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2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?
- 7e 4y ago70K responses biased towards Stack Overflow users. This is pretty weak.
- sfsylvester 4y agoAny clue on what distros are causing the growth? First I've heard of all this.
- retinaros 4y agowindows?
- devteambravo 4y agoCan 2nd this one, I tried Mint and Slackware this year, just because of the Win11 app checker thing kept popping and reminding me that i don't want another few years worth of BS like that.
- pid-1 4y agoArticle says that doesn't include WSL / Docker
- _dain_ 4y agosteam deck
- imwillofficial 4y agoNah, not enough shipping to move the needle
- jupp0r 4y agoProfessional developers use Steam Deck as their main machine? I have the wrong job it seems!
- ekianjo 4y agoSteam Deck is not a distro. SteamOS is.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zwilliamson 4y agoSteam Deck + SteamOS is a catalyst in the making. You pretty much have to use Flatpak for application installation otherwise you risk your installs getting wiped out when Steam does a distro upgrade. You get a managed desktop experience with the setup. When you couple the Steam Deck with a good dock you have a great desktop computing experience.
- tux 4y agoNot sure how accurate this is, but you can take a look on wikipedia. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoStrange article trying to extrapolate a very biased subpopulation and grasping at other aspects to claim this year was "the year of Linux on the desktop". Unix was already dominating anything non-personal and non-mobile. Personal use outside enthusiasts and devs is still a blip on the radar. If anyone thinks otherwise, ask yourself how Windows continues to get away with such consumer-unfriendly practices.
- jacquesm 4y agoUnix has been absolutely dominant on mobile for years now.
- pjmlp 4y agoTry to write a pure POSIX applications on either iOS or Android. https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2016/atlidakis https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2016/atlidakis
- jacquesm 4y agoThat's not the same thing though, is it? Even desktop Linux is not technically POSIX compliant.
- tmpburning 4y agoBut Android and iOS are complete nightmares in this regard.
- Arbortheus 4y agoIs there any Linux distribution with MacOS levels of reliability, simplicity, and productivity, that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full, random things like thunderbolt docks not working, or sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep), or external monitor resolutions being wrong, and monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors with different resolutions? Most of my colleagues at work picked Linux over a MacBook, and they waste countless hours fixing their various Linux bugs.
- vbezhenar 4y agoFedora was much better than macOS for me. Don't have your kinds of complications though.
- c22 4y agoI have a box I've been updating Mint on for the last 10 years with no real issues for the last 6 or 7.
- joombaga 4y ago> that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full Who hurt you? Pop!_OS?
- bronson 4y agoUbuntu, for like a decade. Made running Ubuntu servers real dicey.
- nverno 4y agoSleep states are faulty on the Linux laptop I'm currently on, and I do occasionally waste time on interoperability with various commercial software, although countless hours seems excessive. But when it comes to running dev software or getting up and running with a new project, or compiling some github source, I think I save much more time than I've lost.
- jorvi 4y ago
- imwillofficial 4y agoThat’s against the rules. I’ve been doing this 20 years. You can only say next year is the year of the Linux desktop. No hindsight stuff allowed.
- krick 4y agoThat's moral choice I guess: you were simply making mistakes for the last 20 years, an the OP is blatantly lying. Also, you were simply giving people hope, and OP is actively sabotaging the development, by trying to make false impression that this garbage is already working fine. Which, as every actual Linux user knows, just isn't the case. Obviously, that's Microsoft PR department post. Using praise as a weapon. I've had to update Ubuntu (to the latest LTS! which is 8 months old already!) on a laptop (a Thinkpad, for God's sake!), and I'm still fighting a bunch of problems (not exclusively driver-related) that I didn't have on the same machine on older Ubuntu (or maybe I've already fixed some of them before and forgot about that… but some certainly are new!). I hate it, and I have no idea how non-technical people manage to use it for daily life and not as a troubleshooting exercise simulator (I've heard some of them do — not sure if that's true though).
