established narrative, I guess.

The reality of the current numbers, however, looks a little different to me. To me, it looks like Windows 7 is holding on remarkably well for an OS that's due to officially exit support in only 9 more months, continuing to be the OS of choice on 36.5% of the planets personal computers. That's not 36.5% of Windows PCs, mind, but of PCs overall, a remarkable feat considering that its successor's successor OS was released nearly four years ago, and was free for three and half of those years. To me, the fact that Windows 10 is still only 43.6% of the OS market looks more like a sign foretelling a long, Windows XP-like life for the older OS.

Let's be real, though; "Ten-year-old OS loses market share to four-year-old OS" is basically a dog bites man story. It's expected, and would be dead boring if not for the fact that it's happening a lot more slowly than expected... which is also boring. The more interesting story of the past year has been the movements in the overall OS market.

Windows 7 gained market share last month, while everybody else lost ground.Seriously, WTAF?

OK, I'll admit it... I have no idea what's going on with OS market share trends this year.

Last year seemed to have a clear pattern. With few exceptions, Windows consistently lost share each month to MacOS and Linux, with Chrome staying steady. This year, though, Windows is growing while everyone else has started to slip. That would seem to be the perfect story for Microsoft, who have been waiting for Windows 10 to finally start taking over the desktop/laptop OS market for years, and for tech punditry, who have mostly been expecting business and government deployments to finally make that happen as Windows 7 winds down to end-of-service in January of 2020.

But that's not what we see happening. Instead, Windows 10 is slowly sliding along with all over OS versions, while Windows 7 and 8.1 together posted gains that are strong enough to raise Windows' overall user market share of the desktop/laptop space. It's demented... and yet, it's also happening.

So, what the actual fuck is actually happening?

Comparing last month's numbers with this month's, by same OS version.

I could understand if some Windows 10 users were rolling back to Windows 7, or if some newly-minted Linux users had switched back to Windows 7 - after all, I've done that before, my own self.

But it's not just Windows 10 and/or Linux that are being cannibalized by Windows 7; according to NetMarketShare's numbers, MacOS users are also switching to Windows 7, apparently having already spent the Apple Tax to buy their (expensive) new Macs.

Only one possible explanation occurs to me, and I have no idea whether it's reasonable or not. I'm starting to wonder whether NetMarketShare's are being skewed by something which they themselves claimed to have dealt with before: botnets.

Statistics are weird

After losing market share for six straight months, Windows managed a very slight uptick last month, gaining 0.03% to 86.23%. This very slight gain appears to have come at the expense of MacOS and Linux, both of which ticked down slightly, by 0.06% and 0.33%, respectively; ChromeOS gained, though, climbing 0.05% to sit at 0.37% overall, its highest point in the last month.

Windows' slight uptick didn't help its 6 month average decline, which actually worsened as last July's 0.55% increase finally moved out of frame:

This month's 0.03% increase is unlikely to have the same salutary effect in Windows' 6mo average, though -- it's just not large enough to have much of an impact, falling below the ±0.05% threshold for actual significance. ChromeOS and MacOS changes this month were right on the significance bubble, too; only Linux' 0.33% drop was large enough to have a long-term depressing effect on its 6mo average tracking.

The picture gets even muddier when you dig into the different OS versions. Sure, Windows 10 gained last month, from 39.22% to 40.90%, but Windows 7 also gained, from 36.90% to 37.19%; these gains were offset by losses by Windows 8 (-0.06% to 0.82%), 8.1 (-0.11% to 4.34%), and XP (-1.78% to 2.76%). On the Linux side, the generic "Linux" category declined 0.28% to 1.72%, but Ubuntu only declined by 0.03% to 0.68%, while the "Unknown" category gained 0.30% to reach a whopping 0.35%, which sure looks like NetMarketShare had trouble detecting peoples' OS versions this time around.

So, with statistical anomalies all over the place this month, I'm going out on a limb to call this a case of sub-optimal data, and putting a great big asterisk next to the whole mess until next month. If this month's numbers truly do represent some sort of inflection point, then we'll see similar changes in coming months, too; if these are just July-like blips in the data, then we should return to the trend lines of the past 6 months.

