who uses the linux operating system compared to others?

[nameless132]

If you know a site or know the percentages of the world in which the population operating system they use, would be greatly appreciated.

[Craig McPherson]

This is pretty much an impossible thing to measure. One way to get a semi-accurate estimate is to look at the web traffic of major websites. This is biased in a number of ways: users of different OS's will be more and less likely to visit different sites, some OS's are typically used on servers and hence no web browsing is usually done from them, and with some OS's, people frequently mask their web browser user agent so they appear to be running Windows. Major site traffic statistics put Linux and all other UNIXes combined at less than 2% of web surfers, often with around ~3% for Macintosh and 95% Windows.

Voluntary "what OS do you use" surveys are another option, but they're biased in the opposite direction: users of less-common OS's are going to be far more likely to take the time to answer a "what OS do you use" survey than Windows users. On Linux-leaning sites like Slashdot, you may get 30%+ answering that they run some UNIX OS, while on more OS-neutral sites, it may be closer to 10%.

The truth lies somewhere between the extremes, most likely. If I had to make an educated guess on the number of non-server systems only, I'd put UNIX at 5%, Macintosh at 4%, and Windows at 90%.