The three segments gathered in this article share one thing: Windows was genuinely present there, often dominant, but its position is receding. So these are neither lands where Windows never reigned, nor strongholds it holds firmly — they are breaches. The most emblematic is its last great stronghold, the desktop; then come two older conquests in reflux, databases and game consoles.
The desktop: the last great stronghold, and it is cracking#
Windows still dominates the desktop and laptop — but even that last redoubt is cracking, along three lines: usage, hardware, and the public sector.
The desktop, and the trap in the numbers#
Let’s start with the figure itself, because the headlines recently read it the wrong way. According to StatCounter, Windows today accounts for about 71% of the worldwide desktop (July 2026). That figure gave rise, in mid-2026, to an instructive misreading: the measurement then included a large “Unknown” line (visits whose system was not identified) which, on the surface, dropped Windows below 60% — hence headlines proclaiming its fall. It was a measurement artefact: setting that line aside, Windows stayed around 71-72%. Since then, that line has disappeared from the measurement, and Windows appears directly at ~71%. The decline is real, but gradual: Windows sat around 95% of the desktop circa 2009 — a steady erosion over fifteen years, not a collapse.
One must, however, change scale. Measured across all devices (computers, phones, tablets), Windows now weighs only about 28%, overtaken by Android. The desktop “stronghold” is therefore a stronghold on shrinking ground: the desktop matters less and less, as computing has shifted to mobile and the browser.
Sources:
- StatCounter — desktop operating systems (worldwide)
- Windows Latest — no, Windows did not fall below 60% (the “Unknown” line trap)
- StatCounter — operating systems, all devices combined
The uses that crack the desktop#
Three uses erode the desktop from the side, without a frontal attack.
Chromebooks, first — those laptops running ChromeOS (a Linux-based system). They took a major place in US education: as early as 2015, they made up about half of the devices bought by schools in the United States. The market was boosted by the pandemic, then saw its first decline in 2022; but a generation of pupils learned on a system that is not Windows.
Video games, next. For a long time, gaming on PC required Windows. Valve’s Steam Deck, a handheld console running SteamOS (Linux), changed things thanks to Proton — a compatibility layer that runs games built for Windows directly on Linux, without any porting. As a result, Linux’s share among Steam players reached unprecedented highs in 2026 (up to 5.3% in March, ~3.7% in June). The technical lock has largely loosened: about 90% of Windows games now boot on Linux, and on AMD graphics cards, performance matches Windows — usually within 5%, and sometimes to Linux’s advantage (a set of 17 games puts the Radeon 9070 XT at 98% of Windows performance at 1080p). On Nvidia cards, by contrast, Windows keeps the edge, up to ~20%, for lack of equally mature drivers.
One important lock remains, however: anti-cheat. Kernel-level anti-cheat systems — which many big competitive games refuse to give up — do not work on Linux: Valorant, League of Legends, Call of Duty or Battlefield thus remain unplayable on SteamOS and the Steam Deck. Single-player and most of the catalogue are therefore won; competitive multiplayer with kernel-level anti-cheat is not.
Finally, the developer’s machine — and here it is Microsoft itself that gave way. With WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), Windows now embeds a real Linux kernel, in a lightweight virtual machine, to run the development tools born on Linux. Microsoft even open-sourced it in May 2025. In other words, Windows’s answer to Linux’s dominance on the developer side was… to embed Linux inside Windows.
Sources:
- EdWeek (Futuresource data) — Chromebooks at 49% of US school purchases (2015)
- Phoronix — Linux’s share in the Steam hardware survey (June 2026)
- Microsoft — WSL goes open source (May 2025)
- GamingOnLinux — kernel-level anti-cheat, a persistent lock (Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield… off SteamOS)
- TechSpot — ~90% of Windows games boot on Linux; parity on AMD, behind on Nvidia
- Notebookcheck — Radeon 9070 XT at 98% of Windows performance across 17 games (Linux, 2025)
Hardware: makers that sell Linux#
Twenty years ago, no major manufacturer sold a Linux PC as a product in its own right. Two things have changed.
