8 ms·

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 ev

by sylens 10mo ago

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.

pshc 10mo ago
Yeah, myself and several friends of mine with EOL Windows 10 PCs are looking to jump ship.
cogman10 10mo ago
I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?" I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux. It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it. And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.
- monero-xmr 10mo ago
  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 Linux isn’t a problem. Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack. It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
  - callc 10mo ago
    > 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.
    - monero-xmr 10mo ago
      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 all costs causes so many stupid short term benefits that hurt long term value. There is an enormous number of small companies you have never heard of like this. It’s just so short sighted to kill the golden goose to juice some profit
      - callc 10mo ago
        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
      - machomaster 10mo ago
        How did you manage to agree with VC?
        monero-xmr 10mo ago
        Bought them out
    - theturtletalks 10mo ago
      It won’t help, because once those MBAs take VC money, the incentives push the product toward enshittification sooner or later. What we’re seeing instead is open-source becoming the real alternative. People used to look for other proprietary tools, but now open-source options are getting good enough, and more people are building personal software that fits their needs instead of bloated do-everything apps. That’s the shift. Open-source is rising, and I don’t think these companies can reverse course fast enough.
- marginalia_nu 10mo ago
  Yeah, I think a big part of the momentum toward Linux is from the end of Windows 10 support, and Windows 11's increased hardware demands. Given how rough and uncertain the economy is, this creates a large group of people who can't or aren't comfortable upgrading their computer, but at the same time don't want to be stuck on EOL Windows 10 forever either.
- littlestymaar 10mo ago
  > It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it. I fact, Linux is much easier to run on somewhat older hardware because drivers are often a bit slow to land and Ubuntu and its derivatives always lag in kernel versions. Older hardware becoming more valuable because price hikes doubly benefit Linux.
sho_hn 10mo ago
KDE's income from individual donations has doubled recently, and many of the comments we get with donations are from recent Windows switchers. As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.
- sylens 10mo ago
  Thank you for reminding me that I should set up some recurring donations to the teams powering my Linux experience
  - sho_hn 10mo ago
    Thank you very much in advance!
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- vanviegen 10mo ago
  That increase in donations may also be due to more prominent prompting for them. Got me to donate, at least. But I would be pretty sad if the prompting were to get any more in-your-face than it currently already is.
  - marginalia_nu 10mo ago
    It's a difficult balance, though I think most open source projects are too modest in asking for donations, which, fair enough is pretty uncomfortable at first. You can definitely be too in-your-face, like Jimbo Wales is the sad-eyed picture of taking this too far sometimes. Thing is that explicitly asking for money works, it gets results. If you can get people to pay money to watch you screaming at video games on Twitch, you can definitely get people to pay money for working on useful software.
glenstein 10mo ago
Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB. I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.
- mixmastamyk 10mo ago
  Hah. Feh, I still use that once in a while. It is one of very few image viewers that can lock in pan and zoom and then look over multiple frames. Good for checking which photo of a dozen is clearest, while zoomed in 800%.
lanthissa 10mo ago
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
- coffeebeqn 10mo ago
  Simpler - it is now objectively a much better OS and it’s free
leptons 10mo ago
If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.
- wltr 10mo ago
  I was a bit puzzled by Firebird (I thought that’s a fork of Thunderbird, like, say, LibreWolf or Waterfox), but I couldn’t quickly find the project, so my assumption is that it’s just the misprint, and author thinking of Fire-fox -> Fire-bird, not being into ecosystem for too long to remember the actual bird. Anyway, that’s irrelevant to the point author’s making, and I’m happy there’s a new Linux adopter now. Thanks, M$, I guess.
  - einpoklum 10mo ago
    Maybe it's supposed to be BetterBird [1], a Thunderbird tracking fork whose logo is a red phoenix rather than a blue bird? [1] : https://betterbird.eu/ https://betterbird.eu/
    - leptons 10mo ago
      I misremembered the name, it's Thunderbird. But thanks for your comment, I did not know about Betterbird, but I will give it a try!
  - leptons 10mo ago
    Yes, I did not get the name right. Firefox -> Firebird is what I misremembered.
lynndotpy 10mo ago
Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux. My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows). Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets. These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.
- ninth_ant 10mo ago
  > These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more. I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
  - lynndotpy 10mo ago
    Yeah, I should have been a bit more nuanced. I don't mean to dismiss the incredible mass of raw human achievement that is open source. Microsoft is one of Valve's direct competitors and Valve is totally dependent on Microsoft. Among the notoriously poorly-received changes in Windows 8, Microsoft also started to clamp down on who can run software. Valve saw the writing on the walls and released their first Steam Machines. But those flopped due to the state of Linux gaming at the time, they started pouring resources into Proton, which had the distinction from WINE in that they would develop Linux-specific patches. For sure, Valve would have nothing if WINE hadn't already done the bulk of the work, if Vulkan didn't exist, if Linux didn't exist, etc. But there's a world where Microsoft decided not to rock the boat with Windows, and in that world, Linux gamers would almost exclusively be dual booting.
stn8188 10mo ago
Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.
bsder 10mo ago
Avalanches start with small movements ... I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice. Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc. And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...
unsettledturtle 10mo ago
I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows. That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays. Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows. certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups. Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things: * informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye * more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine
willtemperley 10mo ago
Statistics show adoption rate is increasing. According to [1] it historically took a decade to double Linux desktop market share, but market share has almost doubled since 2022. Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux. [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year-of-the-Linux-desktop-as-the-OS-attains-5-US-desktop-market-share-for-the-first-time.1060391.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year...
- Root_Denied 10mo ago
  For a lot of those people the options are "spend a lot of money to upgrade your hardware to either run Win11 or buy a Macbook" or "use your existing hardware and ask your tech friend for a Linux distro recommendation". When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.
  - willtemperley 10mo ago
    In reality, people will probably keep their insecure Win 10 machines running as long as they can. Linux is a leap especially for busy folk (most people in this economy). I predict a rise in antivirus company share prices. If Apple do make the rumoured cheap A-series based MacBook, it could be a hit.
spuz 10mo ago
I honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.
solumunus 10mo ago
It feels that way. I’m just one person but I’ve tried Linux several times over the decades and never stuck with it, for various reasons. Last year I got so fed up of Windows and tried Ubuntu. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Ubuntu has been good out of the box, but another difference to when I last tried Linux is the invention of LLM’s. Any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved through troubleshooting with Claude/Perplexity, and I’ve used both to quickly learn the things I need. There were occasions last time where I spent literal days trying to fix things through searching and that was intolerable.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
I've even seen gaming YTbers I occasionally watch being fed up with that shit and moving or at least trying Linux MS fucked up
- lovehashbrowns 10mo ago
  Pewdiepie’s linux video alone is almost at 8 million views. There’s another 3-4 million views in reaction videos to it. I think primagen also stayed on archlinux after his ricing experiment
Notjoanbaez 10mo ago
It might be the alignment of several forces : - macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat… - Windows 11… - (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it. - LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands. All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.