Either way, I want more data before I even try to guess at what's happening here.

Microsoft gets petty with Windows 7 users

As of the end of December, 36.90% of all desktop and laptop users (not just Windows users, mind, but PC users in general) had spent three and a half years actively rejecting Windows 10. This isn't like OS version transitions of years past, where people on the old version might just be procrastinating; thanks to the egregious excesses of the GWX campaign, all of the people who didn't care enough to actively do something were switched to Windows 10 already. No, current-day Windows 7 users are the ones who did care, and who took steps to remain on their OS of choice.

Not only have Windows 7 users actively rejected Windows 10, but many of them appear to be actively rejecting Windows entirely, with MacOS and Ubuntu Linux gaining market share at Windows' expense for most of the last year: Windows gained user market share only in March and July of last year, losing market share in every other month of 2018 for a total loss of 2.31%,with MacOS gaining 1.63% and Linux gaining 0.66% over the same time period. Microsoft set out to change the paradigm of personal computing with Windows 10, and clearly succeeded, but not in the way they wanted; rather than making Windows 10 into the new paradigm, they seem to be ushering in an era in which Windows no longer dominates on the desktop.

And so Microsoft, being Microsoft, have responded to this slow-motion exodus by giving Windows 7 users yet another reason to dump Windows, without giving them any clear new reason to adopt Windows 10 in place. Because of course they have.

Windows lost more Steam, too

In case you were still thinking that Windows' 0.83% user market share drop in December was some sort of an error, Steam's Software Survey has corroborated the decline, putting Steam in sync with the overall OS market for a second straight month.

Click to enlarge.

Once again, MacOS (a.k.a. OS X) and Linux were the big gainers, with MacOS 10.14 and Ubuntu 18.10 both showing strong results; the newbie-friendly Linux Mint, a distro that doesn't even register among OS users in the broader marketplace, appears to have gained a significant share among Steam users. Weirdly, only Windows 7's 64-bit version lost Steam users, with Win7's 32-bit version gaining ground alongside all other Windows versions except XP; Win7 64-bit's decline was enough to put Windows in the red overall, though, with a 0.58% overall drop which is only slightly slower than the decline seen in the overall OS market.

In isolation, this sort of behaviour among Steam users could be interpreted as resulting from Valve's Steam Play/Proton initiative, but given that Windows' decline among Steam users is actually less than that seen in the larger OS market, it's difficult to describe this as anything other than just a part of the overall trend, with Windows-dependent PC gamers actually lagging slightly behind everyone else. Whether Steam Play/Proton changes those users' decision-making calculus in the coming months is, of course, anyone's guess. It does seem to be making it somewhat easier for gamers to join the shift away from Windows, though, meaning that Microsoft shouldn't be counting too hard on PC gamers to be a backstop against the overall loss of Windows users.

Windows 10 finally overtakes Windows 7... but it's not the "goods news" story that Microsoft was hoping for

Happy New Year, everybody! 2019 has dawned, and with it, at we already have at least two different posts from sites proclaiming Windows 10's belated ascendancy. Both Thurrott.com (Report: Windows 10 Takes Over Windows 7) and MSPowerUser (NetMarketShare: Windows 10 finally overtakes Windows 7) immediately noticed that Windows 10's usage share is starting the new year at 39.22%, which is finally higher than Windows 7's 36.90% share, according to NetMarketShare.com, and neither could wait to proclaim the future to be smooth sailing for Windows from here on out.

What they've apparently both missed, however, is that Windows has, once again, lost overall market share, with MacOS and Linux gaining at Windows' expense:

Window's share of the market dropped by nearly a full percent in the last month. At that pace, they'll be below 80% by June.

Yes, Windows 10 finally passed Windows 7, and this time WX managed to actually be moving forwards in the process, unlike last month, but Windows overall is still losing users to MacOS, and to Linux. Interestingly, while the Unix-like OSes gained as a group, both BSD and "Unknown" actually lost ground last month; only Linux actually gained, growing by 0.70%.

