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

251–260 of 658 posts

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#251

Post by adabyron »

xattt wrote: post #5

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss. I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.

They would only start to care when they see their enterprise business migrating to Linux. As long as they have large businesses buying a suite of licenses for Auth, OS & Office, they have an amazing monopoly cash cow distribution platform. They can enter new markets, offer an inferior product for free as part of their suite & crush the competition.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#252

Post by Groxx »

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…

yeah, the "it actually just works now" is quite a powerful transition. for all my hardware, that happened like 3 years ago, but I've been Mac-bound for a decade until recently so I'm only really sinking in now.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#253

Post by coffeebeqn »

lanthissa wrote: post #87
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 its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time

Simpler - it is now objectively a much better OS and it’s free

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#254

Post by fragmede »

memoriuaysj wrote: post #30
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.

what has gone horribly wrong is the native UIs. they are completely worthless, across all OSes - difficult to use, limited, and in general suck compared to HTML/CSS. I've worked with all major GUI frameworks, from MFC to Qt, they all suck compared with React/Vue

Ugh, opposite. CSS is the fucking worst way of laying out a UI. How many human lives have been lost to div class layout nonsense that a better system could handle directly.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#255

Post by fantasizr »

cryptica wrote: post #136

I love the fact that there are different Linux distros optimized for every person. I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers. I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking. IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kub…

I've loaded up omarchy and I'm really digging all the keyboard short cuts and window tiling.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#256

Post by ghaff »

MBCook wrote: post #239
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…

> Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers. I would say that’s absolutely the most normal gamer way of playing PC games. As someone who is mostly given up on playing games on a computer and prefer consoles, I’ve thought of doing the same thing. I agree it’s really impressive that lots of people have decided to try Linux, far more than I remember ever before. B…

I was never really a serious gamer and don't do it much at all any longer.

But one of my senses is that the sort of games that really benefited from a desktop system--primarily Windows--like serious simulations and resource allocation games are increasingly fringe.

Certainly there are games on Linux today but I also wonder if a lot of people won't decide, as you say, that consoles are just easier.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#257

Post by WackyFighter »

> TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.

Similarly I haven't booted up Windows in months now. Debian is super stable as a desktop OS and does everything I want at it now.

I am in this weird position where I am keeping a Windows installation around just in case I need it for something. I had a one job interview where they wanted me to use Visual Studio (C#) and it turned out they were fine with me using Rider anyway.

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#259

Post by coffeebeqn »

etempleton wrote: post #167
newsoftheday wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The terminal is going to be a non-starter for your average computer user. My wife is the average computer user and has used Linux apps for years and never opened a terminal once.

Who installed linux and did the initial setup? And then I think there is a class of user that is savvy enough to say, update their graphics drivers but not willing to use a terminal and that is before you get into the mess that is Nvidia on linux. I agree, under a managed setup scenario where a user is only really going to use a web browser and a few apps. Linux is just fine.

Installing is straightforward these days. You live boot a USB and install it from the actual OS

Re: 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

#260

Post by LeFantome »

lawgimenez wrote: post #76
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 dropped the ball with Universal Windows Platform framework, I worked on one project using this framework and it was one the best. Our codebase run on both phone and desktop Windows 8. This was 2014-ish if I remember, and then Windows phone got killed.

You would really like Uno Platform. It is the same API.

https://platform.uno/platform/

Post reply on HN