Actually surprised that Xe wasn't already a Linux user.
2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
31–40 of 658 posts
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#32My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Flatpak gives you a lot of permission controls for GUI apps and you can similarly sandbox a lot of CLI tools with toolbx or distrobox.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#33Actually surprised that Xe wasn't already a Linux user.
Have been for a while, had Windows for games, but now Fedora runs them well enough I don't have to care.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#34My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
[2] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html#sandb...
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#35“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Microsoft has a history of creating new UI frameworks. IMHO it's the result of Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers!" attitude, which I think is a good thing at core (court the developers that add value to your platform!)
But this results in chasing a new paradigm every few years to elicit new excitement from the developers. It'll always be more newsworthy to bring in a new framework than add incremental fixes to the old one.
React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?
(Tangentially, see also the mixed reaction to Mac native apps switching from AppKit to SwiftUI)
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#36See, now this is how a website *should* look: mainly text, with non-obtrusive ads at the bottom. It's really not that hard!
There's a stickied ad at the bottom that says > The AI Agent that gets your codebase Copilot & Cursor letting you down? Try Augment. Install Now
Very observant of you. The comment you replied to mentioned “non-obtrusive ads at the bottom” so they noticed that too. IMO “non-obtrusive” is a fair description, given that it doesn't seem to be doing excessive tracking (I didn't spot any extra cookies or other storage, so it is presumably logging little, if any, more than web server logs did in the 90s/00s, which is better than the stalking done by most adtech these days).
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#37“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.
For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.
I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.
Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#38I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss. I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.
I think they have moved on to other sources of revenue, so I don't think they care that much anymore.
Very much this. I bet the Xbox/games division would be up in arms about it, but they got told to spend less money and also not to bother the important people. The Windows people might care, but with how bad they've been shepherding the OS I'm not so sure.
Nadella is focused on AI and Azure. Bet he could hardly care less.
Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#39Actually surprised that Xe wasn't already a Linux user.
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Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
#40“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews” Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS. I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue
I generally agree with you, but it does entirely depend on the type of application you want to make.
If you need a lot of graphical elements and customization to get a look and feel that matches what you want, then yeah, nothing really beats html/css/js for both it's flexibility and available ecosystem.
But if what you need is an application with a button that does magic things when you push it, or a text box or table that allows for customization of the text color, then all the other types of UX frameworks work just fine. You just can't expect to do something like make a pretty chart.