- imwillofficial 4y agoIt was a joke my friend. Merry Christmas
- krick 4y agoThat was too, in case you didn't figure… Kind of.
- pid-1 4y agoRant: last weekend I finished building my teenager dream PC - 12 cores cpu, 64GB RAM, RTX 3060 12GB VRAM... GNOME on Ubuntu still managed to crash / hang on a fresh install. Will try Mint / others, but it's a shame the "gateway distro for new users" is in such sorry state.
- Avamander 4y agoNvidia with Wayland? That's on you then, man.
- brookst 4y agoExactly why I only use linux for headless serves. God knows how many totally obvious mistakes would be “on me” if I tried to set up a GUI workstation. Who’s got the time to learn why you can’t use of of the main GPU brands with one of the main GUIs?
- soulofmischief 4y agoThis is entirely NVIDIA's fault, not Linux's. AMD plays ball.
- choeger 4y agoWell, you did build your own rig, so some learning is expected, no?
- phpisthebest 4y agoWell it has been known for decades the Nvida is openly hostile to Linux Desktop, and actively tries to prevent development of open source drivers, Hell Linus has a famous speech where he literally flips of Nvida
- brookst 4y agoCelebrity kernel hackers lobbing attacks at hardware makers in speeches is no way to run a compatibility matrix.
- roxgib 4y agoThey're going to be giddy when they learn about Chromebooks!
- ITB 4y agoUbuntu keeps getting better and better for me. This year I bought an Asus laptop with all the bells and whistles, and allegedly the only supported Linux was Fedora. I tried to get everything setup and failed multiple times, and then I went back to Ubuntu, installed a much newer kernel since Ubuntu distros are conservative there, and that was pretty much it.
- jimcaale 4y agoWelcome
- ekianjo 4y ago> a million steam deck this is still just a rumor at this stage as there is no source apart from one guy saying it in a KDE conference. If Valve had indeed shipped more than a million they'd be screaming about it on the rooftops.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoWhy would they? Private companies don't need to brag.
- enneff 4y agoAlso, on track record, Valve have been very quiet in general about the huge piles of money they have raked in over the last 20 years.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4y agoWhile also investing heavily in hard and software BUT never really expanding their teams by thousands of new people. Steam link, steam controllers, steam machines, vr headsets, steam deck inhome streaming, remote play together, steam workshop, family sharing, mobile apps
- themacguffinman 4y agoYes they do if they want to build excitement and interest in their niche platform. Money isn't the only reason to brag, attention is critical to a platform's success and Valve's Linux-based platform is starting from behind.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago>starting from behind They have 20 years of brand history, what are you talking about?
- themacguffinman 4y ago
- mumblemumble 4y agoIf you click through to the link, you'll see that the results add up to 150%. That should be a sign that something odd is going on with this survey result and we need to interpret it with caution. The question was "What is the primary operating system in which you work." (Emphasis mine.) The question itself implies that we should only be able to pick one, and yet the results clearly indicate that more than one was allowed. Most likely, people were listing the OSes they use a lot. A great many of us developers use a commercial OS locally, but also interact with Linux servers or containers on a regular basis. That said, there's no simple interpretation of that "40% use Linux" number that passes the smell test. It's implausibly high for the number of people who use it as their primary workstation OS, and it's implausibly low for the number of developers who regularly work in Linux. More likely, what this number represents is that different respondents interpreted the question, which appears to have been ambiguously framed, in different and incompatible ways, and so the result is statistically meaningless.
- dmix 4y agoYep, Previous years = 100%, so the question has changed somehow https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-popular-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo... I guess you could use Windows at work and Linux at home (or viseversa). I'd bet some people also say Linux becayse they have homeservers and other secondary uses besides their primary driver.
- notwokeno 4y agoWhere I work our laptop runs OSX but we're not allowed to do any work on it (and it's heavily locked down to prevent it.) Instead all of our actual work is done on a machine we ssh into. If you use Windows at home I wonder if it would be wrong to list all three popular OSes.
