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Is 2021 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Darmody 5y ago
Doesn't load on Firefox on Android. The year of the Linux desktop was 2016, when Ubuntu 16.04 was released. It went downhill ever since.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
  Did Proton exist in 2016?
  - Darmody 5y ago
    I can play more games now but my overall experience is worse. I am not happy with the desktop environments we have now. I have to use a custom Gnome Shell to make my experience acceptable.
    - BrightGlow 5y ago
      I used to feel that way but now I'm less picky and am comfortable using the stock version of any desktop environment, as long as it's stable and supports basic functions. There comes a point when you'll realize you're swimming against the tide for very little gain, and it's easier to just learn to be flexible.
      - Darmody 5y ago
        I'm not picky, st least I don't think so. I just want the DE not to get in my way. Unwanted popups, slow and "fancy" effects that makes your workflow slower, weird default behavior (like alt-tab with gnome), multiple clicks to do what you used to do with 1, etc. I don't think that's being picky, it's just wanting something that works and doesn't infuriate you with every new update.
        BrightGlow 5y ago
        I know the feeling of the DE getting in the way, part of resolving that for me was just learning to work with the DE rather than working against it and resisting changes. If an old workflow is slowed with a new update, it might be time to adjust that workflow and look at it in a different way.
sneak 5y ago
I think "Linux Desktop" means something other than "a computer running the Linux kernel that runs desktop applications". ChromeOS is as much a Linux computer as is a Tesla automobile. Sure, there's a linux kernel down in there somewhere, but it's not the thing we mean when we say "Linux Desktop".
- Darmody 5y ago
  Linux Desktop means Linux being a good Windows alternative on your computer.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Interesting sidenote: both ChromeOS devices and iOS devices (and, to some extent, macs), as well as all consoles, are sold as single bundled hardware+software integrated products. There's very little computing done where the hardware is not designed with the software in mind and vice versa. The days of "software x running on hardware platform y" might be behind us for the majority of the planet's population.
    - quantumsolace 5y ago
      Already is. There must be more smartphones and tablet users than personal computer users in the world. Simply because a person who use a PC but doesn't have a smartphone (hyper nerds like Stallman, or ppl who have very particular jobs that give them the freedom not to have a smartphone) are outnumbered by those who have a tablet or smartphone but not a PC (my 94 year old grandma)
      - sneak 5y ago
        The majority of smartphones, I believe, can have other software loaded on to them, if the user so desires.
        Darmody 5y ago
        Yes, but most of the time you're bound to proprietary blobs or some things won't work.
everdrive 5y ago
If Linux ever really gained mainstream appeal (say 40-60% adoption) it would be ruined by many of the pressures which ruined most mainstream operating systems. I think we’re far better off with Linux at 1% or so.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > it would be ruined by many of the pressures which ruined most mainstream operating systems I think Linux is different than other operating systems because if something goes mainstream that you don't like you have tons of viable options. With each component of the OS being tweakable you can choose opinions that others have made or forge your own path. For example if you don't like whatever the latest window manager is you can pretty easily replace it with i3, bspwm or any other window manager that you prefer. Want a different desktop environment? Great, there's plenty of them. Prefer the ethos or core values of one distro over another? Sounds good, I'm sure you'll find something you like.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    This same quality may be part of why it has never gained significant traction though, the proliferation of components and resulting fragmentation have made it a difficult target for application developers. Oh, sure, FOSS applications work fine... because they're open source and rely on unpaid third parties to integrate them into whatever absurdly interdependent ecosystem (a.k.a "distro") you happen to be using. Well, for some definitions of "fine", since they're often out of date, sometimes altered, or otherwise not packaged at all. It also makes troubleshooting a lot more difficult, since any efforts to find solutions will invariably land me in posts primarily about some other combination of components and it's up to me to sort out their relevance to my issue.