The other Unix-likes aren't doing as well as Linux is.

Even more interestingly, Ubuntu alone moved from 0.57% to 0.71%, accounting for 0.14% of the Linux's change by itself, and giving this one Linux distro a greater share of the market than Google's ChromeOS... meaning that Linux is not only growing at the expense of Windows, but that most of Linux's gains are coming in the form of a rapidly-emerging leader.

This has enormous potential ramifications for the future.

Microsoft makes it official

After word leaked yesterday that Microsoft was redesigning their Edge browser to use Google's Chromium engine "under the hood," Windows-watchers were left wondering just how long Microsoft would make everyone wait before actually acknowledging this shift publicly. The answer, apparently, was one day.

As reported by VentureBeat:

Microsoft today embraced Google’s Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced it is decoupling the browser updates from Windows 10 updates, and that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. [...] The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

[...]

Microsoft hopes moving to Chromium will “create better web compatibility for our customers” and “less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” The former is certainly true, as the Edge web platform will thus become aligned with web standards and other Chromium-based browsers. The latter is not true in the short term (plenty of testing will be needed to accommodate the switch) but it is likely in the long term, as developers will have one fewer browser to explicitly test against.

Windows is losing Steam

It looks like the downward trend in Windows' overall market share is also being mirrored in Steam's software survey numbers, as reported by Phoronix:

Valve has published their latest monthly Steam survey data, which shows an increase in the Linux gaming population.

For November 2018, Steam's Survey reports a 0.80% marketshare for Linux, which is a 0.08% increase over October, which was on an upward trend following the roll-out of Steam Play late this summer for allowing Windows-only games to run more easily on Linux with their Wine-based Proton software... Earlier this year it was around just 0.5% Linux marketshare and last year there were the lows of around 0.3%.

While 0.80% may not seem like much, it's significant when factoring in the size of Steam's customer base that is reportedly at 125+ million users. 

Not only is Linux up, MacOS is also up, and Windows is down, in a rare case of Steam users actually trending in the same direction as the market overall.

There's a lot of overlap between Steam's user base and the PC gaming community overlap, and their higher Windows 10 adoption rate, and higher PC purchasing rate, were helping to drive Windows 10's numbers upwards. Windows 10 is still pushing out Windows 7 among PC gamers, but with more PC gamers shifting from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux because of Steam Play, this shift among the most active PC purchasers could be a significant driver of the overall market shift away from Linux.

Importantly, MacOS X and Steam are both consumer-driven market segments, which could mean that Microsoft is losing consumers to both Apple and FOSS. Back in July, Microsoft had talked about their desire to win back consumers with Modern Life Services. We've heard nothing about that consumer-focused initiative since, and if this trend in Windows' market share is any indication, Microsoft's time could be starting to run out. Windows has a healthy lead in PC gaming, though, with a 96.00% market share, so there's still time for Microsoft to react... if they start now.

Tick, tock, Microsoft. Your move.

Windows' incredible shrinking usage share

Most of the attention on desktop OS usage share has been the horse race between Windows 7 and Windows 10. The question to which everybody wants to know the answer is always, "When will Windows 10 finally overtake Windows 7?"

The prediction, for several Novembers running now, has been next November, and November 1st has once more arrived with W7 still holding on to a slim lead over its newer "rival" OS, as reported by Wayne Williams at Betanews:

In October, Windows 10 had edged closer to Windows 7, and I predicted that NetMarketShare would finally see Windows 10 emerge victorious in November.

It didn’t.

Again, this has now happened for at least three consecutive Novembers, and is hardly news. Williams has actually buried the lede at bit, though, because the really interesting bit is what comes next:

In fact, in November Windows 10 actually lost some usage share, dropping 0.14 percentage points. That puts it on 38.1 4 percent, down from the 38.28 percent high in October.

The gap between the two operating systems still narrowed though, as Windows 7 also lost share, going from 39.35 percent to 38.89 percent, a fall of 0.46 percentage points.

Wait, what? Both Windows versions managed to lose market share last month? I mean, yes, Microsoft has had a couple of months of bad news with update 1809's issues, but even so, how the fuck does this happen?

