5 ms·

I know it sounds crazy at this point, but with popular YouTubers switching to Linux, gamers overall well-aware of Steam on Linux advantages and switching as wel

by cromka 7mo ago

I know it sounds crazy at this point, but with popular YouTubers switching to Linux, gamers overall well-aware of Steam on Linux advantages and switching as well, plus popular software like LittleSnitch getting ported, 2026 can without irony be named as Year of Linux Desktop, right?

dainank 7mo ago
I think there is a lot of talk (and this is good), but very little action. Market share is still incredibly low for LNX. I believe only a small subset of people actually attempt the jump from WIN to LNX (since most just want to play their games and run their programs without hassle) and then quickly realize that its tougher than they anticipated and swiftly return to WIN.
- Doxin 7mo ago
  5% on the steam survey though. The jump isn't quite as big from previous years as it seems as they did some corrections to the statistics this year, but 5% is nothing to sneeze at.
  - npodbielski 7mo ago
    Exactly! Me personally in 2010 would never though about the time when one on every 20 gamers will be Linux user. That is huge IMHO.
    - veber-alex 7mo ago
      I wouldn't be too exited. Statistics like this are very problematic. For example, I have Steam installed on my Macbook pro and I occasionally play a single very simple game there. Does that make me a macOS gamer? of course not. The vast majority of games I want to play don't work on macOS. I suspect that most of those 5% are just Linux users who have steam installed and play a small amount of games. Some probably just installed it to check what's available and don't play anything. Everyone I know who is a "serious" gamer, as in exited about upcoming releases of AAA games is using Windows.
      - npodbielski 7mo ago
        That would mean that it still would be around 0,5%. If you want to split the hair probably 4,5% of this 5% is Steam Deck.
      - dainank 7mo ago
        Indeed. The bigger problem is also that consistently the most played games are multiplayer competitive titles with anti-cheat software that is only written for Windows (and sometimes MacOS). I suppose this issue will solve itself, once enough people start playing on Linux. Then developers will be forced to support that too in order to not lose too much of their player base, but we are still a far cry from this threshold.
        Doxin 7mo ago
        I'm not convinced "most played" is the relevant criteria here. That's easily skewed by games which are time-sinks, like PvP games with draconic anti-cheat and DRM. That doesn't make those games more important than games which absorb less playtime.
- rounce 7mo ago
  What’s with the weird abbreviations?
  - kwanbix 7mo ago
    He is saving 4 keystrokes out of ~400 by typing LNX instead of Linux.
    - freedomben 7mo ago
      But holding the shift key makes up for it, so seems like a bad strategy
      - dainank 7mo ago
        You are overthinking it. It is neither a strategy nor keystroke saving (although technically with shift its 4 keystrokes as opposed to 5 for Linux and quite a few saved for Windows). I just typed that without thinking probably because it looks better and reads a bit easier (subjectively).
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- Latty 7mo ago
  This is true, but also the original comment still stands: Linux desktop usage outside developers was so low that it was barely worth mentioning before, so even a small uptick like this is a serious change, and it's how bigger changes start. I definitely don't think it's even the likely outcome, but for Linux to get serious traction this is how it has to start: power users but not the traditional developer crowd start actually moving, and in doing so produce the guides, experience, word of mouth, and motivation that normal people need to do so, alongside the institutional support from Valve to actually fix the bugs and issues. It remains to be seen if a critical mass will find it usable long-term, but if it were to happen, this is how it would look at the start, and Microsoft are certainly doing their best to push people away right now, although I suspect the real winner is more likely to be Apple with the Macbook Neo sucking up more of the lower end.
  - sgbeal 7mo ago
    > Microsoft are certainly doing their best to push people away right now According to a speculative blog post by Eric S. Raymond in September 2020, Microsoft is literally moving towards replacing Windows' internals with Linux. Unfortunately, that post is now unreachable, but searching for "eric raymond article about windows being replaced with a linux kernel" finds many third-party references to it and summaries of it.
    - zbikowski 7mo ago
      Last phase of the desktop wars? by Eric Raymond: https://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 https://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764
- aqme28 7mo ago
  As someone who did make the jump, it was actually a lot easier than I anticipated. I encourage others to do the same. The only games I can't play are some AAA multiplayer games I wasn't particularly interested in anyways.
  - dainank 7mo ago
    I think for people who are browsing this site, it will certainly be easier than expected. For the average person, most likely not.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  I hope more and more folks who want gaming computers realize how turnkey bazzite is, especially if you’re team red. It’s pretty remarkable
IshKebab 7mo ago
No.
Perz1val 7mo ago
Also unrelated, but more linux gamers proves my personal observation that on the spectrum of computer literacy gamers are just below powerusers and programmers. We see more less technical people migrate over to Linux gradually and now it's gamers turn. Well, that's kind of obvious for everybody except Microsoft apparently.
notThrowingAway 7mo ago
The year of the Linux Desktop will always be $CURRENT_YEAR + 1
- dmos62 7mo ago
  What do you call a fallacy where it is implied that the future will be like the past?
  - j-bos 7mo ago
    Maybe similar to boy who cried wolf?
  - xpe 7mo ago
    Reminds me about schools of thought on rates of change: > ## Accelerating Change [One School] > > Our intuitions about change are linear; we expect roughly > as much change as has occurred in the past over our own > lifetimes. But technological change feeds on itself, and > therefore accelerates. Change today is faster than it was > 500 years ago, which in turn is faster than it was 5000 > years ago. Our recent past is not a reliable guide to how > much change we should expect in the future. > > Strong claim: Technological change follows smooth curves, > typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair > precision when new technologies will arrive, and when they > will cross key thresholds, like the creation of [AI]. > > Advocates: Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler(?), John Smart https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools
    - mayukh 7mo ago
      linear % change implies exponential change in absolute terms
  - almostjazz 7mo ago
    Problem of induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
  - BeetleB 7mo ago
raincole 7mo ago
> 2026 can without irony be named as Year of Linux Desktop, right? For whom? Average desktop users? Average users don't know what LittleSnitch is, let alone calling it "popular software."
- cromka 7mo ago
  That's some beautiful, text-book straw man!
  - raincole 7mo ago
    ? So for whom?
- watusername 7mo ago
  For Linux desktop users. A bit of tongue-in-cheek but that's pretty much the argument that I've heard in some circles ("it works for us and not going away anytime soon - why waste time convincing others?").
brainzap 7mo ago
does wifi work yet? last year it didnt for me
- weberer 7mo ago
  Wifi has been working out of the box for close to 20 years now. On some computers with old Broadcom cards, you have to enable non-free drivers. What model are you using?
- janc_ 7mo ago
  WiFi works fine if there are drivers for whatever WiFi chip you have. Unfortunately there are no standards for OS to talk to WiFi devices like exist for many other types of hardware, so it’s not possible to make generic drivers.
- JoBrad 7mo ago
  Did you forget your WiFi password?
- einsteinx2 7mo ago
  yes
- IshKebab 7mo ago
  Wifi and Bluetooth are pretty decent now. As far as I can tell the biggest blockers are: * Laptop battery life. Still in the "it's fine; I get 5 hours!" stage. * Wayland & graphics. It's still a mess. Getting there though. Probably will be ok in about 5 years I'd guess. * RAM management. I don't know why nobody cares about this but when Mac or Windows run low of RAM I don't even notice. With Linux it either hard freezes and reboots, or hard freezes for like 5 minutes and then kills a completely random program. How is that ok? My solution here was to upgrade both my computers to 128 GB of RAM, but that isn't really a viable option today! * Generally bugginess. Both KDE and Gnome are just not as rock solid as Windows 11. I know I'll get downvoted for this but I haven't experienced a single crash on Windows 11 (and no ads or bloatware because I did research and used the LTSC edition). In KDE, much as I love it, the taskbar crashes regularly and I cannot make head nor tail of the completely random order it wants to put windows in. You can't even drag them into a sensible order. Gnome was not much better. Still KDE is a lot better now than it was in the kidney bean days so I reckon in another 5 years it will probably be pretty solid too.
lilOnion 7mo ago
2026 is the year of the linux phone. We need to embrace that the year of the linux desktop (2025) was successful.
- ta8903 7mo ago
  Sadly year of the linux phone feels like it's getting farther away.
- gonzalohm 7mo ago
  I wish. I'm tired of not owning my phone. But I don't see a push being done to get a proper Linux phone
- delusional 7mo ago
  What does "the year of the Linux phone" mean when half the phones already run Linux?
  - mavhc 7mo ago
    And the other half run BSD
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    Android/Google does not fulfill the spirit of that. Yes it’s technically Linux, but it’s not what one expects from a Linux experience. We all know this, we all know Linux is under the hood, but “Linux phone” is basically shorthand for more user control, more open source aspects, more secure/private, and far away from companies like Google/apple/etc. Android phones do not fill that request even with graphene and such. Google still has too much control.
- lossyalgo 7mo ago
  According to latest Steam stats[0], Linux hit > 5% for the first time ever, so definitely successful (to some degree). [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/steam-hardware-software-survey-welcome-to-steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/steam-hardware-softw...
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
a-dub 7mo ago
kde linux may make it happen. that and command line agents that help people fix their systems.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  It’s definitely what converted me (steamOS first real experience, then mint, pop, and now bazzite)
collinmanderson 7mo ago
France is trying to switch to desktop linux. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486 I think AI also makes it easier to deal with issues that come up.