    - tapia 5y ago
      I think that's why we have flatpack now.
      - 5y ago
quantumsolace 5y ago
This "year of the Linux Desktop" joke is getting a bit tiresome. What is missing exactly? Sure the desktop is a bit ugly. But pretty much everything works out of the box. If MS released a native Office for Linux I could get rid of my Mac.
- pjerem 5y ago
  tbh, the last decades have been « year of Linux on my desktop ». Linux is already totally ok for a vast majority of usages (and even gaming is less and less an issue). At the end of the day, who even cares of Linux market share on the desktop ? Because this hides an insidious and bigger issue : PCs, even if it’s a 1% market share os, HAVE alternatives OS. Other modern platforms don’t. I’d rather prefer « xxxx is the year of the 1% Linux on phones » than any evolution on the desktop which would have pretty much no impact on a Linux user day to day usage.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Have you tried running Office over Wine? Have you tried LibreOffice? Admittedly, I don't have to share complicated MS Office documents with other people, but I do like using LO. [edit] Actually, there are some things about LO I'm not sure about: For instance, I don't know how to use their formula editor, and when I tried using it, I got confused and found another way of inserting mathematical symbols into my document. Also, I don't know how good the spell-checking is, since I don't have a spell-checker working on mine. So these are some caveats in my endorsement of LO.
  - type0 5y ago
    > I don't have to share complicated MS Office documents with other people, but I do like using LO. If you do share documents, Excel files especially, you'll quickly find that people using MS Office wouldn't like you using LibreOffice.
    - ogogmad 5y ago
      I used it with some financial records from my bank, which were in Excel format. It worked fine for me. But these might not count as complicated Excel documents. Also, I never shared any of my changes with other people.
thrower123 5y ago
No, it's never going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Right now all the distros together can't crack 2.5% of the desktop market.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Your first point doesn't follow from the second one.
- simonblack 5y ago
  To paraphrase your comment: "No, it's never going to be the Year of Mercedes on the Highways. Right now all the Mercedes models together can't crack 2.5% of the motor vehicle market." (It makes no difference who drives a Mercedes and who drives a Ford, or a Pontiac, or a Volkswagen, or a Skoda, or a BMW, or a Lamborghini. One is just as useful as another. It's pointless arguing about such irrelevant trivia. Ditto for Windows, Linux and OSX.)
Haga 5y ago
They could never put adds into a broken OS and sell it at full price. At some consumers will switch. . Any second now
cloudbonsai 5y ago
The original article is: https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/2021-is-the-year-of-linux-on-the-desktop https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/2021-is-the-year-of-linux-on-... The basic thesis of the author was: 1. In 2021, Chromebooks are everywhere. 2. Chrome OS is Linux. 3. Therefore, 2021 is the year of Linux Desktop. Honestly, I'm not sure this is such a great argument. Isn't it rather like "2021 is the year of Chrome dominance"?
- Foobar8568 5y ago
  I would say because of WSL, it will be the year of the Linux Desktop, it just works™. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...
- lordgroff 5y ago
  I mean I guess it's trivial (is it? it used to be) to run regular Linux applications on Chrome, so the fact it shares the kernel is useful, but how many people do that?
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I agree not a great argument, they even mention the difference between Linux and chromebooks and Android, but call it political. I don’t think it’s political but really technological. Android and off the shelf chromebooks hide Linux away and might as well be a toaster running the Linux kernel. “There's a difference between Linux the technology and "Linux" the political movement, and the political side of Linux has always obscured the practical. Listen to Linux fans all the way back to the 90s, and you hear at worst a mashup of "fight the power" free software advocacy and triumphalist hacker manifestos. But most buyers rank philosophy really low in their purchase choices, behind things like price, ease of use, and software availability.”
goda90 5y ago
