Technology

Animated: Most Popular Desktop Operating Systems Since 2003

Published

2 years ago

June 23, 2023

Sjoerd Tilmans

Featured Creator

Article/Editing:

Pallavi Rao

The Most Popular Desktop Operating Systems Since 2003

Mobile phones might be the most common way of getting online today, but the digital and internet era started for most people with the humble desktop computer.

And over the past 20 years, a long list of operating systems (OS) have been used to run the most popular desktop computers.

Sjoerd Tilmans has created an animated chart showing the rise and fall in market share of popular desktop operating systems over the period of May 2003 to June 2022, using data from W3Schools and GS Stat Counter.

Microsoft’s Monopoly on the Most Popular Desktop OS

The story of the desktop OS market is a story of Microsoft’s explosive growth and market dominance.

In the 1980s, the fledgling company signed a partnership with personal computer behemoth IBM. Microsoft would supply IBM with an operating system for its computers, MS-DOS, and receive a royalty for every computer sold.

Those royalties boosted Microsoft’s coffers. And its release of Windows—a more visual interface than DOS—helped them grab hold of the PC market. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw different versions of Windows capture the market:

Windows 95:
The now famous toolbar and Start menu made their debut here. The version also would launch Internet Explorer, once the world’s most popular browser.
Windows 98:
An upgrade to ‘95 which supported more hardware like USBs and connecting more than one monitor.

Windows XP:
XP quickly became a fan-favorite because of its stability, and a hit with both commercial and personal computer clients. Windows XP gained market share steadily upon release in 2001, quickly becoming the most popular desktop OS with a peak of 76% market share in 2007.

Operating System	Peak Market Share	Year
Win 95	57.4%	1998
Win 98	17.2%	1999
Win XP	76.1%	2006

Microsoft doubled down on their next releases from the end of the 2000s to 2020, with some misses (Windows Vista) and some hits (Windows 10). Here’s a look at the most popular ones:

Windows 7:
Released as the successor to the poorly received Windows Vista, it kept the same visual style (“Aero”) but greatly improved performance and stability from Vista’s benchmarks. In 2011, Windows 7 passed XP to become the most popular desktop OS.
Windows 8 and 8.1:
Created for tablet-desktop integration, just as Microsoft released the companion Surface tablet. The beloved Start menu was replaced (an unpopular decision) and tile-based visual style introduced. However the dramatic differences between the desktop and tablet versions made for a steep learning curve, with the 8.1 release reintroducing the Start button.
Windows 10:
The follow-up to Windows 8 kept the the tile-based appearance but focused on a desktop-oriented interface with quality of life updates. By 2018, Windows 10 had become the most popular desktop OS, eventually peaking at 61% market share at the start of 2022.

Date	Peak Market Share	Year
Win 7	55.1%	2014
Win 8	8.1%	2013
Win 8.1	16.8%	2015
Win 10	61.2%	2022

The most recent version of Windows released, Windows 11, had updated graphics styling, widget integration, and introduced Microsoft’s latest internet browser Microsoft Edge. But it received a mixed response and slow uptake compared to Windows 10, gaining a market share of 8.3% by June 2022.

Microsoft Vs. Other Desktop OS Contenders

As of February 2023, Microsoft had a comfortable lead in the desktop OS market, holding nearly 72% of the market.

Company	OS Name	Feb, 2023 Market Share
Microsoft	Windows	72.0%
Apple	macOS	16.3%
OpenSource	Linux	2.9%
Google	ChromeOS	2.9%
Unknown	Unknown	6.0%

In a distant second is Apple’s macOS. The most profitable company in the world might make most of their money from smartphones, but Apple has still managed to carve out a small but sturdy segment of the desktop operating OS market. It reached its peak of 19% in April 2020.

The other tech giant in the desktop OS game is Alphabet, whose ChromeOS is unique for using an internet browser (Google Chrome browser) as its primary interface. Generally packaged as a simpler and cheaper device option—it was primarily released with inexpensive laptops called “Chromebooks”. More recently, Alphabet announced a version that can be installed on existing computer hardware in 2022.

Compared to the commercially released OS above, Linux is completely free to download and use, and is the largest open-source software project in the world. Although the OS is only used in about 3% of desktop computers, it was also the basis of Android and ChromeOS, and is the most-used OS on devices with embedded software—routers, smart home devices, cars, and even a few spacecraft (The SpaceX Falcon 9, for example).

This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.

Click for Comments

Technology

AI Week Wrap Report: See All the Visuals in One Place

AI Week, sponsored by Terzo, is Visual Capitalist’s in-depth exploration of the latest insights in the world of artificial intelligence.

Published

2 days ago

April 28, 2025

Visual Capitalist Brand Solutions

AI Week was our first-of-its-kind editorial event. In it, we examined the latest AI insights, including the amount each nation is spending on AI, how people utilize AI today, the skills required for a career in AI, and much more.

All these insights were drawn from the 2025 Stanford AI Index and other cutting-edge sources. All of these are available at Visual Capitalist’s AI content hub–brought to you by our partners at Terzo.

Tap Into AI Week

This week, we examined several key areas of the AI landscape in 2025.

First, we examined the state of global AI investment, discovering that the U.S. has raised nearly half a trillion dollars in private AI investment since 2013—the most of any nation.

Following the U.S. were China and the U.K., which invested $120 billion and $30 billion, respectively, during the same period.

Patent filings serve as a means to measure innovation and leadership in the technology sector while also providing legal protection for novel ideas and inventions.

In our second post, we examined AI leadership by analyzing the number of AI patents filed by major nations. We found that China has accumulated 70% of all global AI patents, the most in recent years.

However, evidence does suggest that many of these patents were applied for and protected within China alone.

AI can be found in nearly every digital product today. So, in the third post, we explored how people utilize AI today.

Here, we found that the primary reason people use AI today is for both professional and personal support. Showing that AI can assist humans in managing both their emotions and life.

However, AI continues to find many uses in content creation, learning, and creativity.

A significant aspect of the conversation surrounding AI models is the substantial amount of money tech giants are investing in their training.

We examined corporate investment in various AI models, finding that in recent years, Google has spent the most. Although data is limited, it’s believed that the company spent $192 million in training Gemini 1.0 Ultra—the highest amount across all leading models.

The conversation around AI has also raised the question of whether humans or machines are faster at technical tasks.

While AI systems have historically fallen short compared to humans, the gap has narrowed considerably over the past year. Now, AI surpasses humans in specific technical skills, including advanced mathematics and visual reasoning.

The advent of AI has also created the need for AI-based jobs. Stanford University’s 2025 AI Index examined AI job postings throughout the U.S. and found that the most sought-after skill is the programming language Python.

Computer science, data analysis, and an understanding of the Agile working methodology were also identified as valuable AI skills.

For our final AI Week graphic, we pit American AIs against their Chinese counterparts in a test of performance.

The graphic charts the performance of the top U.S. and Chinese AI models on LMSYS’s Chatbot Arena. It shows that while U.S. models have consistently outperformed Chinese models, the performance gap has closed dramatically in recent years.

Helping the World to Discover Your Data

At Visual Capitalist, we craft campaigns like AI Week that tackle our client’s key challenges.

Whether by making your data more discoverable, leveraging our brand and audience of 12 million people per month, or consulting and educating around data discovery, our goal is to help you isolate the signal from the noise.

If you want to learn how companies like Terzo, BlackRock, MSCI, and Morningstar grew their brands by partnering with Visual Capitalist, contact us today.Use This Visualization