- echelon 4y agoNow that I'm no longer forced to use a Mac at work, all of my work happens on Linux. I only marginally touch Windows and Mac for testing and builds. If I can find a good MDM solution for Linux hardware and software, I'll let the employees at my startup use Linux too. I get a sense that corporate MDM is all that's holding Linux back.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoIf I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script. Software updates rarely work. There are random crashes that take hours to fix. I'm about to give in the towel and get a Mac. I can get it to work because the terminal doesn't scare me, but there's no way I can recommend it to anyone without a certain amount of technical skills.
- rietta 4y agoNot my experience at all. Been running Ubuntu LTS for work for years and updates are just about bulletproof.
- LarryMullins 4y agoNovice Linux users often make the mistake of adding third party repos to their package manager, which almost invariably causes trouble down the line. Some distros (for instance Debian) have a culture of discouraging this practice, while others (particularly Ubuntu) have a user culture which encourages it. This is easily the most common reason for updates breaking. RPM and dpkg are both nigh bullet proof, and you can generally count on most distros to keep their own package repo in good order. Dependency resolution between out of sync and uncoordinated package repos is where things start to break down.
- jeroenhd 4y agoIt doesn't help that every online guide tells people to do this without warning about the consequences. Want to install nginx? Copy this line of script and enter your password, no need to fuss about the details! The Linux volunteer community needs an attitude shift to start recommending the user friendly method over the complicated methods. You don't need to apt install Chrome, it's in your software store, just like most other programs you probably want. If you go die-hard Linux (Arch, Gentoo, etc.) then perhaps there are too many variations in use to give a clear cross DE answer but on Ubuntu 99% of users are on GNOME with Ubuntu customisations, so you can use the Disks tool instead of dd, the Disk Usage analyser instead of a complicated du grep sort command and the software manager instead of apt for almost every common task. Linux people are often fond of their command line and so am I, but this way any normal user will quickly shy away from the platform for no good reason. There are also people who have weirdly strict opinions about the "right" way to do things (systemd hate, Wayland hate, vim enthusiasts, bash vs zsh vs fish debates) that ruin the experience for everyone but will leave an especially bad impression for newbies. You'd better know the difference between pacman, apt, dnf, and brew before you go to the Arch forum or expect to be insulted for being such a complete idiot to even consider asking a question.
- pjmlp 4y agoPlaying numbers from developers survey, while even Steam places it at around 2%.
- IshKebab 4y agoI mean Steam is probably biased in the opposite direction since gamers are clearly going to be more likely to use Windows. But yeah clearly not nearly as insanely skewed as these numbers. Statcounter puts it at 2.8%.
- alexklarjr 4y ago“The Year of Linux on the Desktop of Developers who bothered to register on stackoverflow“.
- jerrygenser 4y agoIronic for me. 2019, 2021 and half of 2022 were the years that I went all in on Ubuntu for desktop. It was an overall awesome experience as a developer.... and then Zoom and Slack started crashing randomly or having weird bugs where I'd needed to restart the app or even the machine in order to get them working again. 2022 is the year I switched back to windows as my development experience with WSL2 + being able to use Zoom and Slack without them crashing or getting random bugs. Even running Linux GUI apps works well on Windows. Run evince file.pdf from the wsl2 command line and evince opens. The one thing that doesn't integrate well is linux disk encryption utilities and windows. I wish I could use LUKS/cryptsetup but ended up giving up and using Bitlocker.
- kibwen 4y agoNote that you don't even need apps, you can just use Zoom and Slack from your web browser. (For Zoom especially, nobody should be trusting their native client in the first place after their security debacles. Your browser is a convenient security boundary.) If your browser locks up to the point where it requires you to restart your machine, that sounds like a much more serious problem.
- kmbfjr 4y agoThen I am glad I missed it. I spend my days fixing other people’s Linux problems, I don’t wish to fix my own on my own time. I still love the OS, but only for Docker and Kubernetes. I’ll run a mature desktop OS with a plan over Linux, possibly Windows.
