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

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#351

Post by bytefish » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:25 AM UTC

adithyassekhar wrote: post #334

bytefish wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Either I am stupid or you're being dishonest. There is no one click way to disable it. Only on pro versions of windows, with a group policy otherwise a couple of obscure registry keys no regular users know.

I stand corrected. I didn’t know the Home Version has no option to disable it. You are right for calling me out.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#352

Post by henrebotha » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

thunderbong wrote: post #222

For the last few days I was trying to revive an old MacBook Air for a non-techie friend. It had 4 GB of RAM. It had Catalina on it and was completely unusable. Hovering on anything would bring up the spinner which would take a couple of minutes to resolve itself. I tried reinstalling the OS, which didn't help. The top recommendation was to revert to Mojave. Finally, after three days of struggle, I gave up and install…

Yeah I've been running EndeavourOS on my 2015 Air (4 GB) and it is so incredibly snappy and efficient now. Makes macOS look like a lurching zombie of an OS.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#353

Post by bluecalm » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:28 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #206

seemaze wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/

While Everything is good on Linux you are spoiled with things like fzf or rgfzf (instant fuzzy search on text file content so you can find "TODO" or "ideas to try" in any file instantly).

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#354

Post by ojr » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

Windows still have the gamers. A lot of anti-cheat system completely block out Linux users. The Year of the Linux Desktop will still be a meme at the end of this year as well.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#355

Post by dash2 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:38 AM UTC

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…

I left desktop Linux in 2010 because everything did not just work. Looking at the responses to your comment, it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work. If it's been true since 2010, I think the problem is systematic, and won't go away with "just one more year".

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#356

Post by bluecalm » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

ergonaught wrote: post #282

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…

And on laptops you may need to write a script to disable Bluetooth before the lid closes and re-enable it when the lid opens because Microsoft in its wisdom forced S0 sleep but didn't care to make it stable enough so a drivers can't crash your system during it.

Additionally there is no reliable mechanism to do so as doing it through Task Scheduler causes a race condition - will your script be allowed to run and finish before S0 sleep cuts power to it? You can not be sure.

Additionally if you got cornered into making an online account Task Scheduler doesn't even work with that reliably (for task that require privileges like turning off BT on lock and turning it on on unlock) so then you have disable the online account Microsoft manipulated you to make. Of course the failure is silent so you have to discover all that by yourself.

That is a a driver but Windows can also crash during S0 sleep because of its own updater failing to update some random app (like Microsoft Phone w/e that is).

On Linux it's just not an issue. The script runs on events and is guaranteed to finish. Random updates at random times won't happen either.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#357

Post by user34283 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #79

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…

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform? Because web stuff utterly sucks for making UIs on the desktop. Microsoft either doesn't know this (bad sign), or is choosing to use the trendy thing even though it'll make their software worse for customers (a worse sign). Either way it's a very bad look from MS.

No, it does not suck.

I attempted to use WinUI 3, and could not even get PNGs to render the colors correctly, no matter what setting I tried.

Then I gave Tauri a try, and everything worked out of the box, with the PNGs rendering even better than in the Windows Photos app.

Building the UI was much easier, it looked better, and you get to build the "backend" in Rust.

Nothing about this sucked.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#358

Post by bluecalm » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:48 AM UTC

newsoftheday wrote: post #151

grugagag wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.5 hours of battery is a serious gaping hole imo.

I removed the batteries in our laptops because we use them like desktops all the time and it's one less fire hazard to worry about.

Even if you are plugged all the time you may want batteries as it prevents crashes when power is cut off or the cable randomly disconnects (especially with USB-C that can easily happen as it's designed to disconnect easily). It's not that file system of today are immune to stability issues when power randomly cuts off not to mention losing your work/state. Batteries are like UPS for a desktop computer.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#359

Post by ivanjermakov » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

ojr wrote: post #354

Windows still have the gamers. A lot of anti-cheat system completely block out Linux users. The Year of the Linux Desktop will still be a meme at the end of this year as well.

Except ProtonDB website reports that completely blocked games make up 3% of the top 1000 Steam games.

Meanwhile, 84% is perfectly playable (some with minor tweaks).

https://www.protondb.com/

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#360

Post by tvbusy » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 9:51 AM UTC

mbirth wrote: post #218

Barrin92 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet the Telegram Desktop App, written in Qt/C++ is the only goddamn desktop messenger app that actually feels smooth and feature rich rather than the webclient wrapper abominations of everyone else that eat half a gig of ram on startup and randomly hang on searches

I’ve recently downgraded my 10 year old used-only-for-obscure-firmware-updaters laptop to Windows 7 and enabled the “Classic” design. The snappiness of that GUI is unmatched even with Win 10/11 on much better hardware. Makes you wonder about the rest of Windows when Microsoft can’t even optimise the most basic things in modern Windows anymore.

Same here. I developed desktop applications for 15+ years and was really frustrated with Microsoft's direction for the UI around the time of Windows Phone. While Windows Forms may not be the best, it worked for decades until then. Now even if someone wants to build a desktop application using native UI, it's next to no resource at all because it's all about cross platform nowadays.