I think 2022 has the potential to be the Year of the Linux Desktop due to the Steam Deck. Valve has promised that Proton will allow almost all Windows games to run on it. Guaranteed they'll also be working hard on SteamOS polish. If Windows 11 turns out to be messy, then gamers could consider Linux more attractive now.
- yissp 5y ago
  Millions of people are using Linux via Android and Chrome OS, but I'm not sure the success of either of those has benefited the general Linux ecosystem in a meaningful way. I think the Steam Deck will be a similar situation. It's cool that it's Linux-based, but I suspect most users will just think of it as a Valve product and not really care about the internals.
  - ajvs 5y ago
    The Android ecosystem has. Currently most mobile devices in the world run the Android Common Kernel, which is only a few patches of differences from mainline Linux kernel, plus proprietary drivers. Considering the current state of fully Linux phones, we'd have never had a shot at being the market leader on mobile otherwise. In Android 12-based devices these drivers will become simply plug-in kernel modules, so all devices will run the same kernel and it will finally be able to be updated without messing with the drivers. This is in addition to less and less out-of-tree patches each year as more of them get upstreamed. This means Android is creeping very close to mainline Linux, and already some projects like postmarketOS have devices they've done the last few tweaks needed to run it on existing phones like the Poco F1. I don't think it would have happened otherwise that most mobiles worldwide would run almost-mainline Linux, so I'd say the Android project has been a net boon for Linux enthusiasts.
    - yissp 5y ago
      That's a good point, but I would ammend it slightly - Android might turn out to be a net boon for Linux enthusiasts in the next few years. I'm definitely super excited, but I still feel like the mobile Linux ecosystem is still not quite there just yet.
jasoneckert 5y ago
I've heard this question every year since 1999, and I somehow feel like we're stuck in a bash loop with no break: YEAROFLINUX=1999 while : do echo "Is $YEAROFLINUX the year of the Linux Desktop?" YEAROFLINUX=`expr $YEAROFLINUX + 1` done
approxim8ion 5y ago
I don't really care, as long as the situation doesn't get worse, it will always be my year of the linux desktop.
- Benjaminyyy 5y ago
  Yeah who cares. I've been using Linux on my (desk|lap)tops for over a decade. I really don't care what other people use.
- leppr 5y ago
  I care because as supply chain issues get worse, it's becoming harder and harder to get the good Linux-ready laptops within a reasonable delay. I recently switched to an Asus after a decade of Thinkpads (because a custom maxed-out Thinkpad would've taken 2 months+ to get delivered). What I forgot to check was Linux compatibility. With out-of-the-box Ubuntu, wifi didn't work. I was forced to switch from my usual distro, and still bluetooth doesn't work. Thankfully there are enough people wanting to run Linux on those machines that a few enthusiasts have managed to get the drivers to a point where it's usable. Think about it, how much of your machine's stack have you actually built yourself? Probably only a tiny fraction: some dotfiles, tiling manager bindings, a few scripts, ... It's a collective effort, and the more people use it, the more enthusiasts work on it, the better it becomes for you and I.
  - pg_1234 5y ago
    What distro did you use in the end? I had to fall back from Mint to Kubuntu due to issues with both wifi and the touchpad on an acer swift.
    - leppr 5y ago
      Arch. It's possible to update to a new kernel on Ubuntu that has the new drivers required, but I couldn't get the installation to succeed, and the Arch repos being so up-to-date helps a lot with those compatibility issues. Overall the switch was quite painless and my setup now is way less buggy than on Ubuntu. It can't be recommended to begineers though, as you do have to use the terminal a lot and the defaults are too bare.
phendrenad2 5y ago
If you accept Android and ChromeOS count toward the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" then the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" isn't very meaningful or interesting. Wake me up when Adobe starts shipping Photoshop in a .deb or .rpm.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
I tried to install Ubuntu 20.04 on my Thinkpad P51 with two monitors. Fonts were funny and the mouse never got the monitors right. Horrible things were happening when I was recovering from sleep mode. I installed Windows 10 on my Thinkpad P51 with two monitors. Everything worked out of the box. So at least for me 2021 is the year of Windows Desktop and certainly not Linux Desktop. Disclaimer: I try 1-2 times a year to install a working Linux on desktop since 1994, and have my family use it. It never, ever fucking worked. I am so pissed of because of that because I have Linux on every backend server and I lost hope that one day I will have a Linux desktop. Comment: I may have been able to make Linux work on my computer after digging some obscure settings in x.org and whatnot. I just want my front end device to just work - so Windows it is.
