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2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

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Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#301

Post by [deleted] »

sho_hn wrote: post #59
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.

KDE's income from individual donations has doubled recently, and many of the comments we get with donations are from recent Windows switchers. As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.

[deleted]

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#302

Post by E39M5S62 »

sandreas wrote: post #274

Long time Linux Desktop user here. I really think Linux is a great choice as a Desktop in days of liquid glass and webviews. There are a lot of choices to make, but in the end it is working out really well (at least for me). KDE and the new COSMIC desktop environment with tiling support are tempting, but for now I keep using GNOME until I have more time to check them out. The things I personally had problems with is…

Quick note on #2 - there aren't really any issues with storing your encryption root passphrase in a file. If the file is owned by root, with no read permissions for any account, only root can access it. Since it's stored on an encrypted dataset, and your initramfs is as well, it's unreadable when the machine is off. Lastly, if anybody _does_ have a root shell on your machine, they can change the encryption passphrase without needing to know the current value.

In short, I'm not sure there are any real issues with having it on disk but unreadable by anybody but root.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#303

Post by Greed »

RajT88 wrote: post #287
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 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 stuf…

I maintain to this day that the Zune was one of the best designed hardware and software platforms I've ever used. Probably the only truly design forward product that MS ever produced.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#304

Post by stevekemp »

blibble wrote: post #201
al_borland wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Me too, back then I wrote applications either using the raw Win32 API (GetMessage, TranslateMessage, DispatchMessage, etc), or using MFC.

I think MFC is now long-time dead and buried, but at the time I liked it despite the ugly macros.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#305

Post by asveikau »

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…

Back when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper.

I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years.

But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#306

Post by spuz »

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 honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#307

Post by asveikau »

zipy124 wrote: post #290
nextos wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was a unix head at the time and ran OpenBSD on my personal Thinkpad. I figured a stint on the Windows team would broaden my horizons and expose me to differences. It did that. I don't regret it. I did in the end feel that the company was not my vibe, but I respect and appreciate some of what came out of there.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#308

Post by solumunus »

bytefish wrote: post #284
jsheard wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best is none. I have no idea why anyone would want a web search there.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#309

Post by solumunus »

justinhj wrote: post #47
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.

How the start menu is programmed is of zero consequence to me.

Performance isn’t a consequence?

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#310

Post by midnightclubbed »

Greed wrote: post #303
RajT88 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stuf…

I maintain to this day that the Zune was one of the best designed hardware and software platforms I've ever used. Probably the only truly design forward product that MS ever produced.

The Zune hardware was slick, particularly the solid state players. The music store worked great and their music licensing was so much better than Apple - $10 a month for unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads (rentals) to Zune devices and 10 free mo3 downloads to own.

Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown! That and being too late to market with a phone that used the same design language

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