by sylens 10mo ago

pshc 10mo ago

Yeah, myself and several friends of mine with EOL Windows 10 PCs are looking to jump ship.

cogman10 10mo ago

I've been seeing it a lot on reddit as well, with a lot of non-technical users asking "how do I get started with linux?" I think this is a real thing and I think a combination of MS demanding everyone get new hardware and Valve really polishing a lot of linux has gone a long way to get non-technical users to start seriously considering linux. It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it. And I know that laptop will continue to fly because, unlike windows, it's never going to get any sort of serious bloatware added on as I update it.

monero-xmr 10mo ago
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 Linux isn’t a problem. Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack. It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
- callc 10mo ago
  > 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.
  - monero-xmr 10mo ago
    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 all costs causes so many stupid short term benefits that hurt long term value. There is an enormous number of small companies you have never heard of like this. It’s just so short sighted to kill the golden goose to juice some profit
    - callc 10mo ago
      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
    - machomaster 10mo ago
      How did you manage to agree with VC?
      - monero-xmr 10mo ago
        Bought them out
  - theturtletalks 10mo ago
    It won’t help, because once those MBAs take VC money, the incentives push the product toward enshittification sooner or later. What we’re seeing instead is open-source becoming the real alternative. People used to look for other proprietary tools, but now open-source options are getting good enough, and more people are building personal software that fits their needs instead of bloated do-everything apps. That’s the shift. Open-source is rising, and I don’t think these companies can reverse course fast enough.
marginalia_nu 10mo ago
Yeah, I think a big part of the momentum toward Linux is from the end of Windows 10 support, and Windows 11's increased hardware demands. Given how rough and uncertain the economy is, this creates a large group of people who can't or aren't comfortable upgrading their computer, but at the same time don't want to be stuck on EOL Windows 10 forever either.
littlestymaar 10mo ago
> It's a huge added bonus that old hardware simply flies with linux. I have a 5 year old laptop that feels about 10x more responsive since I killed the windows install and put linux on it. I fact, Linux is much easier to run on somewhat older hardware because drivers are often a bit slow to land and Ubuntu and its derivatives always lag in kernel versions. Older hardware becoming more valuable because price hikes doubly benefit Linux.

sho_hn 10mo ago

KDE's income from individual donations has doubled recently, and many of the comments we get with donations are from recent Windows switchers. As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.