- canistel 5y ago
  My wife claims that I use Linux precisely for this. To get the kicks from troubleshooting pesky little issues, endless tweaking and discovery of obscure configurations.
- yagodragon 5y ago
  Dual monitor setup is a huge problem with linux distros. I haven't found yet any DE that works out of the box. I'm really looking forward to KDE with official stable wayland support, until then 2021 is not the year of linux desktop
  - lordgroff 5y ago
    What's the issue with dual monitors and GNOME?
    - beardyw 5y ago
      Never had any problems. But I think there is a general problem with sleep modes as mentioned. Luckily it boots in a fraction of the time Windows took.
    - rreyes1979 5y ago
open-source-ux 5y ago
If ChromeOS is the Linux Desktop of 2021, it surely represents the antithesis of open source ideals? ChromeOS is a cloud operating system (OS) that tracks and records all your activity the moment you sign in. Naturally, a Google account is required to use the full functionality of the OS. It is used by millions of schoolkids with all the privacy implications that entails. Somehow, Google's promise to never build profiles of their school users is enough to placate developers. In fact, developers are more likely to defend Google rather than question or scrutinise the privacy implications of using a cloud OS. I presume most developers are happy to sign-in in an OS to unlock OS functionality and have their activity tracked? After all, we've happy to push this model on kids. It's ironic that so much cloud software, whether an OS or a SaaS product, is built on open source software. And yet cloud software gives users less control and more tracking than the desktop model. Cloud software has been open source's greatest success - just not in the way open source advocates expected it to be.
- BrightGlow 5y ago
  I don't see what the problem there is. The entire goal of a school is to track the students and profile them into a set of grades and test scores.
chuckSu 5y ago
In 2025: is this the year of the Linux desktop?…. 2030: is it finally the year of the Linux desktop?
foobarbecue 5y ago
Slashdot lives!
pschastain 5y ago
Been using Mint w/ Cinnamon for a while, tried Kubuntu as well and will probably switch back to a KDE-based distro at some point when I have time. Both are fine but I don't find either as functional for me as macOS (which has lost a lot of usability over time as well) More and more I find myself using the CLI...
georgewsinger 5y ago
What about the Year of the Linux VR Desktop (http://www.simulavr.com/ http://www.simulavr.com/)? A new platform could give people new reasons to consider alternatives?
wooque 5y ago
For me every year after 2015 was year of Linux Desktop
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Why do people continually post this? We all know what is meant by the phrase "Year of the Linux Desktop", and it has nothing to do with one random individual on the internet using it.
66fm472tjy7 5y ago
A thing that still does not work well is fluid, resizable remote desktop in combination with fractional DPI scaling. X2GO enables the remoting part but does not work modern DEs[0]. Even then, there are bugs when remoting[1]. Also, MS Teams installed from the Ubuntu software store on Ubuntu 21.04 does not support screen sharing. You have to switch from Wayland to X11 to enable it. Even then it is missing features like selecting a single window to share, allowing others to highlight on your screen. It does not matter whether this is Microsoft's fault - Teams is a must have in many organizations and Canonical promotes the app in their store. [0] https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat [1] What I have personally encountered: on KDE drkonqi crashes all the time when remote, on GTK-based DEs I get color management prompts and gnome-keyring breaks on local sessions - even worse, it seems to block for minutes then tell the caller that you don't have credentials instead of exiting with an error.
caeril 5y ago
2004 was the year of the Linux Desktop. Fedora Core gave you everything you needed for the typical desktop use case: a browser, an office suite, and an email client, with a modern, sensible GUI. Anybody still denying the usability of desktop Linux since then either plays vidya (which, granted, has been a perennial problem on Linux), or is simply wrong.
midrus 5y ago
No