- wrs 4y ago“The Year of Linux on the Developer’s Desktop” is kind of moving the goalposts from the original idea, no?
- IshKebab 4y agoNot even that - developers that are keen enough to fill in Stackoverflow's user survey.
- chazeon 4y agoI wonder when Linux can finally gain proper fractional scaling support. Now I know Gnome has it under wayland, but many other applications does not, electron apps sometimes can work with caveats, but I still have to make a lot of effort to make it really look okay to my eye. Now out of box, everything feels broken here and there. And every time I came to use it as a real desktop environment instead of just a development machine I was distracted by the instinct to fix things without being to get anything done. I know if someone reside mainly in terminal or use tile-based environment would work okay, but this kind of setup unfortunately does not work for me.
- sz4kerto 4y agoGnome doesn't have it. Looks like it'll land next year.
- iz_zi 4y agoIt’s not finished until more Microsoft and Mac users convert to Linux.
- fxtentacle 4y agoUntil Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator work in Wine, it's a hard no. Word and Excel are good :) plus there are tolerable replacements. Outlook is buggy as hell, but evolution can do its job. But when I need to fill out and digitally sign a PDF form - something that should be an easy and mundane task - the entire Linux ecosystem fails me. Also, task prioritization is still horrible. I fire up a high CPU background task and the mouse cursor stutters? (in GNOME)
- harerazer 4y agoI regularly fill out pdf forms using firefox on Linux Mint.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 4y agoI can’t consider Linux desktop until copy and paste is consistent and seamless and lets me use the macOS key combination everywhere. And of course all this should just work, not be a series of cli commands and configs.
- uneekname 4y agobecause it's usually Ctrl + Shift + C to copy from a terminal? Otherwise I haven't noticed much inconsistency on the distros I've used
- whateveracct 4y agoIt's pretty much just that. People get hooked on the beautiful consistency of the command key and overrate how much value-add it really provides. They'll make arguments about how often they copy-paste and how every bit of complexity fills up their brain and other pseudoscientific stuff.
- G3rn0ti 4y agoI can’t consider MacOS until the „@“ character is back on its internationally standardized place and Apple Safari supports VP9 hardware decoding.
- pksebben 4y agoI've had exactly the opposite experience switching to Mac from Linux. used to be my cli editors worked with the clipboard, now I have to `M-x shell-command-on-region pbcopy`. I've written a wrapper script for it and bound that but if I have to write lisp to use the clipboard I consider that backsliding.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoThese comments are hilarious. Linux user community: Linux has been fine for casual users for years! Give it to your grandma, it's not a problem! Also Linux user community: Wait, you used an nVidia GPU in your build? What kind of idiot scrub are you? If there's one thing I've seen that's consistent with Linux users over the last two decades, it's been blaming users for all their Linux-related problems.
- ryandrake 4y agoOr “You mean you want to run two monitors with different DPIs? What kind of oddball user are you, anyway?” Linux display stack’s treatment of monitor DPI is basically “throw our hands up and let apps like Firefox make it work!”
- reisse 4y agoI think you gave this example as a joke, but here is a quote from one of the Wayland developers: > I would suggest that this setting [UI scale] needs to be a global and not a per-output thing. If it was a per-output thing, windows moving between different monitors would probably have problems (text size changes while window size does not?). It is hard to imagine how it would work as a per-output setting, for me at least. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/34 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... , the original issue and the discussion gives quite some insights in how Linux developers see the world.
- ryandrake 4y agoUnfortunately my example was based on real-world frustration. That conversation was just maddening to read. One person arguing for the end user’s experience and the other one (apparently winning) tunnel-visioned on “pixel perfect”, “well defined”, “guarantees to developers” and “relevant specifications”. Meanwhile, for the last at least five years, I can turn on my Mac, drag windows from one hidpi display to a low dpi display, and everything just works and window sizes and fonts behave sensibly. The ability to make tough technical compromises in favor of the average end user, over technical purity and developer comfort, is what distinguishes a polished, finished product from a science project.
