[broodbucket]

The Year of the Linux Desktop is kind of happening. Not at the scale that the meme implies, but I've never seen anywhere near as much adoption of the Linux desktop as this year. The combination of Valve's efforts, more usage of Linux gaming handhelds, distributions like Bazzite that have strong selling points for Windows gamers, and Microsoft pissing everyone off with everything that is Windows 11, the Linux desktop has some legitimate momentum for once

[vitorgrs]

Especially considering how much software these days on Windows are all Electron/Web. So is not a hard switch as it once was.

I switched from Windows to Linux it's been 2 years. One of the few things I missed on Windows, was the native WhatsApp app, as the Web WhatsApp it's horrible. Then a few months Meta killed the native app and made into a webview-app :)

[LogicHound]

It only takes one application to force you back to using Windows.

e.g. HellDivers 2 didn't work well until recently on Linux. If you are playing certain factions it is a very fast paced game and I would frequently experience slow downs on Linux.

So if I wanted to play HellDivers 2, I would have to reboot into Windows. Since running kernel 6.16 and updates to proton it now runs better.

[pimeys]

And I can just take about any Linux distro, install it to about any computer and have an extremely nice device to work, play games, and handle almost any daily task with. I call that a huge success.

[microtonal]

Yet, still 1/4th of the time my ThinkPad with Linux wakes with a Thunderbolt display connected it dies with a kernel panic deep in the code that handles DDC (no matter what kernel version).

And the latest gen finger print scanner only works between 10-50% of the time depending on the day, humidity, etc., no matter hof often you re-enroll a fingerprint, enroll a fingerprint multiple times, etc.

And the battery drains in 3-4 hours. Unless you let powertop enable all USB/Bluetooth autosuspend, etc. But then you have to write your own udev rules to disable autosuspend when connected to power, because otherwise there is a large wakeup latency when you use your Bluetooth trackball again after not touching it for one or two seconds.

And if you use GNOME (yes, I know use KDE or whatever), you have to use extensions to get system tray icons back. But since the last few releases some icons randomly don't work (e.g. Dropbox) when you click on it.

And there are connectivity issues with Bluetooth headphones all the time plus no effortless switching between devices. (Any larger video/audio meeting, you can always find the Linux user, because they will need five minutes to get working audio.)

As long as desktop/laptop Linux is still death by a thousand paper cuts, Linux on the desktop is not going to happen.

[rob74]

The odds of having just about any Linux distro work "out of the box" without manual tweaking on just about any computer are still pretty low I'm afraid (by "work" I mean "support all of the functionality"). For instance, the laptop I'm writing this on connects without problems to a Bluetooth mouse, but won't for the life of me work with my Bluetooth headphones.

[pjmlp]

As long as it isn't a gamer laptop.

[pjmlp]

Not really, because Proton is Win32, kind of.

[broodbucket]

Half of the applications people use on Windows are just browsers in a native frame, at this point Win32 is just one of the many "stacks" that you can run on Linux.

[LogicHound]

It really isn't. This is a temporary sugar rush that comes after pretty much every time Microsoft does something awful. After a while the buzz will fizz out and the majority of those PC gamers that looked to switching go back to Windows.

IME a lot developers don't even use Linux on their desktop machine. I've met three developers that use Linux professional IRL. A lot of devs have a hard time even using git bash on Windows.

I am always called up by people at work because I am "the Linux guy" when they have a problem with Linux or Bash.

Sure, there are a lot of people that use Linux indirectly e.g. deploy to a Linux box, use Docker or a VM. But if someone isn't running Windows, 9 times out of 10 they are running a Mac.

More generally the thing that has paid the bills for me is always these huge proprietary tech stacks I've had to deal with. Whether it be Microsoft's old ASP.NET tech stack with SQL Server, AWS, Azure, GCP, what pays the bills is proprietary shite. I hate working with this stuff, but that what you gotta to pay the bills.

[xvfLJfx9]

I mean, this strongly has to depend on what kind of software you are developing. I don't know a single developer who primarily uses Windows. Literally everyone around me uses Linux for development work (and a large portion of them also use Linux for their personal machines).

[anonymous908213]

> This is a temporary sugar rush that comes after pretty much every time Microsoft does something awful.

I think what it fundamentally comes down to is that for consumer-oriented Linux to see widespread adoption, it needs to succeed on its own merits. Right now, and since forever, Linux exists in a space for the majority of consumers who consider it where they think "I might use it, because at least it's not the other guy". A real contender would instead make the general public think "I'll use this because it's genuinely great and a pleasure to experience in its own right". And that's why I have absolutely zero faith in Linux becoming a viable smartphone ecosystem. If it were truly viable, it would have been built out already regardless of what Android was doing. "Sheltering Android refugees" is not a sustainable path to growth any more than "sheltering Windows refugees" is.