Doesn't load on Firefox on Android. The year of the Linux desktop was 2016, when Ubuntu 16.04 was released. It went downhill ever since.

kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
Did Proton exist in 2016?
- Darmody 5y ago
  I can play more games now but my overall experience is worse. I am not happy with the desktop environments we have now. I have to use a custom Gnome Shell to make my experience acceptable.
  - BrightGlow 5y ago
    I used to feel that way but now I'm less picky and am comfortable using the stock version of any desktop environment, as long as it's stable and supports basic functions. There comes a point when you'll realize you're swimming against the tide for very little gain, and it's easier to just learn to be flexible.
    - Darmody 5y ago
      I'm not picky, st least I don't think so. I just want the DE not to get in my way. Unwanted popups, slow and "fancy" effects that makes your workflow slower, weird default behavior (like alt-tab with gnome), multiple clicks to do what you used to do with 1, etc. I don't think that's being picky, it's just wanting something that works and doesn't infuriate you with every new update.
      - BrightGlow 5y ago
        I know the feeling of the DE getting in the way, part of resolving that for me was just learning to work with the DE rather than working against it and resisting changes. If an old workflow is slowed with a new update, it might be time to adjust that workflow and look at it in a different way.

sneak 5y ago

I think "Linux Desktop" means something other than "a computer running the Linux kernel that runs desktop applications". ChromeOS is as much a Linux computer as is a Tesla automobile. Sure, there's a linux kernel down in there somewhere, but it's not the thing we mean when we say "Linux Desktop".

Darmody 5y ago
Linux Desktop means Linux being a good Windows alternative on your computer.
- sneak 5y ago
  Interesting sidenote: both ChromeOS devices and iOS devices (and, to some extent, macs), as well as all consoles, are sold as single bundled hardware+software integrated products. There's very little computing done where the hardware is not designed with the software in mind and vice versa. The days of "software x running on hardware platform y" might be behind us for the majority of the planet's population.
  - quantumsolace 5y ago
    Already is. There must be more smartphones and tablet users than personal computer users in the world. Simply because a person who use a PC but doesn't have a smartphone (hyper nerds like Stallman, or ppl who have very particular jobs that give them the freedom not to have a smartphone) are outnumbered by those who have a tablet or smartphone but not a PC (my 94 year old grandma)
    - sneak 5y ago
      The majority of smartphones, I believe, can have other software loaded on to them, if the user so desires.
      - Darmody 5y ago
        Yes, but most of the time you're bound to proprietary blobs or some things won't work.

everdrive 5y ago

If Linux ever really gained mainstream appeal (say 40-60% adoption) it would be ruined by many of the pressures which ruined most mainstream operating systems. I think we’re far better off with Linux at 1% or so.

nickjj 5y ago
> it would be ruined by many of the pressures which ruined most mainstream operating systems I think Linux is different than other operating systems because if something goes mainstream that you don't like you have tons of viable options. With each component of the OS being tweakable you can choose opinions that others have made or forge your own path. For example if you don't like whatever the latest window manager is you can pretty easily replace it with i3, bspwm or any other window manager that you prefer. Want a different desktop environment? Great, there's plenty of them. Prefer the ethos or core values of one distro over another? Sounds good, I'm sure you'll find something you like.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  This same quality may be part of why it has never gained significant traction though, the proliferation of components and resulting fragmentation have made it a difficult target for application developers. Oh, sure, FOSS applications work fine... because they're open source and rely on unpaid third parties to integrate them into whatever absurdly interdependent ecosystem (a.k.a "distro") you happen to be using. Well, for some definitions of "fine", since they're often out of date, sometimes altered, or otherwise not packaged at all. It also makes troubleshooting a lot more difficult, since any efforts to find solutions will invariably land me in posts primarily about some other combination of components and it's up to me to sort out their relevance to my issue.
  - tapia 5y ago
    I think that's why we have flatpack now.
    - 5y ago

quantumsolace 5y ago

This "year of the Linux Desktop" joke is getting a bit tiresome. What is missing exactly? Sure the desktop is a bit ugly. But pretty much everything works out of the box. If MS released a native Office for Linux I could get rid of my Mac.

