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posted by janrinok on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the home-versus-business dept.

Windows 10's market share continues to grow a point or two a month, but it's also cracked the milestone of being the most-used version of Windows on weekends.

That's The Register's conclusion after downloading the US Government Analytics service's latest 90-day dump recording over a billion visits to US government web sites. That's as big a sample as we can find anywhere, so we figure it's at least as newsworthy as the other two sources we track for market share, NetMarketshare and Statcounter.

We've remarked in the past that operating system usage rates change during the week. A mature OS like Windows 7 will do well Monday to Friday because business has embraced it. A new OS like Windows 10 will do okay during the working week, but will initially do rather better on weekends because consumers are faster to adopt new code than businesses.

Windows 10 has displayed that pattern of adoption and continues to do so. But over the last 90 days it has also won more market share over the weekend than Windows 7. Here's the latest graph we've cooked up showing the trend.

Its hardly surprising seeing that Microsoft have made it very difficult not to upgrade.


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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:30PM

    by Francis (5544) on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:30PM (#397425)

    That's like 90% of the users out there. For the most part any user that doesn't really understand computers would do just fine on Linux.

    The only reason anybody uses Windows is inertia. That and the programs that only work on Windows and don't have replacements on Linux or that don't work well with their Windows counterparts.

    Nobody in their right mind thinks Windows is a good OS, the best release they had was 7, which was solidly mediocre. And they immediately through the good work they did in the crapper to give us 8.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:09PM (#397485)

    This table of equivalents [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [linuxrsp.ru] is very very old.
    It has demonstrated for ages that your app has to be pretty obscure to not have a Linux-compatible alternative.

    The only reason anybody uses Windows is inertia.

    That pretty well covers it.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday September 04 2016, @11:03PM

      by tftp (806) on Sunday September 04 2016, @11:03PM (#397558) Homepage

      Interesting. I haven't seen that table before. It is indeed very old. I cannot follow many links anymore, they are dead.

      However... the comparison is a bit strange. They are trying to say that KMail is equivalent to Outlook [express]? That must be a cruel joke. I am using Kmail every day at home, and it is so basic that, essentially, you can't use it unless you really know what you are trying to accomplish.

      The reason why there are no comparable equivalents in special areas of expertise is very simple and well known. This is because the software requires a lot of effort - and in those cases it is also a BORING effort. For example, you need to enter and maintain a bunch of tax tables for accounting software. You need to have a license for PANTONE numbers if you do a graphics package. You need a 3D modeling library - that is not free - if you want to build an equivalent of SolidWorks. And so on. You have to have expertise in the industry that you are trying to serve - you have to be an accountant or have a consultant who is an accountant. For other examples that would be a graphics artist, a mechanical engineer, a mathematician, an RF engineer, a physicist... When the subject moves to pure science things get better, as there are many competent specialists. But industry-specific gaps will continue to exist until some company hires the necessary talent - and then it becomes another proprietary package, neither better nor worse than others. They will need to recoup the investment, and they start asking "why are we spending 30% of our money on supporting 3% of our customers?" - and it's all downhill from there.

      Linux exceeds Windows in most areas of communication - networking, Internet, storage. But even there holes exist. For example, the latest Skype for Linux (which I have and run) is a pale shadow of its Windows or Android version. It is not even updated. It barely works. I choose to run Skype on a tablet that sits next to my Linux Mint box. Imagine that!

      Recently Linux started acquiring its own demons - first PulseAudio, and now the universally hated SystemD. The latter refuses to run my postfix service after upgrade to Ubuntu Server 16.x. Though if I run /usr/sbin/postfix start, it runs just fine. Now I have to run the postfix manually whenever I reboot the box. And on Windows side some other, entirely unrelated people made a patch to 2008R2/SBS2011. Now it takes too much time to boot up the box, and the Exchange's transport service fails - and never starts! For that there is another workaround. All in all, I am viewing this civilization with great pessimism :-|

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @12:42AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 05 2016, @12:42AM (#397589)

        There's a lot of truth in what you said. 8-(

        you need to enter and maintain a bunch of tax tables for accounting software

        You wouldn't if the purpose of your gov't was to serve you and ALL of the other citizens and not to select winners in business.
        That information would be available as Open Data in downloadable files.

        until some company hires the necessary talent - and then it becomes another proprietary package

        ...and, as I like to say about the platform-specific proprietary apps:
        If your "Windoze-only" app is old enough, it will likely run under WINE.
        There are guys whose app has become the industry standard because they made a commitment to always be WINE-compatible and who did that over a decade ago. [google.com]

        Skype for Linux

        A spyware app from a malware company.
        I have an item in my personal queue about replacements for this and other apps that make you surrender your privacy|control.
        Gotta get that item submitted.

        SystemD

        The sin of trying to duplicate MICROS~1 technology methods and M$ business models.

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Monday September 05 2016, @03:44AM

      by Francis (5544) on Monday September 05 2016, @03:44AM (#397653)

      Personally, there's like 4 or 5 programs I use that don't really have open source equivalents and one of them is a game.

      And they're not so much obscure as they're labor intensive to create and as such target Windows for the larger userbase.