sylens 10mo ago
Thank you for reminding me that I should set up some recurring donations to the teams powering my Linux experience
- sho_hn 10mo ago
  Thank you very much in advance!
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
vanviegen 10mo ago
That increase in donations may also be due to more prominent prompting for them. Got me to donate, at least. But I would be pretty sad if the prompting were to get any more in-your-face than it currently already is.
- marginalia_nu 10mo ago
  It's a difficult balance, though I think most open source projects are too modest in asking for donations, which, fair enough is pretty uncomfortable at first. You can definitely be too in-your-face, like Jimbo Wales is the sad-eyed picture of taking this too far sometimes. Thing is that explicitly asking for money works, it gets results. If you can get people to pay money to watch you screaming at video games on Twitch, you can definitely get people to pay money for working on useful software.

glenstein 10mo ago

Indeed, it's the Linux super power. I've mentioned this before but my favorite linux adventure was, being a borderline penniless college student, having broken Toshiba Tecra 8000 from 1998 with a dead hard drive. But it had a working CD drive and USB port, so I got Puppy Linux 4.0 on a CD, booted from a CD, and installed to a 1gb USB stick and set it to boot from USB. I had Dillo for a web browser, a stripped down version of VLC that could play 360p Youtube videos without issue, downloaded via Youtube-DL. I had XMMS which looked just like Winamp, and Sega/Nintendo emulation and even Duke Nukem 3D. For programs I had epub/pdf/djview readers, xpaint which is like classic MS Paint, feh as a hyperlightweight all purpose image viewer and background manager, a super lightweight RSI break popup program, and even a fully functional web server stack. It also had a window manager (JWM) that handled multiple desktops more intuitively and effortlessly than Windows does now.

mixmastamyk 10mo ago
Hah. Feh, I still use that once in a while. It is one of very few image viewers that can lock in pan and zoom and then look over multiple frames. Good for checking which photo of a dozen is clearest, while zoomed in 800%.

lanthissa 10mo ago

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

coffeebeqn 10mo ago
Simpler - it is now objectively a much better OS and it’s free

leptons 10mo ago

If Microsoft could make me move to Linux, they will be getting a lot more people to switch. I was very into Microsoft's OS since v3.0, I used Outlook for all my email for decades. I recently moved over to Linux Mint and Firebird for email and have not looked back. All my Windows VMs are now Linux VMs. All of Microsoft's invasive "AI" was the last straw. I don't like the direction they are headed.

wltr 10mo ago
I was a bit puzzled by Firebird (I thought that’s a fork of Thunderbird, like, say, LibreWolf or Waterfox), but I couldn’t quickly find the project, so my assumption is that it’s just the misprint, and author thinking of Fire-fox -> Fire-bird, not being into ecosystem for too long to remember the actual bird. Anyway, that’s irrelevant to the point author’s making, and I’m happy there’s a new Linux adopter now. Thanks, M$, I guess.
- einpoklum 10mo ago
  Maybe it's supposed to be BetterBird [1], a Thunderbird tracking fork whose logo is a red phoenix rather than a blue bird? [1] : https://betterbird.eu/ https://betterbird.eu/
  - leptons 10mo ago
    I misremembered the name, it's Thunderbird. But thanks for your comment, I did not know about Betterbird, but I will give it a try!
- leptons 10mo ago
  Yes, I did not get the name right. Firefox -> Firebird is what I misremembered.

lynndotpy 10mo ago

Just anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum in my social circles. My friends and their parents (!!!) who are asking about Linux. My "year of the Linux desktop" was in 2010, because even then everything was much, much faster on Ubuntu. (It helps major browsers were shipping 64-bit versions for Linux only, but Minecraft simply did not run on my laptop under Windows). Does anyone else feel kind of sick (something like pity?) when they see people using Windows 11? Right click menus which have a loading spinner, advertisements littered throughout, and headlines from right-wing tabloids spammed in news widgets. These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. Proton work started after Windows 8 and really became usable in late 2019. Now we're seeing something again with Windows 11. It's awesome, hope it sticks.

ninth_ant 10mo ago
> These past six years have been absolutely bonkers incredible for Linux, and it can all be attributed to Microsoft shooting themselves in the head with Windows. It can’t all be attributed to Microsoft. There have been huge efforts by many parties to make this happen. Folks working on the Kernel, desktop environments, distros, applications, tooling, advocacy, and more. I believe people who say they are being pushed away from ms because of disillusionment with windows 11. But there also needs to be someone to pick up the ball after it was dropped — and those people deserve equal if not more credit
- lynndotpy 10mo ago
  Yeah, I should have been a bit more nuanced. I don't mean to dismiss the incredible mass of raw human achievement that is open source. Microsoft is one of Valve's direct competitors and Valve is totally dependent on Microsoft. Among the notoriously poorly-received changes in Windows 8, Microsoft also started to clamp down on who can run software. Valve saw the writing on the walls and released their first Steam Machines. But those flopped due to the state of Linux gaming at the time, they started pouring resources into Proton, which had the distinction from WINE in that they would develop Linux-specific patches. For sure, Valve would have nothing if WINE hadn't already done the bulk of the work, if Vulkan didn't exist, if Linux didn't exist, etc. But there's a world where Microsoft decided not to rock the boat with Windows, and in that world, Linux gamers would almost exclusively be dual booting.