- smsm42 4y agoSo, this person called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746655
- compumike 4y agoOut of curiosity I just pulled User-Agent stats from my “Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns” post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081943 that was #1 on Hacker News on July 13, 2022. Of 38595 clicks that day from news.ycombinator.com total: 30.8% (11868) Macintosh 22.7% (8745) iPhone 21.7% (8356) Windows 15.7% (6065) Android 8.5% (3284) Linux (!Android) That implies a 61%/39% desktop/mobile split. Mobile: 59%/41% iPhone/Android split. Desktop: 50%/36%/14% macOS/Windows/Linux split. Personally I switched back from macOS to Linux (Pop_OS!) as my primary desktop operating system in 2020.
- randunel 4y agoMy linux user agent would've told you chrome on mac, and I use neither.
- robertlf 4y agoThis is utterly ridiculous. Unless you're a long-time Unix hacker or system administrator (I was the latter for ten years), trying to do anything in Linux is time-consuming, difficult, and ultimately very frustrating. Desktop Linux was always be a backwater for techies and it has absolutely no hope of widespread adoption like Windows or macOS.
- rvz 4y agoThe article continues to grasp and cling onto straws, to actually prove that a minority of StackOverflow techies who bothered to fill in the survey are using their machines as a Linux Desktop and not normal users as proof of 'widespread adoption'. A long time delusion preached by Linux Desktop techies. The Year of the Linux Desktop has ended with Windows being the best Linux Distro.
- college_physics 4y agoNo it wasn't. Nor was it needed. Linux is unstoppable. The monotonic accumulation of all that open source goodness is like a giant capacitor taking forever to charge. The result takes a while compared to a well funded commercial enterprise, but it slowly morphs into a super desktop that is basically impossible to compete against. Free, super capable, private by design. You cannot beat that with bells and whistles. The "average person" UX red lines will be met at some point. Make no mistake. Life is not linear. Nothing much happens, it becomes a running joke and then, boom and its not a joke anymore, its the new reality.
- jcelerier 4y ago> Make no mistake. Life is not linear. Nothing much happens, it becomes a running joke and then, boom and its not a joke anymore, its the new reality. A data point: today I was talking with a friend who works in a company making a 3D software. Apparently since last year they lost most of their clients to Blender, which used to be the butt of so many 3D software jokes.
- coffeebeqn 4y agoLet’s not forget that the other players in the OS game are literally the biggest and richest companies in the world. Apple, MS, Google. It’s phenomenal what Linux has achieved and will continue to achieve
- willnonya 4y agoLol. This is complete nonsense. Numbers that don't hold up, assertions which don't pass the smell test. Linux excels in invironments where people don't ever lnow they're using Linux. Servers, embedded and highly customized environments. For average users Linux is still too much of a disjointed mess with poor hardware support. I use multiple Linux distros daily and none of them would pass for a primetime ready desktop environment in any of my personal or professional environments. As much as I hate windows and Macos Linux just isn't up to the job of replacing them on the desktop. Luckily for them that is becoming less and and less relevant outside of the business environment. In the end Linux is still little more than a random collection of software loosely connected through an administrator centric framework.
- malkia 4y agoWhen I was at Google (2014-2017) - The Linux (I think it was Ubuntu based) just worked. Granted it was mostly java/blaze/little r/js/go, no dedicated graphics chips us (I came there from gamedev background). It was working just fine, and we had option to use Cinnamon or something else. The only thing I remember is that it wasn't that easy (or maybe my memory does not serve me well) to "apt update" anything (and that makes sense). I think apt was going somehow through internal servers. All I remember is that "apt-file" wasn't working or was prevented from doing so. Nonetheless - never had problem with the distro/whatever, and TBH never cared what linux is there - as compiler/everything else got somehow in, and you just carry on your work in Eclipse/CLion/JetBrains/Chrome/Firefox/etc.
