It’s finally happened. After a long reign at the top, Microsoft’s Windows XP is no longer the most widely used desktop operating system in the United States, instead turning the crown over to Windows 7.

As of April, Windows 7 has 31.71% of the desktop operating system market, compared to 31.56% for Windows XP.

Here is the current distribution of desktop operating systems in the United States, based on the first seven days of April.

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Pardon the wordplay on “dog-eat-dog world,” but as you’ll see it applies perfectly to what is going on with Windows in the desktop OS space.

Because there are several interesting things going on. Some quite expected, others not so much.

First of all, the situation now is that Windows 7 has made a real splash. It’s already passed Windows Vista and is getting closer and closer to that clunky old workhorse that refuses to die, Windows XP.

This is how the different versions of Windows were divided one year ago, versus now…

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Linux has been around for almost two decades now. It has become a resounding success as a server OS (for example as the L in the famous LAMP stack), and more recently as a mobile OS (Android). But what about on the desktop?

Linux enthusiasts have been predicting the rise of Linux as a desktop OS for the better part of a decade. To name just one of many examples, in 2003, Siemens Business Systems predicted that Linux would have captured 20% of the desktop market by 2008.

Well, it’s now 2010, and desktop Linux isn’t even close to 20%. Or one tenth of that.

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Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

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Do you have a website? Do you like knowing that it’s working ok? Pingdom exists for this very reason, to alert you when your site has downtime, so you can fix it. With this in mind we have released a new application that we call the Pingdom Desktop Notifier, which sits in your Windows system tray.

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