AI-generated editorial illustration; not a documentary photograph.
Windows received 12.8% of roughly 4,000 responses in a developer operating-system poll conducted by Gergely Orosz, while macOS took 61.6% and Linux 24.2%. A separate LinkedIn poll with 6,000 votes produced a similar result: 66% for macOS, 20% for Linux and 12% for Windows. The results suggest Windows remains less popular among the startup and Big Tech developers represented in Orosz’s audience, despite Microsoft’s sustained effort to improve it as a development environment.
A preference poll, not market share
The figures should not be treated as a measurement of all developers or installed operating systems. The X poll required a single choice, while the supplied source does not specify the response format of the LinkedIn poll. Both polls came from Orosz’s audience, which he characterized as a bubble weighted toward startup and Big Tech engineers. By contrast, the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, with tens of thousands of respondents and multiple selections allowed, placed Windows at roughly 49.5% among professional developers, compared with 32.9% for macOS.
Statcounter page-view data also does not directly measure developer machines or people. The source notes that its separate treatment of OS X and macOS can further distort comparisons, while traffic from automated systems can inflate apparent Linux usage in some datasets.
Why Unix-like systems remain attractive
macOS combines a Unix-based command-line environment with Apple’s desktop hardware and is required for development using Xcode, Apple’s SDKs and its device simulators. Linux is a closer match for many server, container, cloud and AI workloads. The source also notes that Microsoft warns of I/O overhead when projects are stored on the Windows filesystem while Linux build tools run through WSL.
Microsoft’s developer response
Microsoft has expanded WSL with faster file access, improved networking and easier setup. Its built-in WSL Containers tooling is intended to build and run Linux containers without third-party tools such as Docker Desktop. At Build 2026, Microsoft also presented Linux-like Coreutils for Windows and Windows Developer Configurations, which can configure tools including VS Code, GitHub Copilot, WSL and PowerShell 7 with one command.
The remaining challenge
Windows still offers Visual Studio, cross-platform .NET support, enterprise reach and a large PC gaming ecosystem. Microsoft is also positioning Project Zenith, announced September 4, 2026, around local coding models, with at least 64GB of unified memory and 250GB/s of bandwidth. Those efforts address capability, but the polling indicates that many developers are choosing an environment that feels natively Unix-like rather than one that provides Linux compatibility inside Windows.
Source: Microsoft keeps rebuilding Windows for developers, but a new poll puts Windows at just 12%
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