⚡ Operating Systems in the United Kingdom

Server operating systems are designed for computers that provide network services, such as hosting websites or storing data.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) is a Western European country with a population of over 67 million people.

According to our research, operating systems are detected on 14.4% of websites from the United Kingdom.

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the top operating systems on websites in the United Kingdom in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is Linux with a substantial share of 61.9%, followed by Windows with 37.1% and Ubuntu with 14.2%.

🚀 Highlights

Here is a list of the top systems that are more popular in the United Kingdom than worldwide.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

✨ Best Operating Systems

Below is a more detailed list of 18 operating systems used on sites from the United Kingdom, ranked by their market share.

RankNameMarket share
1
Linux
San Francisco, California, United States

A family of open-source, Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, originally created by Linus Torvalds and now maintained by a global community of contributors.

FreeOpen source
2
Windows
Redmond, Washington, United States

A family of proprietary operating systems from Microsoft used on personal computers, servers, and virtualized environments.

$1,176+
3
Ubuntu
London, United Kingdom

A free operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux, designed for use on desktops, laptops, servers, and mobile devices.

FreeOpen source$500+/year
4
Debian
New York, United States

A free and open source Linux distribution.

FreeOpen source
5
CentOS
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States

A discontinued open-source Linux distribution compatible with RHEL.

Legacy
6
Unix
San Francisco, California, United States

A family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems.
7
AlmaLinux
Estero, Florida, United States

An open-source, community owned and governed, free enterprise Linux distribution focused on long-term stability.

FreeOpen source
8
Rocky Linux
Albany, California, United States

An open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

FreeOpen source
9
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States

A commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the enterprise market.

$383.90+
10
Amazon Linux
Seattle, Washington, United States

A supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Free
11
FreeBSD
Boulder, Colorado, United States

An open source Unix-like operating system designed for reliability, performance, and advanced networking across servers, desktops, and embedded systems.

FreeOpen source
12
Fedora

A Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project.

FreeOpen source
13
Oracle Linux
Austin, Texas, United States

A Linux distribution based on RHEL source code, freely distributed by Oracle.
14
Raspbian

A free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware.

FreeOpen source
15
Gentoo
Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States

A Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system.
16
CloudLinux
Estero, Florida, United States

A commercial Linux distribution marketed to shared hosting providers.

$7+/month
17
OpenBSD
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

A security-focused open-source operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution.
18
SUSE Linux
Nuremberg, Germany

A Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE.

FreeOpen source€477.24+/year

👉 See Also

Data is based on the analysis of 157,370 websites from the United Kingdom.
Statistics were last calculated on .
For details, see our methodology and disclaimer.