Today marks exactly five years since Microsoft cast the cruciatus curse of operating systems onto PCs everywhere: Windows Vista. The reviews have never been… kind, to put it gently. You’d be lucky to find anyone these days who could convincingly make up something nice to say about Vista let alone actually share honest praise of it yet, in spite of everything, Vista is still the third most used OS in the world.
Curious to learn who’s still keeping the Vista spirt alive in the world, Pingdom took a look at the global market share of operating systems to find out who exactly still uses this OS (and then troll those parts of the world unforgivably) (actually, the Pingdom people didn’t troll anybody for their OS choices). After looking at data for 216 countries, Windows Vista was found to still be in use among 10.5% of all desktop operative systems. Windows 7 commanded the greatest portion of desktop OS market shares with 44% and Windows XP claimed 35% of all market shares.
And in case you’e wondering which country out there is still using Vista the most: Ireland. Oddly, the country with the lowest percentage of Windows Vista usage was Cuba. As much as I want to tease out conclusions from these findings, I wouldn’t go too far in extrapolating conclusions about the cultural climate of either country based on their Vista usage (or lack thereof), but simply smile, say an amused “Humh,” and enjoy the new piece of tech trivia. And really, the world seems to still love it some Vista: out of all 216 countries included in Pingdom’s survey, 182 of them – that’s 84.2% – Windows Vista is the third most commonly used OS.
One piece of trivia I do enjoy, however, and that does have some small validity to it: Windows Vista is still more popular worldwide than Mac OS X. In fact, only 16 countries in the world use Mac OS X more than Vista. And surprisingly, 2 countries out there can say that more PCs use Linux than Vista.
So if you’re one of the many out there still rocking the Windows Vista, I invite you to share with us in the comments why you’ve remained attached to this particular OS system over the years.