Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

xeiaso.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 658 posts

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#561

Post by lkglglgllm »

Heavily invested in Microsoft tech, but not using windows. At all. Couldn’t be happier.

Due to word being too buggy, I switched to libre office in windows. Local outlook was also too buggy in windows, I ended up running the web version. Switched to vscode b/c VS was to buggy and slow.

Teams works better in macos. Web version of teams is ok in Linux, you don’t want to run the native app in windows, it’s a resource hog written as a web app anyway.

Dotnet and powershell (pwsh) actually works better in both macos and in Linux, than in windows. Not a little better, but much better, that ecosystem is very stable and reliable.

And azure has of course no dependency on any local windows, on the contrary, dealing with remote systems are easier in Linux, particular if you accessing remote Linux systems as well.

Then I realized there was no reason to run windows. At all. It will only drag you down when it comes to productivity, it’s an awful os, filled with malware and other shit.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#562

Post by wolvoleo »

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…

When I was a developer I was not amused at all with constantly changing APIs to be honest. And UWP was really sucky. Way too aligned with mobile and tablet which nobody actually uses on windows. Even as a user I'm glad it didn't take off.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#563

Post by gverrilla »

Been playing with linux for 20y or so. Used it to program, mostly. Now after 15 days only of having Claude Code I'm flipping my setup to delete windows and have ubuntu as my main. I've never been so happy using a computer in my entire life: in this short time I already have dozens of customizations, custom scripts, opensource stuff personal custom forks, etc. Not to mention the fixes, oh so many fixes that could have taken DAYS of work from me and got solved by cc in minutes.

I even tried vibecoding my own custom text editor to use for todo and notes management, but that didn't go quite well lmao. (if anyone curious about my journey: after that I vibe-coded a Sublime Text 4 plugin that kinda worked, then I discovered Dynalist and it's more structured experience was a big hit. When I found out with Dynalist I didn't own my data, I tried other outliners (liked none), then I spent a couple of days trying to sort out some sort of scheme to use Obsidian similarly to Dynalist, didn't look too promising and also Obsidian is not open source, so now I'm finally trying Emacs (spacemacs) for the first time in my life for org-mode. Wish me luck!)

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#564

Post by callc »

monero-xmr wrote: post #269
callc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m a big fan of staying private. I own a company that took VC many years ago but we strategically stayed private for a decade now and made peace with the VC. You just keep being honest, stacking customers, playing the long game. I see the value of being public but as a 100 to 500 person company that grows steadily, you keep it private and remove the quarterly earnings. The constant drive to hit the quarterly nut at…

That’s awesome! I want to do the same if I start a company.

Indeed quarterly earnings make people think short term, disregard long term. Focus on growth above all else

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#566

Post by kgwxd »

petabyt wrote: post #502

I've spent the past 8 years going back and forth between Linux and Windows. When I switched back to Linux last year I was shocked how well steam/proton/wine worked compared to a few years prior. Valve is truly making incredible progress.

My only hold out until this year was my gaming PC. When Windows 10 became unsupported, so did Minecraft updates. I tried Windows 11 just enough to get MC installed, only to find out I must log into the Microsoft Store to get it to run at all. The launcher installed, the desired versions downloaded and installed, click play, Store login required. Bedrock and Java editions. Just because... why not, I guess?

I decided as long as Rocket League (Steam) runs fine, I'll stick with Linux. It did, without any tweaking (other than telling it to use Proton because, technically, it has native Linux support, just not online play), and it used to require a ton of weird tweaking.

Every game I cared about in my Steam library worked too, way more than when I tried in 2020, also without any tweaking. So did MC Java edition.

The machine has a RTX 3080, which I almost didn't buy, because I've had issue with Nvidia on Linux in the past, but haven't had to do a single tweak this time.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#567

Post by ethbr1 »

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…

> dysfunctional middle-management

I thought about this a lot while working at a high-growth company recently.

Decided that regular (quarterly) manager rankings (HR-supported, anonymous) by 2-3 levels of subordinates is the only way to solve this at scale.

The central problem is: assuming a CEO accidentally promoted a bad middle manager, then how do they ever find out?

Most companies (top-down rankings-only) use project success as their primary manager performance signal.

Unfortunately, this has 3 problems: (1) project success doesn't prove a manager isn't bad, (2) above-managers only hear from managers, and (3) it incentivizes managers to hack project success metrics / definitions.

Adding a servant/leader skip-level metric is a critical piece of information on "On, this person is toxic and everyone thinks poorly of them, despite the fact that they say everyone loves them."

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#568

Post by kgwxd »

aprilnya wrote: post #185
kakadu wrote: post #178

I ve been a happy user of debian stable for 15 years now, if I could get a Linux laptop with a comparable battery life to apple's then it's done for me. I think linux people tend to forget how important battery life is on a laptop

Would be great... what I've heard is, Apple's incredible battery life comes from the vertical integration - they make everything, the laptop, the OS... so they are able to optimize it incredibly well. Even running Linux on a Apple Silicon Mac doesn't get you the same kind of battery life because of how much work the OS does putting different components to sleep etc. (though one could argue Apple's arbitrarily making…

How's battery life if you run Linux in a VM on Mac OS?

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#569

Post by nightski »

andrekandre wrote: post #518
midnightclubbed wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown i think the other big issue was calling it a 'zune' but thats just me...

Name or color had nothing to do with it imho (I like the brown personally). It was all timing. They were entering a market with a well estaablished leader (iPod) that was nearly as good, as good, or better depending on who you ask. On top of it phones themselves were taking over the music player market at the same time, which is where Microsoft really dropped the ball.

I mean, iPhone is a really ridiculous name as well if you stop to think about it.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#570

Post by nightski »

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…

Blaming this on Ballmer is a serious stretch, I can't see how you would come to that conclusion. Developers Developers Developers was for the launch of .NET and it brought us a platform that is still considered cutting edge 25 years later.

UX was fine in the Windows Forms days, and WPF was a large step forward (responsive layouts, etc...). The problem was after that it all fell apart with Windows 8 and the attempt to switch to Metro, followed by the Windows Store fiasco and attempting to move to a sandboxed application model.

It all comes down to Microsoft's failure to adapt to mobile/tablets in so many ways. Which is kind of hilarious, because they had some really cool tech for the time (the PocketPCs were pretty fun back in the day, before touch came along).

Post reply on HN