Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

xeiaso.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 658 posts

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#201

Post by blibble »

al_borland wrote: post #198
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fix…

I think the reason they keep trying new UI frameworks is that no one really adopts them. Developers know that Microsoft won’t kill off backward compatibility and break all the enterprise apps, so why rewrite? When one framework fails, they start working on the next one. I question if they understand the corner they’ve painted themselves into.

I stopped writing Windows applications back in the early 00s

my Windows API knowledge (essentially: just Win32) is still exactly as useful as it was then, having missed the 7 or 8 different UI frameworks in the interim

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#202

Post by seemaze »

TACIXAT wrote: post #21

I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on. It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL a…

>It was faster to rg to search files

This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins..

Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#204

Post by moltopoco »

kakadu wrote: post #178

I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me. I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop

Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#205

Post by layer8 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #95
roxolotl wrote: post #4

“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.

It takes over five seconds for task manager to open on my Windows 11 work laptop.

What’s worse, the list of tasks/apps in Task Manager for some reason populates gradually over a couple of seconds, so when you right-click on some task to perform an action, it might switch to a different task under the mouse cursor while you’re clicking because it’s still populating.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#206

Post by layer8 »

seemaze wrote: post #202
TACIXAT wrote: post #21

I strongly agree on this. I mained Windows for the last few years and got to the point where I was comfortable doing development similarly to how I would on Linux (text editor and command line build tools, cl, ml64, batch, etc.). I did that mostly so I could game and develop on the same machine. I learned a ton doing it but it has just gotten too awful to carry on. It was faster to rg to search files, drop into WSL a…

>It was faster to rg to search files This continuously drives me crazy on Windows and macOS. I am befuddled at the number of times where I'm searching for a top level subdirectory that starts with 'foo' but the search bar spins and spins.. Eventually I get fed up and just sort by name and perform an alphabetical visual search in meat-space.

On Windows, just use Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#207

Post by monero-xmr »

cogman10 wrote: post #57
sylens wrote: post #14

If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.

I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?" I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux. It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a…

Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.

It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.

Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.

It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#208

Post by asveikau »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #51
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fix…

The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.

They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.

That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#210

Post by loumf »

I recently switched to Linux for all development. I still use my Mac for everything else.

The main reason was to protect my personal data from possible supply chain issues or LLM agent mishaps.

I’m 99% in VSCode, a browser, and a terminal. There’s hardly a difference day-to-day.

Post reply on HN