Well, the short answer is that Windows lost overall market share last month, dropping from 87.27% to 87.03%. But even that's not the end of the story; looking back at overall market share numbers for the last six months, we see a pattern emerge:

Meltdown and Spectre - much less sexy than the James Bond movies they sound like.

Yesterday, The Reg reported that Intel CPUs going back ten years had a fundamental design flaw which compromised the security of users. At the time, it looked like only Intel chips were affected, but Intel has been quick to claim that AMD and ARM chips have the flaw, too.

Here's the thing about that, funny story.. it's actually not true. Not Pants On Fire, mind you, but still Mostly False, or at best Half True, according to this report from Gizmodo:

Originally, the Register reported, only Intel processors (which dominate the U.S. market) were believed to be subject to the flaw. But it’s become clear that a wide range of processor types could be affected, with Google writing that AMD, ARM, and other devices were also vulnerable—though only partially and with less performance impact following a fix than Intel-based devices.

In a statement to Gizmodo, AMD said that of the three attack variants, one was easily resolved with “negligible performance impact,” while the others have “near zero risk” or “zero risk” due to “architecture differences.”

ARM told Gizmodo that it has been working “together with Intel and AMD to address a side-channel analysis method which exploits speculative execution techniques used in certain high-end processors, including some of our Cortex-A processors. This is not an architectural flaw; this method only works if a certain type of malicious code is already running on a device and could at worst result in small pieces of data being accessed from privileged memory.”

I don't believe Intel's spin on this one; there is currently no evidence that AMD and ARM have anywhere near the same kind of fundamental design issues that Intel have with this, and users of AMD and ARM products will not see the same kind of slowdown post-patch as Core i5 users. Sure, AMD (and ARM) are also engaged in a little PR over this development, but right now, I'm inclined to trust them a lot more than I trust Intel, for whom this is the second such wide-reaching security problem that comes built right in to their Core i5 product line. 

Right now, it looks like AMD and ARM are acting from an abundance of caution, here (better safe than sorry, right?), and not trying to "work the refs" in advance of the inevitable flood of class action lawsuits by which Intel will shortly be besieged. So, yeah... I'm still glad to be an AMD man, at least for one more day.

Did I ever mention how glad I am to be an AMD man?

Because right now, I really, really am, thanks to stories like this one, from The Reg:

A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – such as PCID – to reduce the performance hit. Your milage may vary.

Similar operating systems, such as Apple's 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can't address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.

[Emphasis added.]

Yikes.

With a 5% slowdown as the best case, and 30% as the worst, I'm thinking that the modest performance hit that I took by getting an AMD FX-6300 at half the price of an Intel Core i5 is looking like a better and better deal all the time.

Details of the exact nature of this new flaw are naturally embargoed, given that it's a hardware-level security issue affecting everyone who bought an Intel CPU in the last decade, although The Reg's report includes those details of the flaw that have surfaced, if you're interested in what details are available. The fact that this is being described as a "fundamental design flaw," though, the second such flaw to surface in the last few months, seems especially egregious. Intel had been beating AMD in performance benchmarks for years, but it now seems like they were cutting some serious corners along the way.

Cue the class action lawsuits in five.... four... three...

NetMarketShare's new online tools are more powerful than I first suspected... and also confusing...

Of all the ways in which NMS's free stat reports have annoyed me over the years, the most annoying is the way they segregate results. You can compare OS market share across desktop devices, for example, or across mobile devices, but not both at the same time... so you can't compare, say, Windows to Android, to see their growth and trends over time relative to each other.

StatCounter does offer this sort of comparison, but only as an overall picture (i.e. all Windows versions, all Android versions, all iOS and MacOS versions, &c.), which make for simple graphs... but if you do want to drill down a bit, you can only drill into one OS at a time. You can't, for example, compare Windows 10 and Windows 7 to the most popular versions of iOS, MacOS, and/or Android, all at once.

