Programmers OS Windows Linux

Do Programmers Use Windows or Linux as Their Operating System?

This article explores which operating system programmers use - Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX - and examines available statistics on their market share. If Linux download numbers were included... Programmers' favorite (primarily used) OS is as follows...

Shou Arisaka
1 min read
Nov 14, 2025

This article explores which operating system programmers use - Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX - and examines available statistics on their market share.

Usage share of operating systems - Wikipedia

Desktop/Laptop operating system browsing statistics

  • Windows 82.45%
  • macOS 12.98%
  • Unknown 2.09%
  • Linux 1.69%
  • Chrome OS 0.78%

These are only statistics related to shipment numbers.

In other words, free downloadable operating systems like Linux are at a disadvantage. If Linux download numbers were added here, it wouldn’t be strange if Linux exceeded 90%. But that’s not the case.

According to The 2018 Stack Overflow developer survey, programmers’ favorite (primarily used) OS is as follows:

  • Windows: 49.4%
  • MacOS: 27.4%
  • Linux: 23.0%

It’s surprising that Linux doesn’t account for the majority. That said, I myself, after using various distributions of Linux centered on Ubuntu for over a year, settled on Windows and am a Windows user. After all, the abundance of information makes problem-solving easier on Windows.

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Shou Arisaka Nov 14, 2025

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