- malkia 4y agoActually now that I think, I might've had NVIDIA card of sorts. But what I meant to say, I never needed/care what GPU I have (unlike before), so it must've worked fine somehow. Maybe I got once or twice the machine to crash, and it was all the time on.
- dgacmu 4y agoI had a Titan x in my workstation to around the same time at Google (deep learning). Everything generally worked but then after about two years I ran into a disk space problem that prevented apt stuff from working. But by that point a lot more had moved into desktops-in-the-cloud anyway.
- midasuni 4y agoHas been for me every year for the last 22. Occasionally I Remote Desktop into a windows machine or show someone something in their MacBook, it’s exhausting how bad the experience is. Random hangs, applications crashing, lvl of basic functions like virtual desktops, and don’t get me started on the Mac trackpad being the wrong way round.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoThe Linux CLI is a dominate user interface I use at work, it is also just called bash (well, that’s the default shell anyways). I have never tried an actual Linux desktop at work, web and native Mac applications are still dominate there (besides the CLI).
- TylerE 4y agoThe cli existed when Linus was still in diapers. Even Bash predates Linux by years. There is zero that running a bash Shell has to do with “Linux”
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoYes, but it is the desktop I’m used to, and it’s running on Linux.
- TylerE 4y ago> . I have never tried an actual Linux desktop at work Which is it? Your statements are contradictory
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoI meant something with a GUI. Though I guess all the web stuff technically runs on Linux.
- TylerE 4y agoThat isn’t what people mean when they say a Linux desktop.
- kewrkewm53 4y agoI've been running Linux Mint for years on both laptops (Thinkpads) and desktop, it hasn't been any more trouble than MacOS or Windows. Things just work out of the box for the needs of a basic home-office user & programmer. I think it's just important to pick the right distro. RHEL which I use at work is giving me way more trouble.
- im_down_w_otp 4y agoAfter 25 years as a dedicated Mac user, I kind of inadvertently switched to Kubuntu for most things, and it's been mostly fine. It gets better and better with each release too. My singular major complaint is that not enough applications leverage the KDE system that allows you to rewire various keyboard shortcuts, so I can only half-ass having a setup where all the shortcuts mimic those of a Mac.
- whateveracct 4y agoMacOS and Windows treat their users like idiots. Since I have technical proficiency, I like to be able to use it. Using forked software, scripting, low-level config. It's frustrating how much of a pain in the ass that stuff can be on non-Linux desktop environments. That's my main motivation to using Linux as my daily driver (3 years now).
- dinvlad 4y agoRecently, I've been impressed by Intel's Clear Linux project. It really feels like a completely new generation of Linux desktop that's designed from the ground-up to be more performant than even Windows, while still being "turn-key" pretty much, and a bleeding-edge yet stable rolling-release at that.
- eecc 4y agoI’d argue the problem isn’t really with the Linux kernel or the command line. The UI experience is unfortunately the same coherence of design horror story it has been since forever. Windows is of a terrible of it's own, but wayland, gtk, the OS services model and user settings are just a horror show.
- inktype 4y agoThe article is disappointingly short, but at least for me, the title is true; at long last, 2022 was finally the Year of the Linux Desktop. May the YotLD meme live on in spirit. I finally switched my desktop and laptops 100% to Linux. Some games don't run - fine - plenty of other games do. Ableton runs well in Wine, but Bitwig is native, and yabridge runs VSTs. MuseScore was saved. KDE is pleasant and productive. Blender is amazing. Pipewire is audio done right. Electron, despite its problems, makes Linux a build target of ordinary apps. Flatpak and AppImage enable simple cross-linux-distro app distribution. Critical mass achieved. No desktop is perfect, but at least for people with a nominal, base level of experience, Linux is the least bad. Looking to the future, I hope the Desktop Linux experience improves with respect to memory exhaustion, and I hope a Patreon-like platform gains prominence to enable easily donating to keep projects alive; it's currently cumbersome to find all the different places to donate. With great gratitude to every free software and open source contributor, happy end of 2022!
