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

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#381

Post by mcv » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:13 AM UTC

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…

Out with the old, in with the new, doesn't have to be bad, but it depends on what your old and new are. I'd be a lot less skeptical about migrating OS-level sttuff from C to Rust than from C to React.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#382

Post by user34283 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:18 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.

'Randomly' here likely corresponds to a typo in the search term.

If I type "Visual Std" instead of "Visual Stu" it goes to the Bing results.

Alternatively it shows No results if you disable Bing in the Search settings found in the top right meatballs menu.

I also would expect fuzzy search by default instead of typos sending users to Bing.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#383

Post by PunchyHamster » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:18 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…

I think it's more of result of "okay we made it and it works, how we now can excuse still being employed in same head-count" development. And the answer is of course "rewrite, rewrite, rewrite". UI works well, no major bugs ? TIME TO CHANGE IT TO BE "MODERN"

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#384

Post by wiseowise » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:20 AM UTC

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.

> their own UI libraries

It doesn't help that their own UI libraries are unfinished, unpolished, hot garbage.

I commend on using React, though. Like it or hate it, React is the closest to one true framework for everything.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#385

Post by Root_Denied » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:21 AM UTC

willtemperley wrote: post #265

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.

Statistics show adoption rate is increasing. According to [1] it historically took a decade to double Linux desktop market share, but market share has almost doubled since 2022. Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux. [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year...

For a lot of those people the options are "spend a lot of money to upgrade your hardware to either run Win11 or buy a Macbook" or "use your existing hardware and ask your tech friend for a Linux distro recommendation".

When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#386

Post by layer8 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:22 AM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #353

layer8 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Fzf also works on Windows. That being said, most content search I need is for PDFs and Office documents.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#387

Post by PunchyHamster » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:22 AM UTC

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 even seen gaming YTbers I occasionally watch being fed up with that shit and moving or at least trying Linux

MS fucked up

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#388

Post by PunchyHamster » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:25 AM UTC

unsettledturtle wrote: post #223

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 think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows. That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again…

Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups.

Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things:

* informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye

* more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on just fine

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#389

Post by SllX » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:32 AM UTC

midnightclubbed wrote: post #310

Greed wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There was also the fact that Microsoft introduced it 3 months before Apple announced the product that would kill the iPod, leading with the HDD model (a direct competitor to what would become known as the iPod Classic line) when Apple’s real flagship was the iPod nano.

There was also the crap that was Windows Media Player 11 which I tried to like for about a month.

There was also the incompatibility with Microsoft’s own DRM ecosystem in PlaysForSure which was full of these subscription music services, some of which were quite popular with the kind of people that were inclined to buy a Zune: folks in Microsoft’s ecosystem that had passed up on using an iPod and used something from SanDisk, Creative, Toshiba or iRiver instead. This is because they wanted to replicate the entire iPod+iTunes model entirely.

The 2006 lineup of iPods was also particularly strong, and included the first aluminum iPod nano’s. When Microsoft announced and released the Zune, they were counter-programming against that, right into the Holiday season with a new brand that had no name ID, with a product that was just like the iPod, couldn’t play any of your music from iTunes or Rhapsody, but with… HD radio.

More than a few missteps were made.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#390

Post by normie3000 » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:32 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #355

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".

> it seems that basic stuff like wifi still doesn't always just work

This is true. I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, but still see issues with

Wifi: Ubuntu 22 didn't work out of the box with a 2014 macbook air

Bluetooth: maddening trying to set "listening" mode instead of headset mode on JBL earphones - it seems to choose randomly every time it connects, and the setting isn't exposed in any UI

Sleep: I don't think I've ever seen sleep/suspend working reliably on a Linux laptop, to the point I don't know the difference between the two. I have one thinkpad which never wakes from sleep, and also never fully shuts down on system shutdown without a long press of the power button.

I accept all this so that I don't have to wait seconds for basic UI things to happen, like switching virtual desktop (osx) and opening the application launcher (windows).