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The Worlds Most Popular Operating System Goes To

What's Really The Most Popular Operating System? That Depends On How You Look At Them And Who's Doing The Looking. For Example, Ne...

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What's really the most popular operating system? That depends on how you look at them and who's doing the looking. For example, Net Applications shows Windows on top of the desktop operating system mountain with 88.14% of the market. That's not surprising, but Linux -- yes Linux -- seems to have jumped from 1.36% share in March to 2.87% share in April. Has the Linux desktop seen a sudden surge in popularity?

I doubt it. I'm writing this story on a PC running Linux Mint and I've been a Linux desktop user since Bash, rather than KDE or GNOME, was the Linux desktop interface.

The Linux desktop seems to be catching on in some niches. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical CEO, reported in 2019, "We have seen companies signing up for Linux desktop support because they want to have fleets of Ubuntu desktop for their artificial intelligence engineers." That's good news, but there really aren't that many AI and machine learning developers out there.

By and large, the Linux desktop seems to have blown its last, best chance of overtaking Windows when Windows 7 was put out to pasture earlier this year. The same problems -- no less a figure than Linus Torvalds pointed out -- still exist. "I still wish we were better at having a standardized desktop that goes across all the distribution," Torvalds said. "[It's] a personal annoyance how the fragmentation of the different vendors have, I think, held the desktop back a bit."

Other sites that monitor operating systems statistics, like StatCounter, don't see any surge in Linux popularity. If anything, Stat Counter sees Linux declining to a mere 0.7% in April from 0.78% in March.

Both Net Applications and StatCounter massage their data. Neither gives us access to the raw data. For that, you must turn to the federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP).

DAP gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. While it doesn't tell us about global operating system use, it does offer us the best information we have about operating system use by Americans.

There we find that while Windows is number one on the desktop, it's far from the most popular end-user operating system. That honor, in the United States, goes to Apple's iOS, which powers iPhones, with 32.2%.

Windows comes in second with 30.9%. Digging deeper, we discover that Windows 10 is well ahead of the now out-of-date Windows 7 by 25.6% to 3.9%. A paltry 1.1% are still using Windows 8.1.

After that, Android is number three with 25.6% . Of course, Android is a mobile version of Linux. When you add in the Linux desktop's 0.9% and Chrome OS, a cloud-based Linux distro, with 1.1% , the greater Linux family comes a lot closer to Windows, but it's still in third place.

MacOS, by DAP's count, comes in at fourth place with 9.3% .

The last time I took a long, hard look at end-user operating system numbers in 2017, the Linux desktop and macOS were exactly where they are today. Both operating systems have their loyal fans, but neither has gained many new users.

The real difference in the last three years is the overall decline of the Windows desktop to iOS and Android. In 2017, Windows was the first place operating system, with iOS closing in with 22.9% and Android close behind at 16.8% .

We've seen the rise of the smartphone over the desktop for some time now. By 2012, Facebook users spent more time on the social network from their smartphones than from their PCs. We still talk about PCs as if they were the more important end-user computing device, but the truth is that honor now goes to smartphones.

Of course, the PC isn't going away. Sure, people look up websites more often from phones than they do on PCs now. They also spend most of their social time on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter smartphone apps now. But, for work, you still can't beat PCs.

Indeed I wonder if the coronavirus pandemic might briefly reverse the smartphone growth as we spend more time in our home offices. But, regardless of that, for now, and tomorrow the desktop still belongs to Windows, and Americans still love their iPhones.

All the other operating systems are important in their places -- Linux for developers, Android for thrifty users, and Macs for its fans and audio, graphic, and video creators. But I see no chance that any of the others will displace iOS and Windows from the top of the operating system mountain.

Tutorial - How To Install Microsoft Teams On Linux PC Alone

Microsoft Teams Is Now Available As A Linux Desktop Client. Learn How To Install And Connect, So You Can Begin Collaborating With

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Ajiri 1.5k

Microsoft Teams is now available as a Linux desktop client. Learn how to install and connect, so you can begin collaborating with team members.

You may or may not have heard by now, but Microsoft has released an official port of its Teams tool for Linux. That means, no matter what operating system you're on, be it Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and now Linux, or if you're stuck at your desktop or on the go, you can get your Microsoft Teams collaboration on.

This is the first of the MS Office suite tools to make its way to Linux, and it may not be the last. Best of all, the Linux version will support all the features you've come to depend upon with Teams. In fact, the application looks and behaves exactly the same on Linux as it does on Windows, so there's no reason to think you'll be missing out just because you're using Linux.

I'm going to walk you through the process of installing Microsoft Teams on Linux. I'll be demonstrating on Ubuntu 19.10, but the process is similar (with a single command modification) on both Debian and Red Hat-based distributions.

What you'll need to install Microsoft Teams on Linux

A running instance of a Linux desktop

A user with sudo privileges

The free installer file

How to install Microsoft Teams

The first thing to be done is the downloading of the installer file. Open a browser and point it to the official Teams download page. Click on either the .deb version (for Debian-based distributions) or the .rpm version (for Red Hat-based versions).

Depending on your desktop, you might be prompted to open the file with your desktop's Software Installer (Figure A).

Figure A

Installing with the built-in software installer.

If you are prompted to install via the GUI method, click OK and, when prompted, type your user's sudo password and allow the installation to complete.

If you are not prompted by the built-in software installer, let the download finish, open a terminal window, and change into Downloads directory with the command:

cd ~/Downloads

Install Teams with the command:

sudo dpkg -i teams*.deb

If you're working on a Red Hat-based distribution (such as Fedora desktop), the command would be either:

sudo dnf install teams*.rpm

sudo rpm -i teams*.rpm

The installation command should complete without issue. Once finished, you're ready to launch the application from your desktop menu.

How to connect in Microsoft Teams

Once Teams launches, type your Microsoft account email address in the required field (Figure B).

Figure B

Click Sign In and then you'll be prompted to sign in a second time (Figure C).

Figure C

The second sign-in window.

Click Next and, when prompted, select the team you want to connect with for collaboration (Figure D).

Figure D

Selecting your team.

Click Continue and Teams will finally open and you're ready to get to work (Figure E).

Figure E

And that's all there is to installing and connecting to MS Teams on Linux. You might have thought the MS Linux love fest to be a passing phase, but it seems the industry giant is quite serious about making their proprietary software work on Linux.

Although many in the Linux community will balk at using software solutions that aren't open source, this is a game changer for anyone wanting to use Linux and are required to collaborate via Microsoft Teams. Yes, you can always opt for the web-based version of Teams, but many (such as myself) prefer to always use the desktop client--otherwise it's yet another tab open in my already overcrowded browser.

Enjoy the collaboration.

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