Now this is interesting: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp Granted the quote at the bottom, it shows Linux being about 5 times as popular as Windows Vista. That's something I guess. And Macintosh usage is bumpy, which is... kind of weird. Maybe people are dual-booting their Macs. Otherwise mostly as expected; XP is doing a nose dive, Win7 is holding strong, Win8 is catching on very slowly. I do wonder though what's with the spike in WinNT hits (!) in late 2013. That's just weird. Edit: FWIW this is based on browser statistics, so it's not going to be all that accurate, but still.
Vista had the biggest share in October 2009 (18,6%), before Windows 7 started to shrink Vista's user base. Will Windows 8 reach this share or will Windows 10 shrink it's share before it happens?
I guess Vista's market share was reflecting coercion.... One of the alternate MS OS versions I am proud to have skipped. I'm still fond of NT by the way, it didn't try to do too much... I wonder how many people are running Linux in Vms, that's the way I tend to browse by default these days.
Note the remarks at the bottoms though. These statistics are skewed by the fact users of w3schools are mainly webdevelopers (tech savvy, more willing to try new OSes, etc...) and not really representative of global internet usage, and even less of general desktop/mobile usage. A better source for me is http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm You can explore statistics (via Archive) on OSes since 2009. Not perfect of course, but I think a better source if you want to extrapolate. GNU Linux amounts to barely more than 1% total there compared to w3schools.