pjerem 5y ago
tbh, the last decades have been « year of Linux on my desktop ». Linux is already totally ok for a vast majority of usages (and even gaming is less and less an issue). At the end of the day, who even cares of Linux market share on the desktop ? Because this hides an insidious and bigger issue : PCs, even if it’s a 1% market share os, HAVE alternatives OS. Other modern platforms don’t. I’d rather prefer « xxxx is the year of the 1% Linux on phones » than any evolution on the desktop which would have pretty much no impact on a Linux user day to day usage.
ogogmad 5y ago
Have you tried running Office over Wine? Have you tried LibreOffice? Admittedly, I don't have to share complicated MS Office documents with other people, but I do like using LO. [edit] Actually, there are some things about LO I'm not sure about: For instance, I don't know how to use their formula editor, and when I tried using it, I got confused and found another way of inserting mathematical symbols into my document. Also, I don't know how good the spell-checking is, since I don't have a spell-checker working on mine. So these are some caveats in my endorsement of LO.
- type0 5y ago
  > I don't have to share complicated MS Office documents with other people, but I do like using LO. If you do share documents, Excel files especially, you'll quickly find that people using MS Office wouldn't like you using LibreOffice.
  - ogogmad 5y ago
    I used it with some financial records from my bank, which were in Excel format. It worked fine for me. But these might not count as complicated Excel documents. Also, I never shared any of my changes with other people.

thrower123 5y ago

No, it's never going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Right now all the distros together can't crack 2.5% of the desktop market.

fsflover 5y ago
Your first point doesn't follow from the second one.
simonblack 5y ago
To paraphrase your comment: "No, it's never going to be the Year of Mercedes on the Highways. Right now all the Mercedes models together can't crack 2.5% of the motor vehicle market." (It makes no difference who drives a Mercedes and who drives a Ford, or a Pontiac, or a Volkswagen, or a Skoda, or a BMW, or a Lamborghini. One is just as useful as another. It's pointless arguing about such irrelevant trivia. Ditto for Windows, Linux and OSX.)

Haga 5y ago

They could never put adds into a broken OS and sell it at full price. At some consumers will switch. . Any second now

cloudbonsai 5y ago

The original article is: https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/2021-is-the-year-of-linux-on-the-desktop https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/2021-is-the-year-of-linux-on-... The basic thesis of the author was: 1. In 2021, Chromebooks are everywhere. 2. Chrome OS is Linux. 3. Therefore, 2021 is the year of Linux Desktop. Honestly, I'm not sure this is such a great argument. Isn't it rather like "2021 is the year of Chrome dominance"?

Foobar8568 5y ago
I would say because of WSL, it will be the year of the Linux Desktop, it just works™. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...
lordgroff 5y ago
I mean I guess it's trivial (is it? it used to be) to run regular Linux applications on Chrome, so the fact it shares the kernel is useful, but how many people do that?
twobitshifter 5y ago
I agree not a great argument, they even mention the difference between Linux and chromebooks and Android, but call it political. I don’t think it’s political but really technological. Android and off the shelf chromebooks hide Linux away and might as well be a toaster running the Linux kernel. “There's a difference between Linux the technology and "Linux" the political movement, and the political side of Linux has always obscured the practical. Listen to Linux fans all the way back to the 90s, and you hear at worst a mashup of "fight the power" free software advocacy and triumphalist hacker manifestos. But most buyers rank philosophy really low in their purchase choices, behind things like price, ease of use, and software availability.”

goda90 5y ago

I think 2022 has the potential to be the Year of the Linux Desktop due to the Steam Deck. Valve has promised that Proton will allow almost all Windows games to run on it. Guaranteed they'll also be working hard on SteamOS polish. If Windows 11 turns out to be messy, then gamers could consider Linux more attractive now.

