Is Everyone Leaving Windows?

My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.

Some numbers: Windows under 60 percent. Linux over 10 percent in North America. Windows sales down 27 percent.

Those are all headlines from this year. Put them together and it looks like everybody is packing up.

I would like that. I wrote that it's truly embarrassing to keep using Windows. So I'm not neutral here. I don’t understand why people voluntarily chose Windows.

But let's look at those numbers. Because most of them don't say what the headlines say.

Under 60

In June, StatCounter's numbers put Windows market share of desktops worldwide. For the first time in years.

Then . That same June .

So that one never happened.

Over 10

July was next. of desktops in North America. That went big on Reddit and Hacker News.

Then August, : 15.65 percent.

Then September: 3.53 percent.

So, millions of North Americans installed Linux over the summer and went back to Windows for the fall. Sure.

StatCounter counts page views, not people or PCs. And the web has a lot more bots now. Windows Latest looked at Cloudflare's data for North America, where you can filter those out. With bots, Linux was at about 16 percent. Human traffic only: about 4.7 percent. Windows around 65, macOS around 28.

Yes, that site is called Windows Latest. But these are Cloudflare's numbers.

So the big Linux wave of summer 2026 was probably, in large part, AI bots browsing the web. Or a factor, at least.

Steam

Valve's hardware survey is a different kind of number. It looks at the PCs of people who play games on Steam and agree to take part.

: Windows 93.70 percent. Linux 3.95. macOS 2.35.

A year earlier, Linux had just cracked 3 percent, and Windows was at 94.84. So that's growth. Nearly one point in a year.

And a good part of that kind of growth has been the Steam Deck, which comes with Linux out of the box. Nobody had to wipe Windows for that.

Money

Microsoft's Windows OEM and Devices revenue fell 22 percent last quarter. Windows OEM alone, what PC makers pay for licenses, fell 27 percent. For next quarter, Microsoft expects OEM and Devices to drop in the mid-30s.

Microsoft names three reasons: last year's rush when Windows 10 support ended, PC makers working through their stock, and weak PC demand. Sure.

And the whole market went down. IDC says PC shipments fell 20.1 percent in Q3, to 62.7 million. HP lost 30.9 percent. Memory prices are a big part of this. RAMaggedon.

Macs went down too. 5.9 million, minus 11.3 percent. So Apple too.

Generally, fewer people are buying computers. Any computers.

Still there

Satya Nadella said early this year that Windows 11 passed one billion users. Faster than Windows 10 did. I mean they sort of forced this… but yeah.

And about still run Windows 10. More than a year after free support ended. (StatCounter again, so... roughly.)

Those people haven't left. They haven't even moved.

Where to

Some do leave, of course. Thank God. Two places to go.

Linux. Zorin OS 18 hit 2 million downloads in under three months, more than three-quarters of them from Windows. Those are downloads, not installs, and Zorin's own numbers. But I like Zorin. We put it on my dad's Mac. It’s great. So are other Linux distros, of course, like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, CachyOS, Pop OS, and so on.

Mac. Apple's share went from 8.5 to 9.5 percent in Q3, according to IDC. While shipping fewer Macs. So that's the others falling faster, not necessarily Apple winning...

Then there are the governments and agencies. France, the International Criminal Court, Schleswig-Holstein, where I live. Many move from Windows to Linux. Those matter to me. But they're a small piece of a billion.

There is always a catch

Nobody counts people leaving an operating system. All of this is a proxy: page views, a survey of gamers, revenue.

Microsoft has the better number. And it shares that when it's a good one. Understandably.

Also, this is slow. So slow… People don't swap computers every year, so a shift like this could show up very late.

The Bottom Line

So, is everyone leaving Windows? No. Not at all.

Linux is up a bit. Mac is up a bit, in share. Windows is still at about three-quarters of desktops.

And I can't say much. I wrote in May that I'd never use it again, and then part of my work moved onto a Windows machine. Involuntarily, people use Windows. Still don’t understand those who chose to… but yeah.

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