Most-Used OS in the World?

Andrew Tanenbaum, creator of the MINIX operating system, in an open letter to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich:

Thanks for putting a version of MINIX 3 inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world. I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn’t even know until I read a press report about it. Also here and here and here and here and here (in Dutch), and a bunch of other places.

It’s an interesting development, having a full-blown operating system running inside a CPU. And it’s a nice feather in the cap for MINIX, which heretofore had best been known as a teaching OS for computer science students. But it can’t be the most-used OS in the world. Android is. (Or, if you only want to count the kernel-level operating system, Linux, which runs at the heart of Android.)

MINIX is now almost certainly the most widely-used OS on Intel-based computers, but Intel-based computers are now far outnumbered by ARM-based ones.

★ Thursday, 9 November 2017