stn8188 10mo ago

Same here. I spent a good chunk of the evening just today messing around with Steam to see what I could get running on Linux. It's been a while since I tried in earnest, but I got all the games I wanted running (minus VR, but that felt like it was close). Even though I barely play any games anymore, it's the last reason I haven't wiped my Win10 drive.

bsder 10mo ago

Avalanches start with small movements ... I'd argue that its drips and papercuts all over. Everything is trying to extract rent, and that makes things unreliable enough that even basic users are starting to notice. Um, can't connect to the Internet? Nope, you can't play a game on your machine, and you may not even be able to log in. Service hiccup? Booted from whatever you were doing because we can't extort your if we leave data on your machine. And, oh, if you have the nerve to complain, you ungrateful serf, we will kickban you with no recourse. etc. And this is before we even bring the AI bukkake into the picture ...

unsettledturtle 10mo ago

I think it's a lot of different factors coming together. The success of the steam deck has really breathed life into the linux gaming scene - certainly for me personally, that was the main blocker to switching from windows. That, plus (what feels like) a lot of recent advances in Linux. When I tried it... 2-3ish years ago? I recall e.g. fractional display scaling being basically nonfunctional. But when I tried again early 2025, it pretty much Just Worked (arguably even better than it did on windows), I just had to manually enable wayland. Pretty sure even that's just the default nowadays. Which basically sums up my personal windows -> linux pipeline: bought a steam deck, was impressed at how well it ran my steam library; had my old laptop finally die on me, ran my life off the steam deck for a while; decided to eventually build a new machine, and figured I might as well try installing linux from the get-go. Everything worked fine on the first try, and I ended up not even installing windows. certainly within my friend groups, I'm seeing more and more people entertaining the idea of making the switch as well. Admittedly, that's primarily "tech-savvy" folks though.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago
Yeah there are many things coming together on top of W11 fuckups. Proton was good, but SteamDeck did 2 things: * informed bigger public that hey, it is good enough for vast majority of games/gamers in the public eye * more importantly, *made developers care* about their stuff working on Steam Deck. And if it works on Steam Deck, very good chance it will work on <generic linux distro> just fine

willtemperley 10mo ago

Statistics show adoption rate is increasing. According to [1] it historically took a decade to double Linux desktop market share, but market share has almost doubled since 2022. Now, two in five PCs worldwide are running Windows 10, an unsuppoted OS. What are the user's options? Either buy a new PC, switch to Mac or run Linux. [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year-of-the-Linux-desktop-as-the-OS-attains-5-US-desktop-market-share-for-the-first-time.1060391.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/2025-could-finally-be-the-year...

Root_Denied 10mo ago
For a lot of those people the options are "spend a lot of money to upgrade your hardware to either run Win11 or buy a Macbook" or "use your existing hardware and ask your tech friend for a Linux distro recommendation". When prices are going nuts and the economy is tanking the option that doesn't cost you money starts to look a lot more appealing, and for some the first isn't even an option; they're completely priced out of the new market for the foreseeable future.
- willtemperley 10mo ago
  In reality, people will probably keep their insecure Win 10 machines running as long as they can. Linux is a leap especially for busy folk (most people in this economy). I predict a rise in antivirus company share prices. If Apple do make the rumoured cheap A-series based MacBook, it could be a hit.

spuz 10mo ago

I honest felt like the tide had turned when my elderly parents both asked me wipe Windows and install Linux on their laptops this Christmas. So far they have both had an overwhelming positive experience. They say it's such a relief not to have to dodge the minefield of popups and upsells and ads.

solumunus 10mo ago

It feels that way. I’m just one person but I’ve tried Linux several times over the decades and never stuck with it, for various reasons. Last year I got so fed up of Windows and tried Ubuntu. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Ubuntu has been good out of the box, but another difference to when I last tried Linux is the invention of LLM’s. Any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved through troubleshooting with Claude/Perplexity, and I’ve used both to quickly learn the things I need. There were occasions last time where I spent literal days trying to fix things through searching and that was intolerable.

deleted 10mo ago

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PunchyHamster 10mo ago

I've even seen gaming YTbers I occasionally watch being fed up with that shit and moving or at least trying Linux MS fucked up

lovehashbrowns 10mo ago
Pewdiepie’s linux video alone is almost at 8 million views. There’s another 3-4 million views in reaction videos to it. I think primagen also stayed on archlinux after his ricing experiment

Notjoanbaez 10mo ago

It might be the alignment of several forces : - macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat… - Windows 11… - (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it. - LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands. All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.