drathbun wrote:Are we talking desktop operating systems or server?
As a desktop, I would imagine Windows is first, OS/X second, and various linux variations third. It would be interesting to see numbers on that though.
Agreed that on the server side of things Linux far outnumbers Apple.
That's correct. Server side, *nix variations (including Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc) have the dominant marketshare, Windows is second, and Apple is last. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but servers running Windows are actually increasing markeshare, at least in the x86/64 realm.
When dealing with IBM PPC or SPARC based systems of the RISC family, *nix (such as Solaris) and Linux variations are about as close to 100% marketshare as you can get. However, such servers are usually reserved for highly technical and specific tasks (such as supercomputers predicting weather models) of which extreme customization is needed, whereas Windows targets a much wider and general audience, such as web servers and mainframe systems within companies.
Apple targets another specialized market with OS X server. To be perfectly honest, unless things have changed in the last release of OS X Server, performance when dealing with web serving and databases has been ridiculously poor in comparison to Linux and Windows. While OS X server can serve that purpose, I wouldn't ever use it.
- Adam