Latest Operating System Usage Share Statistics

Since today is the start of the month, I thought it was coincidental that I received an e-mail from Ziff-Davis with an interesting article saying how Windows 7 had surpassed Vista in usage as measured by checking website logs. I always check our monthly logs on the first day of the month, so I modified one of my handy, dandy Perl scripts to see how our local distribution compared to the numbers in the article. This is the last month I can easily check on our old departmental site since we are folding our main site into the boring, humdrum corporate look for the rest of the College of Arts and Sciences, hosted more centrally where the log files will not be as easy to obtain. Plus our new site is a drupal site running on an aging Solaris Sun, so it is incredibly slow compared to our old site of static pages running on an even older Solaris Sun. In any case the article was saying their numbers had Windows 7 at 14.5% versus Vista at 14.3% with XP holding a big lead at about 62%. They had Mac OS at right around 5% and Linux at under 1%. So now it was time to check and compare our numbers, first for our department site (about 240,000 hits for the month) and then our more popular and generally read meteorite site (over 700,000 hits). Our departmental site is accessed primarily by our prospective and current students and other academics, and it has a very interesting distribution:

Windows XP137,87357.7%
Windows 729,49412.3%
Windows Vista27,27811.4%
Macintosh24,49410.2%
Linux11,8134.9%
Windows 987,5743.2%

So even though our Windows numbers were proportionately similar to each other based on the article, the total Windows percentile was about 84% instead of 90%. Our Macintosh usage was twice as high and our Linux use was almost five times as high! Just to make sure there was no error in my calculations, I ran the same analysis on the very popular meteorite site which appeals to a much broader audience:

Windows XP401,83653.8%
Windows Vista171,20522.9%
Windows 7116,15615.6%
Macintosh45,6486.1%
Linux7,4731.0%
Windows 984,3710.6%

Here we see that the total Windows count is over 92% as expected but Vista actually has a surprisingly large lead over Windows 7. The Macintosh and Linux numbers are more in line with the general population at 6.1% and 1.0%. We had more Linux hits on our departmental server than on the meteorites site that has about three times the total traffic. It is also interesting to note that the aging Windows 98 still has more than half the total of all the Linux distributions in both my cases! Some people (especially older academics) still like those 10 year old operating systems.

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