Apparently neither NMS nor StatCounter thought that people would want to do this... or, perhaps they did know that people would want to do this, and simply decided to reserve the more powerful functionality for their paid subscription services. Which is entirely fair; after all, these are businesses and not charities, and they have to make money somehow. I get that. As a dedicated online freeloader, though, I still found it ever so slightly irritating.

But the game has changed, thanks to NetMarketShare's brand new online tools, which were "completely rearchitected [...] to provide more accurate and accessible data," actually do allow you to pull from multiple datasets at once, making possible exactly the kinds of extremely nerdy comparisons that I've been idly wishing I could do, without having to pay to do them.

The results are, to say the least, surprising:

The surprise? According to NMS, Android is still only 33.48% of the market, well behind Windows' 45.41%. This is surprising because, to quote Wikipedia:

According to a January 2015 Gartner report, "Android surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014, and will continue to grow at a double-digit pace in 2015, with a 26 percent increase year over year." This made it the first time that any general-purpose operating system has reached more than one billion end users within a year: by reaching close to 1.16 billion end users in 2014, Android shipped over four times more than iOS and OS X combined, and over three times more than Microsoft Windows. Gartner expected the whole mobile phone market to "reach two billion units in 2016", including Android.^[307] Describing the statistics, Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times that "About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. [It] has become Earth’s dominant computing platform."^[18]

StatCounter disagrees with both assessments, clocking both Android and Windows at about 38% of the market, but with Windows' share of the combined OS market growing in recent months... which makes no sense, since desktop/laptop PC sales have been declining.




I know that NMS revamped their product to remove botnet traffic, but why would that affect Android's numbers? Are Android botnets a widespread thing that nobody knows about, or can detect, except NetMarketShare for some fucking reason? It makes even less sense than the effect on Linux' numbers. And how have Gartner, StatCounter, and NetMarketShare all ended up with such apparently divergent results? Seriously, WTF is going on?

I think I want to see some serious critique of NMS's new product/methodology. Their new online tools look very slick and very powerful, but if their data collection and analytical methology is badly flawed, then their online tools may be useless, no matter how slick or powerful they seem.

Boldly predicting more of the same... whatever that means.

We're just a few days away from the latest OS market share numbers's release, so let's take a minute to discuss expecations.

For the last two months, NetMarketShare's initially posted results have shown a significant shift away from Windows, and towards Linux. Both times, NetMarketShare have blinked rather than standing by their own data collection and analysis, and re-weighted those numbers to hew closer to tech reporters' expectations. In both cases, though, their carefully targeted re-weighting has failed to make the shift go away entirely; they've masked the shift, but not eliminated it.

Looking at both the first-reported numbers and the later revised numbers together shows both trends:

The truth lies somewhere between these trend lines... but where?

So, what should we expect this month? More of the same, would be my guess... as you can probably tell from the fact that I'm tracking both 1st-posted and revised numbers, and plotting them against each other. We'll have to see just how big the reported shifts are, both as first reported, and then after NetMarketShare cave to the pressure and massage as much of the shift as possible out of their reported statistics.

Happy Canada Day!

It's July the 1st, and you know what that means... time to check in on NetMarketShare, and see what June hath wrought, as far as Windows 10's market share is concerned. Spoiler Alert: Not much has changed.

When last we checked, the OS landscape looked like this:

One month later, the picture now looks like this:

And the trend lines look like this:

Yep... still flat.

Windows 7 did dip slightly, from 49.46% to 49.04%, but that doesn't reverse all of its gains from the previous month, and is starting to look like just noise in the data - Win7 has been oscillating back and forth like this for months, now, but hasn't dipped below 47.01% in the past year; 49.04% is almost exactly where it was at the end of June 2016 (49.05%), so it would seem that (a) Windows 7's user base really is well and truly dug in, and (b) that they comprise just under half the OS market overall, and about 54.99% of the total Windows market.

Windows 10, meanwhile, managed a feeble 0.02% gain (from 26.78% to 26.80%), putting it pretty much exactly where it was the previous month. Other gainers for June included Windows XP (from 5.66% to 6.94%), which didn't quite manage to get back to 7% but came pretty close, and Linux (from 1.99% to 2.36%). Windows 8 (-0.22%), MacOS 10.12 (-0.10%), and "Other" (-0.58%), posted losses, but "Other" was the only category to show a change of more than ±0.5% (the "noise" threshold), and all of them are looking more like fluctuations than trends at this point.

