2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#281

Post by throwaway894345 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:03 AM UTC

ivanb wrote: post #279

It will be mine as well but only because consumer agentic AI became available and good. Only it makes all quirks and hardware incompatibilities bearable. I tell it to investigate the problem and it does an incredible amount of digging to help find the cause and eventually, after several iteration, either fix it or implement a good enough crutch. Even then it takes minutes to hours and I would take months.

How does this work? Do you give the AI read permissions on your system, or is it just running arbitrary commands?In the latter case, is it prompting you before each?

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#282

Post by ergonaught » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:15 AM UTC

On my Windows machines, every time I have to click my Bluetooth icon, which is about a dozen times every day, the full second pause before it presents me with a menu makes me wish I didn't need Windows on two of my systems. It's mindbogglingly stupid that a UI element has a one second delay to present a menu on...any hardware, much less "2025" hardware.

But that's the kind of product they're shipping, because that's the kind of people they're employing, and that's the kind of decisions they're allowed to make. It permeates everything.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#283

Post by amanzi » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:17 AM UTC

0000000000100 wrote: post #270

the_hoser wrote: post #236

For those of us that have been using Linux for a long time (since 1999, here), the improvements have been incremental, and hard to spot over time. But sometimes I encounter something and it just blows my mind how good desktop Linux has become. I just bought a laptop that came with Fedora installed. This isn't anything new, but what really blew me away is that everything... just worked. No tinkering. No alternative mo…

To temper expectations a bit, I’ve installed Linux recently on my HP Omen to pretty decent results. Still having some lingering issues, e.g the WiFi adapter going dead after a sleep. But have found the experience relatively similar to my recent windows installs. For a laptop user who likes to game, you’ll definitely encounter some issues based on my experience. Better than it was 2 years ago, but it’s not a seamless…

See this for something that might help your Wi-Fi issue. https://gist.github.com/gornostal/192e2ae29af3da1baeea384d0f...

I had the same problem on my new Yoga laptop with Fedora and an Intel BE200 Wi-Fi card.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#284

Post by bytefish » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:19 AM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #84

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.

Typing "Visual Studio" into the new start menu may randomly trigger a Bing search for "Visual Studio" instead of running it, but on the other hand that makes Bings KPIs go up so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.

It takes literally a click to deactivate it though. One could argue about Bing Search being the default, but I didn’t run the user surveys to see, which is best for the average user.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#285

Post by tuetuopay » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

darubedarob wrote: post #107

Saw a fascinating talk on gui and ui development today, lamenting the stagnation at M$ and apple when it comes to desktop computing (including browsing). " there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.

Can you ring the same bell at the GTK and GNOME folks? The GTK4 thing with hamburger menus that replace everything is just a mess. I stumbled on nemo the other day while looking for nautilus. That… was a breath of fresh air: compact UI, menus, features, etc.

It’s painful seeing FOSS making some of the same mistakes as corporations

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#286

Post by bradley13 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:23 AM UTC

Welcome to the club. After years of dual-booting, I deleted my Windows partition a few years ago.

And it's not just techies. My non-technical brother-in-law asked me to install Linux for him last fall. I installed Xubuntu, showed him how everything worked, and haven't had a single "support call" since.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#287

Post by RajT88 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #35

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.

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 software biz in general has a major "out with the old, in with the new" attitude, which paired with the attitude of, "We're going to build what we know, instead of learning the old stuff which is new to us".

I've seen time and again, things like apps rewritten from scratch because nobody knew C++, and they only had C# devs. Or a massive runaround because the last guy on the team who knew C++ wrote a bunch of stuff and left a couple years back, and now nobody really knew how any of that stuff worked.

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?

IMO - this is worth talking about. Zune, Windows Phone, and some others died when they did not, in fact, suck, and were pretty good products which while late to the game, could have competed if there had just been a decent app ecosystem.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#288

Post by bradley13 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

hifikuno wrote: post #209

Maybe someone here knows a solution. The ONLY thing keeping me on windows is that my employer uses F5/Big IP edge clients. I cannot find a Linux client that can also handle Web SSO. Does anyone have any Linux experience with this?

I'm no expert here, but my employer uses no less that three different SSO services (don't ask).., and all of them work under Linux.

Web-based really ought to work. Maybe your admins are being weird, and checking the user agent? Try using a plug-in to change your user-agent to Windows

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#289

Post by bradley13 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:34 AM UTC

cjk wrote: post #22

Yeah. I feel the same way. If not for the fact that my gaming PC pulls double duty as a work PC, I'd seriously consider ditching Windows 11 for Bazzite. I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Li…

All of my Steam games work under Linux. For one or two, I gave to select a specific Proton version, but that's the only issue.

Try dual-booting, and see if your games work...

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#290

Post by zipy124 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 6:35 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #268

asveikau wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production. Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy…

You also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.