Talk:Usage share of operating systems

The HPC system information is wrong

The current (2018/10/26) page text claims: "In June 2017, two AIX computers held rank 493 and 494,[230] the last non-Linux systems before they dropped off the list." The "last non-Linux" part of this claim is wrong.

As of 2018/10, the #8 machine on the TOP500 list is Sequoia. It is an IBM BG/Q system, and the operating system it runs on the compute nodes is not Linux. It does implement some parts of Linux syscalls (e.g., common read() and write() parameters), but it implements only partial syscall support, and is far from "Linux". Partial syscall support reduces the memory/compute footprint on each node -- a good trade-off for HPC -- but supporting only a few Linux features is not "Linux".

Even among "Linux" vendors, support may be 99% (or 98% or 90%, or whatever) rather than 100%. For example, some vendors support HugeTLBfs for only a subset of the hardware's page sizes. This may be a good engineering choice, but may still violate Linux compatibility -- e.g., some Linux compatibility tests may fail.

One way to explain this may be to say HPC systems use Linux, or some HPC-friendly subset of the Linux API, and that since the AIX systems fell off the list, all systems either use Linux or a subset of the Linux API. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:daa0:e2e0:b961:705e:436f:b84f (talk) 03:48, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Oppose as while this may be technically true, is it really helpful for most readers (and vendors' and TOP500 info claim "Linux" and we should go with what sources say)? The Linux kernel (and the full "Linux" OS) is a moving target, just as any non-dead OS is, and can we say that e.g. some old Linux API is fully supported (regarding e.g. huge pages, a thing not always supported in Linux). One other thing is that the host nodes (as opposed to compute nodes) support Linux, I believe have full support. Yes, those do not supply the full compute power, just a fraction of, but you can say the same for the GPUs, that provide a large part (often majority) of. In a sense the compute nodes are just as much "accelerators" to the host nodes as the GPUs. comp.arch (talk) 19:01, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

My laptop's OS has the same parameters to read() and write() that Linux has, but it's most definitely NOT running Linux; heck, an operating system for the PDP-11 that came out in 1979 had the same parameters to read() and write() that Linux has. (And, yes, the latter statement is the similar to "PL/I had the same comment characters as C89. :-))

I.e., "has the same parameters to system calls dating back to V7 that Linux has" is rather far from being sufficient to say the OS is close enough to Linux to call it Linux. Now, if the Compute Node Kernel has some calls that implement more than the POSIX versions of those calls *and* extend them in a Linux-compatible fashion, perhaps saying they run a "Linux subset" would work. Guy Harris (talk) 05:27, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Why is the Fedora bar larger than Mint?

...under the Linux section of Desktop share. The Fedora bar appears to take up more space than Mint, even though Fedora has 1.4% market share, and Mint has 1.7%. From what I understand, the sizes of those bars are proportional to their percentages, and are automatically calculated based on them. If this is true, is this a bug? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kaos-Industries (talk • contribs) 01:44, 4 August 2017 UTC (UTC)

The bar chart appears no longer to have separate bars for particular Linux distributions (other than Chrome OS if you consider it a distribution), so problem solved. :-) Guy Harris (talk) 05:35, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Android and iPad battle/switching places and tablet share statistics

I noticed a seemingly a contradiction in Statistica's predictions, but more likely an improvement is predicted sales of tablets. They predictably, by now, predict a decline in installed base of desktop PCs (in the US) every year from now on, and commulative decline of 31% by 2022 (from 2017).[1] In the same graph they show "Mobile PCs" (assumed to be laptops, the term from the title) and tablets to increase their share. However, mobile PCs/laptops will not, but almost, make up for the decline in desktop PCs. I.e. the total decline is predected to be 0.7% decline.

They predict a 5.5% increase in the installed base of tablets (so and thus the installed base of those and the PCs above are predicted to increase for at least a few years).

Now the "contradiction", from their other prediction on tablets (for a similar period, but I guess older prediction, since starts one year earlier in 2016):

"The statistic shows the installed base of tablets in the United States from 2016 to 2022. The installed base of tablets in the U.S. is forecast to fall to at 168.92 million units in 2019."[2]

I.e. having the installed base already peaked and declining year by year from now on.

Android on tablets has overtaken (up to 61.34%) iPad in 2018, then iPad recovered, then in April Android just barely got majority (50.50%) then iPad recovered, now at 51.39%[3] comp.arch (talk) 00:06, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

Does this page need to go into detail about the growth and decline of different segments of the computing market?

In this edit, the article had a bunch of stuff copied from mainframe computer added to it, in a new "Decline" subsection of the "Mainframes" section, discussing the decline of mainframes.

It also has a large section "Crossover to smartphones having majority share".

Do detailed discussions of the growth and decline of various segments of the computing market belong in this article, or do they work better in articles about the segments themselves, with this article mentioning the growth or decline without all the details and just pointing to those articles, or sections thereof, with "See also:" links? That growth and decline is less an issue of "the OSes used in that segment became {more, less} popular" than "the platforms themselves became {more, less} popular", with the platforms being the hardware as much as the software (e.g., computers you can hold in your hand became more popular than computers you can put on your desk or on your lap, for reasons that may have had more to do with the form factor than to do with Windows vs. {Linux,Darwin}). Guy Harris (talk) 20:11, 25 April 2020 (UTC)