On one side, Linux-first makers appeared, selling machines with Linux pre-installed and no Windows: the American System76 (founded in 2005, with its in-house distribution Pop!_OS since 2017 and its Cosmic desktop environment, whose first stable version shipped in late 2025) and the German TUXEDO (with TUXEDO OS since 2022), joined by Slimbook, Star Labs and others.
On the other, the big manufacturers opened their professional ranges to Linux. Dell launched its “Project Sputnik” as early as 2012 — an XPS running Ubuntu — since extended to the Latitude and Precision lines. Lenovo had its entire workstation portfolio (ThinkPad P, ThinkStation) certified for Linux in 2020, with Ubuntu pre-installed on some thirty models. HP offers its Z workstations certified for Ubuntu. The trajectory is clear: from “all Windows” to “every pro range offers Linux.” One must stay measured, though — this offering remains “second-class”: concentrated on the professional ranges, with a narrower catalogue, and far less visible than Windows.
Sources:
- System76 — Pop!_OS (in-house distribution since 2017) (Wikipedia)
- Canonical — 10 years of Dell’s “Project Sputnik” (Ubuntu laptops)
- Lenovo — Linux certification of the entire ThinkPad/ThinkStation portfolio (2020)
The public sector: a single truly durable migration#
The desktop of public administrations is an old testing ground for Linux — with one constant lesson: migrating the system without migrating email and line-of-business applications almost always leads to a reversal.
The reference success is French: the Gendarmerie nationale, with its GendBuntu distribution (derived from Ubuntu). Decided in 2008, generalised from 2011, the migration today covers about 97% of the fleet, i.e. more than 100,000 workstations, and it is actively maintained (moving to GendBuntu 24.04 in late 2024). It is, at scale, the only office desktop migration to Linux that is genuinely complete and lasting.
The counter-examples are just as instructive. Munich had migrated ~15,000 workstations to Linux (the LiMux project, 2003-2013) before voting to return to Windows in 2017. The French National Assembly had switched its ~1,150 workstations to Ubuntu in 2007, then returned to Windows in the early 2010s — in both cases, email left on the Microsoft ecosystem weighed heavily. Recent projects are under way (the German state of Schleswig-Holstein migrated its email and office suite in 2025, with the Linux OS to follow), but one should beware of hype: the Danish “wave” of 2025, often cited, concerns mainly the office suite and the cloud, not the desktop system — to the point that the headline “Denmark leaves Windows for Linux” was retracted by the source that launched it.
Sources:
- GendBuntu — ~97% of the Gendarmerie’s fleet on Ubuntu (Wikipedia)
- LiMux — Munich’s migration and its 2017 abandonment (Wikipedia)
- The Document Foundation — Schleswig-Holstein moves to LibreOffice (2025)
The second life of abandoned PCs#
A last front: reuse. The end of support for Windows 10, on 14 October 2025, combined with Windows 11’s hardware requirements (TPM 2.0 chip, recent processors), makes millions of perfectly functional PCs “obsolete” — an estimate from the firm Canalys puts ~240 million devices at risk of being scrapped. Yet many can get a second life on Linux.
This movement is taking shape. The refurbisher Back Market opened an “Obsolete devices” section, with low-cost refurbished laptops running ChromeOS Flex (in partnership with Google), and documents installing Ubuntu. The Emmabuntüs collective has maintained since 2011 a Linux distribution (derived from Debian) designed to ease the refurbishment of donated computers, notably for the Emmaüs communities. And a coalition of organisations (KDE, GNOME, the Free Software Foundation Europe…) has been running, since late 2024, the “End of 10” campaign, which helps install Linux on PCs abandoned by Windows 10 — in the lineage of the Free Software Foundation’s “Upcycle Windows 7” campaign in 2020.
Sources:
- Tom’s Hardware — ~240 million PCs threatened by the end of Windows 10 (Canalys estimate)
- Emmabuntüs — Linux distribution for refurbishment (the collective’s official site)
- End of 10 — campaign to move PCs abandoned by Windows 10 to Linux
Databases: a 2000s conquest in reflux#
Databases are a breach of a different kind: not a ground wrested from Windows, but a conquest that Windows itself had waged on enterprise turf. In the 2000s, driven by landmark releases — SQL Server 2005 foremost — Microsoft won a significant share of the professional relational-database market. Two dynamics are eroding that position today.