The "Other" category, BTW, appears to consist mostly of older MacOS versions, and has been steadily declining for the last year, from 13.66% a year ago to only 7.33% now, a period over which MacOS has generally lost market share to Windows' combined versions (with Windows gaining 1.72%, and MacOS losing 1.75%, since last July). Windows' dominance on the desktop is still secure.

That's about it, though, as far as good news for Microsoft. Their hopes for the future have been pinned entirely to Windows 10, and Windows 10 is completely stagnant, for yet another month. The much-predicted Enterprise migration to 10 has failed to materialize yet again, and another month of scare-mongering by Microsoft's apologists about malware vulnerability in XP and 7 has resulted in XP recovering some of its previous month's losses while 7 stands pat. In fact, Windows 7 is looking more and more like the next XP, and with the Universal Windows Platform looking less and less viable as each of these stagnant months limps past, I think it's safe to say that Microsoft's Windows 10 strategy isn't working.

Small wonder, then, that we're seeing rumours of a possible name change starting to make the rounds, but I have the feeling that Microsoft will need more of a plan B than that. So far, though, there's no sign of one.

UPDATE:
It looks like I slept better than normal last night, because betanews' Wayne Williams beat me to the punch:

According to NetMarketShare’s figures, Windows 10’s share of the desktop operating system market remains pretty uninspiring, with growth much slower than you’d expect.

In fact in a year, the new OS has grown by just over 5 percent. In comparison, Windows 7 grew by 2 percent in the same time frame.

Of course, this is usage share, rather than market share, but in some ways that’s more important as it shows the percentage of people actually using the different operating systems.

[...]

Will July be any kinder to Windows 10? We’ll find out in a month’s time.

We don't actually need to wait a month for the answer that question; unless Microsoft change course significantly, July is going to play out just like June did, and as May did before that, and April before that, and so on, and so on, and so on. Windows 10 is the only available choice for new PCs, so it's market share (and usage share) will continue to creep upward, but Microsoft really need for Windows 10's upward movement to happen faster than a creeping pace - that's the whole point of giving it away for free, after all, something that they're still doing, in spite of having officially ended the free giveaway almost a year ago.

Still flatlined

It's the first day of a new month, which means that it's time to check Microsoft is progressing on their mission to lure PC users to Windows 10. Redmond spent most of the month touting the various new features in the Creators Update (the rollout of which is going Just Fine, thank-you), while boasting of having crossed the 500M active devices mark for their new OS, and their apologists have spent the last couple of weeks using the WannaCry outbreak to scare-monger on Windows 10's behalf, but the real question, as always, is: how will actual Windows 7 users react to all of this? Is Win10 finally enticing enough as a package to lure them away? Or was WannaCry finally a scary enough threat to push them over?

Well, according to the latest data from NetMarketShare, the answers would seem to be negative.

This was the picture at the end of March:

and this is how things look at the end of April:

with this as the 6-month trend line:

It looks to me like Windows 7 has ticked back up again, reversing all of its previous month's loss, while Windows 10 gained slightly as well, mostly at the expense of Windows 8.1 and Windows XP. The changes are very slight, though, and the overall trend is still pretty damn flat.

So, what does this mean? Well, early reports about WannaCry had inaccurately pegged WinXP as the major vector for transmission, so it's probably no surprise that WinXP's share of the market dropped again this month; Win8.1 also dropped again, which isn't a surprise, either, considering that 8.1 was massively unpopular, and also considering that 8.1 and 10 are basically the same OS, anyway; the slightly older Windows 8 is still holding steady, though, which I find little odd.

The other winner this month is MacOS 10.12, posting a healthy 0.38% gain; the increasingly relevant "Other" category (a.k.a. Google's ChromeOS) dropped 0.17%, a reversal of the previous month's gain that can probably be chalked up to noisy data, one way or the other. Linux also dropped again very slightly -- while that change (-0.1%) also wouldn't normally be large enough for significance, the fact that it's the 3rd such change in a row can't be ignored.

Overall, we seem to have Windows 10 posting just enough of a gain for Microsoft to declare victory and stay the course on their most unpopular practices for another month, even as Windows 7 becomes ever more entrenched as the top PC OS. The much-predicted imminent mass migration of businesses to Windows 10 is still not showing up in the market share data, which isn't much of a surprise. Basically, it's another month of stagnation, with Windows 10 continuing to fail in its goals, even as users of XP and 8.1 migrate to the latest versions of both Windows and MacOS.

All that remains is to see how the tech media react.

Windows 10 finally on the move?

Happy 1st of May! Time to see what's happening with Windows 10 adoption.

This was the end of March:

this is the end of April:

and this is the 6 month trend:

All from NetMarketShare.

It remains to be seen how the tech press choose to spin this, but there's no denying it: Windows 10 finally managed a substantial uptick of 0.92%, while Windows 7 (which Microsoft officially stopped selling last August) finally ticked downwards by the same amount. It's only one month, of course, and we've seen similar small swings be followed by substantial reversals before, but it could be that Windows 10 has finally managed to do enough, barely, to mollify customers' privacy concerns, while polishing enough rough edges off the product to finally start luring customers away from Windows 7 again.

Perhaps all those businesses that were telling Gartner about their upgrade plans actually meant it, this time. If nothing else, this means that Microsoft can look forward to at least one month without headlines about Windows 7 gaining market share while Windows 10 remains flatlined... even though the 6 month trend line still looks pretty damn flat. Windows 10 will have to manage at least three months of this kind of near 1% (or more) growth before I'll call this anything like a trend in increasing adoption rates.

Also of note this month: Apple's latest MacOS version remained pretty much exactly where it was (-0.01%), while Linux ticked downward by 0.05%, neither move being large enough to be considered significant; interestingly, though, the "Other" category, which presumably includes Google's ChromeOS, also moved this month, ticking upwards by 0.24%. Not sure what's going on there, but it could be that we're seeing the impact of Google's Chromebook, which has been selling really well lately. With the contest for schools' market share heating up between Google Chromebooks, Microsoft's upcoming Cloudbook, and Apple's iPad, it will be interesting to see if NetMarketShare and others start breaking ChromeOS out separately at some point to keep track of it all.

Vulkan will have multi-GPU support on Windows 7 & 8, after all.

This is good news for people interested in the Vulkan API, and in competition generally, at least when it comes to gaming.

From Dark Side Of Gaming:

Last week, we informed you about Vulkan support multiple GPUs only in Windows 10. Well, it appears that won’t be the case as the Khronos Group has announced that Vulkan will also support multi-GPUs in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 (as well as in Linux).

As the Khronos Group claimed:

“The good news is that the Vulkan multi-GPU specification is very definitely NOT tied to Windows 10. It is possible to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension on any desktop OS including Windows 7, 8.X and 10 and Linux.”

The Khronos Group has also commented on its GDC 2017 slides that, obviously, mislead us.

“Some of the Khronos GDC presentations mentioned that for Vulkan multi-GPU functionality, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) must be in Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. That was not a very clear statement that has caused some confusion. And so it is worth clarifying that:

1. The use of WDDM is referring to the use of Vulkan multi-GPU functionality on Windows. On other OS, WDDM is not necessary to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension.
2. On Windows, the use of LDA mode can make implementing Vulkan multi-GPU functionality easier, and will probably be used by most implementations, but it is not strictly necessary.
3. If an implementation on Windows does decide to use LDA mode, it is NOT tied to Windows 10. LDA mode has been available on many versions of Windows, including Windows 7 and 8.X.”

I don't know what happened here -- whether Kronos Group's previous communication on this was just unclear, or just so unpopular that they decided to reverse course on this one -- but either way, this is a positive development for Vulkan. And more competition is likely to be a good thing for gamers, too, especially those wanting to game with Linux, or with Linux-like platforms like MacOS/iOS, Orbis/PS4, and Android.