Today, just for a change, a slightly different topic. We’ll still be talking about computing but not strictly about adobe software, more about Operating Systems, or OSs as they usually referred as.

According to figures from the analyst house – Gartner, Mac OS and Linux were the fastest growing operating systems in 2010. Does it mean the decline of Windows? Are Unix based operating systems (both Mac OS and Linux are Unix based) expanding?

One of the reasons for Mac OS growth is the popularity of iMacs and Mac Books and the report attributes the success to “Apple marketing its product line as “cool” computing devices”. But even though Mac OS is growing rapidly, it only accounts for 1.7% of the operating systems market.

Mac is growing fast as the client OS, but Linux is rapidly expanding as a server OS. Microsoft Windows is still the most popular client OS with the market share of 78.6%.

What about supercomputers? Have you ever heard of them? This one is very interesting as one would have thought that Windows could lead here as well. According to TOP 500 Project List, 91.8% belongs to Linux! and Microsoft Windows Server has 1.0%…

What is future going to bring? Is Open Source software going to catch up on other operating systems? Who knows? Hopefully… Why would anyone pay for an operating system (Windows costs over £100) where one could have it for free? And have a huge variety of operating systems to choose from? What about security? One could say that there are no viruses on Mac OS and Linux…

Have a look on this history of Unix operating systems (source: Wikipedia).

We’ll see what the future will bring. Enjoy! 🙂