First, the operating system beneath the databases is not Windows. Take the top four relational engines in the DB-Engines popularity ranking and look, for each, at the system it runs on:
| Rank | Relational engine | Relationship to the operating system |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oracle Database | Cross-platform (Linux, Unix, Windows); Oracle pushes its own Oracle Linux distribution |
| 2 | MySQL (vendor: Oracle) | Cross-platform, historically Linux (a pillar of the LAMP stack) |
| 3 | Microsoft SQL Server | Windows-native, but ported to Linux since 2017 |
| 4 | PostgreSQL | Open source, born on Unix; cross-platform, mostly deployed on Linux |
Of these four engines, only one — SQL Server — was born and centred on Windows, and it now runs on Linux too. The other three are Unix/Linux-native or cross-platform. The foundation beneath databases is therefore not Windows: it is mostly Linux.
Next, the popularity dynamic works against Windows. The DB-Engines ranking measures popularity (mentions, job postings, searches): SQL Server is losing ground there, while PostgreSQL keeps climbing — to the point of coming out well ahead in developers’ actual usage (Stack Overflow 2025 survey), far in front of MySQL and SQL Server. The 2000s conquest is thus crumbling in favour of an open-source engine, born on Unix.
One nuance remains: SQL Server is still a strong Microsoft product, and its adoption on Linux — which Microsoft calls “phenomenal” — is real, but a minority, with no reliable market count. The public samples converge: a 2021 PASS survey found 12% of organisations running SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux; at the instance level, Brent Ozar’s telemetry (SQL ConstantCare) counted, in spring 2023, only 32 out of nearly 3,000 monitored — about 1%. So it is a breach, not a collapse: a still-powerful Windows product, but one whose ground — the choice of system as well as developers’ favour — is sliding toward Linux.
Sources:
- DB-Engines — DBMS popularity ranking (SQL Server 3rd and declining, PostgreSQL 4th and rising)
- Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 — PostgreSQL, the most-used database (58% of professional developers)
- Microsoft — SQL Server on Linux (since 2017)
- Red Hat / PASS — 12% of organisations run SQL Server on RHEL (survey, 2021)
- Brent Ozar — SQL ConstantCare Population Report (spring 2023): ~1% of SQL servers on Linux
Game consoles: the breach that is closing#
This is probably the clearest breach. In 2001, with the Xbox — whose system derives from the Windows kernel — Microsoft entered a market where it did not exist: the living-room console, then built on Unix or proprietary foundations (the PlayStation line derives from FreeBSD, the Nintendo Switch from an in-house microkernel). It was a genuine conquest. Twenty years later, it is receding.
The current generation’s sales are damning. Cumulatively, the Xbox Series X|S tops out around 34 million units (VGChartz estimates, September 2025), while the PlayStation 5 approaches 80 million and the Nintendo Switch — released back in 2017 — exceeds 150 million. The gap even widens year by year: in 2025 alone, the PS5 sold 9.2 million units, against 1.7 million for the Xbox, whose hardware sales dropped 70% — to the point that, as CNBC sums up, “in console sales, Xbox can barely see the leaders.” Microsoft, moreover, no longer publishes its console sales figures, hence the reliance on estimates.
More telling than the sales: the strategic about-turn. Microsoft has given up exclusivity — it opened former in-house games to rival consoles as early as 2024 — and now publishes on PlayStation; its gaming chief, Phil Spencer, openly no longer wants to “put walls up” between players. The company is thus retreating from the hardware ground it had conquered to become, in part, a multiplatform publisher: the breach opened in 2001 is closing on its own.
A word, finally, on a received idea: Valve’s Steam Deck — a handheld console running SteamOS (Linux) — does not threaten living-room consoles. With around 4 million units sold, it remains a niche phenomenon, and its segment, the handheld PC, struggles to take off — the handheld-PC market even fell 50% in 2024, on already small volumes. It nonetheless deserves a mention for what it symbolises: on gaming ground, the alternative to Windows is no longer only the other console, it is also Linux — the Steam Deck accounts, in fact, for nearly half of gaming-handheld-PC sales. Microsoft’s answer, the ROG Xbox Ally (2025), runs, for its part, on Windows.
Sources:
