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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

#471

Post by partomniscient »

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…

Remember when Silverlight was _the_ future?

How long did it last. Ironically it still gives me the shits because you can't select text on Netflix's front end.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#472

Post by basisword »

There is something massive missing from Linux that for me has made it even less likely that I would use it full-time (I've tinkered with it in my youth): personal data. I have so much personal, important data generated regularly thanks to smartphones. Photos, videos, voice memos, notes, computer files I want to access anywhere, health data etc. etc. iOS/Mac has made this seamless, secure, and in 15-20 years it has not gone wrong for me. Sure there are horror stories posted from time to time but for 99.9% of people it works really well almost all of the time. Replicating this with Linux systems is difficult, requires lots of setup and maintenance, and incurs significant risk for me in terms of data loss.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#473

Post by basisword »

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…

>> what really blew me away is that everything... just worked

It has improved greatly over the years. When I was using it relatively regularly in the mid-00's it still took a lot of effort to get everything to work.

But long-time users being amazed that buying a brand new linux laptop in 2026 'just works' says a lot about how far behind it is/was. PC's that 'just work' have been available for 40 years. That should be the starting point for any shipping product.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#474

Post by rd07 »

Funny that at the last minute of 2025 (at least in my country), I wrote a blog post titled "2025 is the Year of Linux Desktop, at least for me".

It is just a short post to note about how in 2025 some of my friends are finally migrating to Linux. And that was something awesome for me.

https://blog.juliardi.com/2025-is-the-year-of-linux-desktop-...

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#475

Post by jillesvangurp »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #359
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/

My guess is that this is going to shift rapidly for new games. Once the Steam PC launches, most new games will probably run fine on it. There's no logical reason for game studios to throw way significant market share over weird legacy crap related to "anti cheat". I expect the already significant amount of Linux using Steam users will grow to the point where game studios can no longer ignore it in terms of revenue and angry users and will actively test and ensure their games work flawlessly.

Of course one point here is that MS owns some of the more problematic game studios. Anti cheat here might be less about users cheating and more about them using this as a control point to ensure gamers keep on preferring Windows. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't think MS has much of a moat left for gaming. And it will be tempting for them as well to tap into the few percent of Linux using Steam users for selling them games. They've long stopped insisting on windows for things like Office or SQL Server as well. The whole of Azure is pretty much Linux based at this point. So, they might dig in for a bit but they'll be under growing pressure to give in.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#476

Post by neogodless »

I believe this was Dec. 2023 through Feb. 2024 (I should add dates to my little "blog"...):

https://www.retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm

If I remember, Linux Mint was on kernel 5.15 at the time.

The TL;DR is that fractional scaling was broken under Cinnamon, and Brightness controls were broken under KDE.

Most gaming was good, but a brand new game (Hogwart's Legacy) had major issues, including crashing and vastly worse performance compared to Windows. Another game wouldn't work with multiplayer (Anno 1800) which meant I couldn't play it with my spouse.

So I'm tempted to go back, give Linux 6.8 or 6.11 a try, and see if those issues are fixed. (I sold that laptop to a family member, so I'd probably try it on a newer Legion 5 Pro, but still with Nvidia graphics.)

For my primary machine though... what I would miss most is DxO PhotoLab. I love my Fujifilm XT-5 and mirrorless photography, and I love editing with DxO. I tried Lightroom, darktable, and a few other pieces of software, but I kept going back to PhotoLab. It's not objective - it's very subjective but I get the most joy out of using PhotoLab for editing.

I really hope (like throw a wish in a bottle) that companies like DxO consider supporting Linux[0] but I doubt it's even on their radar. Software like this uses hardware in demanding ways, and it isn't trivial to support it.

Now, this is one person's anecdote, but I do think it's a factor in overall mainstream acceptance. For Linux users, after years or decades of use, they've embraced the software available to them, but for Windows / macOS users, they will often have to consider what compromises they'll have to make. (I know Adobe is thrown around a lot, and it's a fine example, but I don't like Adobe's subscription model... I still gave it a fair shake but enjoyed PhotoLab much more!) But I think my point will still be that there's a chicken-and-egg scenario, and it's taking a very long time to get Linux to the kind of market share it needs to start forcing the hands of the thousands of companies that don't currently support Linux.

[0] https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406558299537-Syst...

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#477

Post by einr »

prhn wrote: post #113

I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me. I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.

Music production is indeed still a blocker. I used to use Windows for that; I am now on macOS for work and music (much better than Windows in every way! I use an old trashcan Mac Pro with Monterey for my studio computer) and Debian for my personal machines.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#478

Post by RandomDistort »

trueismywork wrote: post #77
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.

Long time ago, I read a blog about how the user must absolutely trust the dialog boxes for Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Adminstrator passwords and why they were tricky to get right.. Then I hear that now ctrl alt delete is a webview. Its difficult to believe. Do you have a reference?

On the new Windows 365 Link thin client I think it is, not sure about normal builds of Windows though?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAKg-Z6m8nM - 6:50

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#479

Post by cjbgkagh »

markus_zhang wrote: post #458
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…

Is compensation really the issue? Like, people earning 160k simply can’t take a dive into the OS source code and make proper fixes, but people earning 250k magically can? I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who want to work on the OS source code, given the chance, but need some hand holding in the beginning. Companies in general are not willing to give them the chance, because they don't want to hand hold…

I think uncompetitive compensation is the dominant factor in Microsoft’s decline. Up there with stack ranking. They claim that it’s 30% cheaper to live there but then they go and capture most of that 30% for themselves.

It is my opinion that developer ability is on a Pareto distribution, like the 80 20 rule when 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. The job market is more liquid for those that are extremely productive so it’s pretty easy to for them to get a pay rise of 30% by switching companies. In the worst case you can often come back with a promotion because, like many companies, Microsoft is more likely to promote you when trying to poach you back. Doing a 2 year stint at Amazon was quite common. The other problem is that when your best people leave is that the process is iterative, not only are you getting paid less but you are now working with people who couldn’t easily switch jobs. You start being surrounded by incompetence. Stack ranking, which I hear is still being done unofficially, also means that you put your promotion and career in danger by joining a highly productive team. So it is rather difficult to get highly productive people to work on the same team.

Being paid less, being surrounded by incompetence, and being forced to engage in constant high stakes politicking really sucks.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#480

Post by pjmlp »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #435
trinix912 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a thin book describing changes to the API in Vista and 7 compared to XP and it was really thin. Just a few extra APIs to be able to show controls in the taskbar preview and things like that. Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.

>Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it. I've heard a Microsoft executive talk about win32 as legacy that they want to replace. I don't think that's realistic though, it's probably the last piece of technology keeping people on the platform.

It was the goal with UAP and UWP, but they clearly messed up the execution.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/win32-and-com/win32-an...

Win32, the C API, is stagnant since Windows XP, other than some ...Ex and ...ExN kind of additions.

As mentioned above, the new APIs are mostly delivered as COM, occasionally with some .NET bindings.

There is still a silo trying to push WinRT now on Win32 side, although given how they made a mess of the developer experience only those with Microsoft salaries care about it.

This oldie shows some of the background,

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

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