yissp 5y ago
Millions of people are using Linux via Android and Chrome OS, but I'm not sure the success of either of those has benefited the general Linux ecosystem in a meaningful way. I think the Steam Deck will be a similar situation. It's cool that it's Linux-based, but I suspect most users will just think of it as a Valve product and not really care about the internals.
- ajvs 5y ago
  The Android ecosystem has. Currently most mobile devices in the world run the Android Common Kernel, which is only a few patches of differences from mainline Linux kernel, plus proprietary drivers. Considering the current state of fully Linux phones, we'd have never had a shot at being the market leader on mobile otherwise. In Android 12-based devices these drivers will become simply plug-in kernel modules, so all devices will run the same kernel and it will finally be able to be updated without messing with the drivers. This is in addition to less and less out-of-tree patches each year as more of them get upstreamed. This means Android is creeping very close to mainline Linux, and already some projects like postmarketOS have devices they've done the last few tweaks needed to run it on existing phones like the Poco F1. I don't think it would have happened otherwise that most mobiles worldwide would run almost-mainline Linux, so I'd say the Android project has been a net boon for Linux enthusiasts.
  - yissp 5y ago
    That's a good point, but I would ammend it slightly - Android might turn out to be a net boon for Linux enthusiasts in the next few years. I'm definitely super excited, but I still feel like the mobile Linux ecosystem is still not quite there just yet.

jasoneckert 5y ago

I've heard this question every year since 1999, and I somehow feel like we're stuck in a bash loop with no break: YEAROFLINUX=1999 while : do echo "Is $YEAROFLINUX the year of the Linux Desktop?" YEAROFLINUX=`expr $YEAROFLINUX + 1` done

approxim8ion 5y ago

I don't really care, as long as the situation doesn't get worse, it will always be my year of the linux desktop.

Benjaminyyy 5y ago
Yeah who cares. I've been using Linux on my (desk|lap)tops for over a decade. I really don't care what other people use.
leppr 5y ago
I care because as supply chain issues get worse, it's becoming harder and harder to get the good Linux-ready laptops within a reasonable delay. I recently switched to an Asus after a decade of Thinkpads (because a custom maxed-out Thinkpad would've taken 2 months+ to get delivered). What I forgot to check was Linux compatibility. With out-of-the-box Ubuntu, wifi didn't work. I was forced to switch from my usual distro, and still bluetooth doesn't work. Thankfully there are enough people wanting to run Linux on those machines that a few enthusiasts have managed to get the drivers to a point where it's usable. Think about it, how much of your machine's stack have you actually built yourself? Probably only a tiny fraction: some dotfiles, tiling manager bindings, a few scripts, ... It's a collective effort, and the more people use it, the more enthusiasts work on it, the better it becomes for you and I.
- pg_1234 5y ago
  What distro did you use in the end? I had to fall back from Mint to Kubuntu due to issues with both wifi and the touchpad on an acer swift.
  - leppr 5y ago
    Arch. It's possible to update to a new kernel on Ubuntu that has the new drivers required, but I couldn't get the installation to succeed, and the Arch repos being so up-to-date helps a lot with those compatibility issues. Overall the switch was quite painless and my setup now is way less buggy than on Ubuntu. It can't be recommended to begineers though, as you do have to use the terminal a lot and the defaults are too bare.

phendrenad2 5y ago

If you accept Android and ChromeOS count toward the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" then the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" isn't very meaningful or interesting. Wake me up when Adobe starts shipping Photoshop in a .deb or .rpm.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

I tried to install Ubuntu 20.04 on my Thinkpad P51 with two monitors. Fonts were funny and the mouse never got the monitors right. Horrible things were happening when I was recovering from sleep mode. I installed Windows 10 on my Thinkpad P51 with two monitors. Everything worked out of the box. So at least for me 2021 is the year of Windows Desktop and certainly not Linux Desktop. Disclaimer: I try 1-2 times a year to install a working Linux on desktop since 1994, and have my family use it. It never, ever fucking worked. I am so pissed of because of that because I have Linux on every backend server and I lost hope that one day I will have a Linux desktop. Comment: I may have been able to make Linux work on my computer after digging some obscure settings in x.org and whatnot. I just want my front end device to just work - so Windows it is.

