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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

#311

Post by 0000000000100 »

amanzi wrote: post #283
0000000000100 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, will give that whirl. Appreciate the info

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#312

Post by jraph »

seemaze wrote: post #294
grugagag wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.5 hours of battery is a serious gaping hole imo.

Year of the Linux desktop perhaps; Year of the Linux laptop perhaps not..

2.5h of battery life is absolutely not typical though. Linux on laptops is often fine.

Picking hardware with good support helps a lot. I would expect system76 to be a safe bet though (but I haven't tried their hardware).

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#313

Post by solumunus »

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.

It feels that way. I’m just one person but I’ve tried Linux several times over the decades and never stuck with it, for various reasons. Last year I got so fed up of Windows and tried Ubuntu. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Ubuntu has been good out of the box, but another difference to when I last tried Linux is the invention of LLM’s. Any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved through troubleshooting with Claude/Perplexity, and I’ve used both to quickly learn the things I need. There were occasions last time where I spent literal days trying to fix things through searching and that was intolerable.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#314

Post by iamcalledrob »

Same.

After decades of macOS, and a bit of Windows, I tried Linux again recently and it was... good? For the first time in 20+ years, I ran into no big issues and no need to switch back.

The new UI stuff happening in Gnome-land, while controversial, has started to make the desktop feel modern and cohesive.

After years of Windows Explorer, clicking around in ~~Nautilus~~Files felt so snappy. The built-in Gnome document viewer is fantastic.

Gnome is starting to show glimmers of being the natural evolution of the Mac desktop, not a poor imitation -- which is very exciting.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#315

Post by theturtletalks »

callc wrote: post #232
monero-xmr wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It’s literally the ads and bloatware I hope more companies and MBAs open their eyes to this: that the long term cost of user-hostile changes is negative compared to respecting users and building good products. Also currently it helps to stand out from the sea of crap products. Play the long game. Make good products. Bring joy and positive experience to peoples lives. Sleep well at night.

It won’t help, because once those MBAs take VC money, the incentives push the product toward enshittification sooner or later.

What we’re seeing instead is open-source becoming the real alternative. People used to look for other proprietary tools, but now open-source options are getting good enough, and more people are building personal software that fits their needs instead of bloated do-everything apps.

That’s the shift. Open-source is rising, and I don’t think these companies can reverse course fast enough.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#316

Post by eviks »

> I think that Linux on the desktop is ready for the masses now, not because it's advanced in a huge leap/bound.

Yeah, right, these types of shallow pieces about Linux "for the masses" have the same structure without addressing the obvious issues:

- Windows has the following 3 components that became worse.

Well, they were bad 10 years ago (the ones that existed), so you could've spent a few hours per component to replace it (Start menu), disable it (Copilot), or find a workaround (invoke process manager with a shortcut without going through the webview in ctrl-alt-del or maybe there is some non-web app the presents the same menu of a few items) or even just ingore it (what are the serious practical issues with using dumb webviews for a tiny menu?)

But the alternative would require you spending many days learning the whole new OS where many things you're used to would simply not exist.

Want to find any file anywhere instantly (including newly created)? No, impossible, there is only NTFS Everything app that does it.

Got tired of the File Explorer garbage and got used to the greatness of Opus? Well, good luck, there is not a single great file manager over there

Want to relax and play X, Y, Z games? Oops, only A, B, C have good support, will take another decade to fix that (but at least someone is working on that)

Want to use your favorite Productivity/VideoShop app? No one is even working on that, so another decade would not fix that.

So how is it reasonable (for the masses, not you!) to replace a few fixable annoyances with a bigger list of the same and an even bigger list of unfixable stuff?

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#317

Post by sandreas »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #302
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…

Absolutely - I know that but thanks for pointing that out again. There is no real "use case" for NOT storing the key into a root owned file. However, as I don't do it for myself there is no way of accidentally deleting the file, copying it quickly from my system to another drive when I accidentally left a root shell open and went to the restrooms (that never happens;) and the one single place I store the key (my head) is pretty much unreadable for everyone except me (at least for now :-) Being paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you :p

Since I reboot my notebook only about once in a month it is no real hassle to enter the key twice 12 times a year :-)

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#318

Post by bluecalm »

layer8 wrote: post #205
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me at least "details" tab populates in one step (there is a slight delay and then all processes appear). You can set it as the default tab as it's the most useful anyway.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#319

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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