No, Windows did not fall below 60% market share or lose 20 points to Linux
No, Windows did not fall below 60% market share or lose 20 points to Linux
Publish Date: 2026-07-11 19:21:00
Source Domain: www.windowslatest.com
StatCounter, a web analytics company, claimed that Windows’ market share had fallen from roughly 79% to just 56%, but as expected, it turned out to be a reporting error.
In April 2026, StatCounter documented that Windows held approximately 79% of the desktop market. In June 2026, the same company reported that Windows’ market share had dropped to just 56.55%. This meant Windows’ market share appeared to fall by 22.45 percentage points, or about 28.4%, in just two months.
At the same time, Linux had climbed to 4.39%, while Apple’s OS X and macOS stood at 16.37%. This was immediately picked up by Linux fan sites like Linuxiac and “AI” influencers like Chubby, who posted on X that Windows’ market share was dropping rapidly and shared the screenshot below:
StatCounter incorrectly shows Windows usage has dropped
Windows’ reputation may be at an all-time low, but that doesn’t mean the operating system’s market share has dropped below 60%. As expected, StatCounter has admitted that it messed up and rolled out fresh data that shows Windows at 72%. It’ll likely climb back toward 78% in the coming weeks as the numbers continue to adjust.
It’s clear that, even if you take StatCounter’s retracted numbers at face value, Linux’s market share growth does not explain the reported 28% drop in Windows usage.
So where did the missing chunk of Windows users go?
I downloaded the data from StatCounter, and we found that an operating system labeled “Unknown” suddenly accounted for 21.45% of the desktop market. This category could include any device where the browser’s user agent is modified, unavailable, or cannot be correctly identified by StatCounter.
That means a portion of those “Unknown” devices could very well be Windows PCs. The more likely explanation is that StatCounter misclassified a large number of devices rather than Windows suddenly falling below 60% or contributing to Linux’s growth.
It’s not the first…