canistel 5y ago
My wife claims that I use Linux precisely for this. To get the kicks from troubleshooting pesky little issues, endless tweaking and discovery of obscure configurations.
yagodragon 5y ago
Dual monitor setup is a huge problem with linux distros. I haven't found yet any DE that works out of the box. I'm really looking forward to KDE with official stable wayland support, until then 2021 is not the year of linux desktop
- lordgroff 5y ago
  What's the issue with dual monitors and GNOME?
  - beardyw 5y ago
    Never had any problems. But I think there is a general problem with sleep modes as mentioned. Luckily it boots in a fraction of the time Windows took.
  - rreyes1979 5y ago

open-source-ux 5y ago

If ChromeOS is the Linux Desktop of 2021, it surely represents the antithesis of open source ideals? ChromeOS is a cloud operating system (OS) that tracks and records all your activity the moment you sign in. Naturally, a Google account is required to use the full functionality of the OS. It is used by millions of schoolkids with all the privacy implications that entails. Somehow, Google's promise to never build profiles of their school users is enough to placate developers. In fact, developers are more likely to defend Google rather than question or scrutinise the privacy implications of using a cloud OS. I presume most developers are happy to sign-in in an OS to unlock OS functionality and have their activity tracked? After all, we've happy to push this model on kids. It's ironic that so much cloud software, whether an OS or a SaaS product, is built on open source software. And yet cloud software gives users less control and more tracking than the desktop model. Cloud software has been open source's greatest success - just not in the way open source advocates expected it to be.

BrightGlow 5y ago
I don't see what the problem there is. The entire goal of a school is to track the students and profile them into a set of grades and test scores.

chuckSu 5y ago

In 2025: is this the year of the Linux desktop?…. 2030: is it finally the year of the Linux desktop?

foobarbecue 5y ago

Slashdot lives!

pschastain 5y ago

Been using Mint w/ Cinnamon for a while, tried Kubuntu as well and will probably switch back to a KDE-based distro at some point when I have time. Both are fine but I don't find either as functional for me as macOS (which has lost a lot of usability over time as well) More and more I find myself using the CLI...

georgewsinger 5y ago

What about the Year of the Linux VR Desktop (http://www.simulavr.com/ http://www.simulavr.com/)? A new platform could give people new reasons to consider alternatives?

wooque 5y ago

For me every year after 2015 was year of Linux Desktop

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Why do people continually post this? We all know what is meant by the phrase "Year of the Linux Desktop", and it has nothing to do with one random individual on the internet using it.

66fm472tjy7 5y ago

A thing that still does not work well is fluid, resizable remote desktop in combination with fractional DPI scaling. X2GO enables the remoting part but does not work modern DEs[0]. Even then, there are bugs when remoting[1]. Also, MS Teams installed from the Ubuntu software store on Ubuntu 21.04 does not support screen sharing. You have to switch from Wayland to X11 to enable it. Even then it is missing features like selecting a single window to share, allowing others to highlight on your screen. It does not matter whether this is Microsoft's fault - Teams is a must have in many organizations and Canonical promotes the app in their store. [0] https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat [1] What I have personally encountered: on KDE drkonqi crashes all the time when remote, on GTK-based DEs I get color management prompts and gnome-keyring breaks on local sessions - even worse, it seems to block for minutes then tell the caller that you don't have credentials instead of exiting with an error.

caeril 5y ago

2004 was the year of the Linux Desktop. Fedora Core gave you everything you needed for the typical desktop use case: a browser, an office suite, and an email client, with a modern, sensible GUI. Anybody still denying the usability of desktop Linux since then either plays vidya (which, granted, has been a perennial problem on Linux), or is simply wrong.

midrus 5y ago