- coffeebeqn 4y agoI’m running the Steam Deck and it is an absolute generational shift in gaming on Linux. The majority of games now run totally without problems.
- flatiron 4y agoSame. The only ones that seem to have problems are the ones that explicitly don’t support Linux via anti cheat or weird launchers or DRM. If it’s just a normal game, it runs fine.
- tasuki 4y agoWould the assassin's creed series games work through steam deck? I've wanted to try them but not enough to bother with windows...
- themoonisachees 4y agoThat has been my experience this year as well. After a frustrating bout with my video drivers on windows, my thinking was "well, that is usually what keeps me coming back to windows whenever it happens on Linux, so what do I have to lose?" Turns out Debian+KDE +Wayland is exactly right for me, especially KDE connect. The only pain point has been VR gaming, so I've kept a minimal windows install on a small ssd. Everything else has been smooth sailing and I'm considerably less frustrated by design choices when I can just fix them.
- omniscient_oce 4y agoCan't beat the build quality and performance of the Macbook Air M1 for the price and size in my opinion so I'm sticking with it for laptop. But as for "Desktop" I've almost fully switched over to Mint and very happy with it. Windows + WSL2 for work so I guess I turn up in all metrics on the surveys :)
- harerazer 4y agoAnother vote for Mint here. Had some minor mouse sensitivity problems starting out but other than that I’ve been using it as my daily driver for 2 years now without any problems.
- ianai 4y agoIs there something to know to make the Linux desktop/modern GUI apps more responsive? Sometimes it just feels clunky. This is under gnome.
- tokai 4y agoHow should we be able to help without knowing your hardware and distro?
- pepperidgeFarm 4y agoPepperidge Farm remembers when 1998 was the year of Linux on the Desktop. Red Hat and StarCraft boxes lined the shelves of CompUSA.
- telcal 4y agoIt's funny sad that every year is the year of Linux on the Desktop. I used it as my desktop from around '97-'99 and eventually gave it up for Mac. It was fun to tinker with and get my Enlightenment setting just right but I can't see it ever taking much marketshare.
- jasoneckert 4y agoWhile I agree with many of the points here questioning the validity of the title, I must say that 2022 definitely feels to me like the year of Linux on the "developer desktop" - it was the first year where nearly all of the people in my developer circles embraced Linux and where all major laptop manufacturers offered a developer-focused Linux laptop (HP Linux One, Lenovo Thinkpad Linux Edition, Dell XPS Developer Edition, System76, and so on.).
- heikkilevanto 4y agoI understand that Linux may not be for everyone, but I have not used anything else since 1999 at least. I stick with Debian, even on my desktop, in spite of it not always being the most updated. But it is rock solid. YMMV
- ritcgab 4y agoLinux desktop on x86 is the backbone of (almost) every single ARM MacBook.
- baraksch 4y agoI'm a software engineer turned manager, was on Linux for a while but my main tool is unfortunately outlook. I tried in vain to find a good outlook alternative that works with exchange but couldn't find one. The o365 web client is super slow so after a while I gave up and went with the macos flow.
- bratwurst3000 4y agoLittle anectode … My Parents are over 60 and know a how to use a computer on a basic lvl… like installing software etc…. 6 years ago I forced them to switch to linux with linux mint and christmas presents…. It was a hell of a work at first. To show them how it works etc … They adapted very fine and are now big linux fans, because its so easy and not overloaded with shit you dont need. Every other person in that agegroup that is using windows has a shitload of strange software because it was the anwser to some problem on google and at leas 10 accounta for things they dont understand…. My parents are super happy with linux. My mother even shoked me when she had a problem with a printer and was suddenly using the comand lines for showing me that the printer doesnt react… that was a crazy moment for me … mama using shell commands … I think if mama is using comand lines linux desktop is mainstream!!! Btw she was also surprised by the amount of help she got in the comunity