by cromka 7mo ago

dainank 7mo ago

I think there is a lot of talk (and this is good), but very little action. Market share is still incredibly low for LNX. I believe only a small subset of people actually attempt the jump from WIN to LNX (since most just want to play their games and run their programs without hassle) and then quickly realize that its tougher than they anticipated and swiftly return to WIN.

Doxin 7mo ago
5% on the steam survey though. The jump isn't quite as big from previous years as it seems as they did some corrections to the statistics this year, but 5% is nothing to sneeze at.
- npodbielski 7mo ago
  Exactly! Me personally in 2010 would never though about the time when one on every 20 gamers will be Linux user. That is huge IMHO.
  - veber-alex 7mo ago
    I wouldn't be too exited. Statistics like this are very problematic. For example, I have Steam installed on my Macbook pro and I occasionally play a single very simple game there. Does that make me a macOS gamer? of course not. The vast majority of games I want to play don't work on macOS. I suspect that most of those 5% are just Linux users who have steam installed and play a small amount of games. Some probably just installed it to check what's available and don't play anything. Everyone I know who is a "serious" gamer, as in exited about upcoming releases of AAA games is using Windows.
    - npodbielski 7mo ago
      That would mean that it still would be around 0,5%. If you want to split the hair probably 4,5% of this 5% is Steam Deck.
    - dainank 7mo ago
      Indeed. The bigger problem is also that consistently the most played games are multiplayer competitive titles with anti-cheat software that is only written for Windows (and sometimes MacOS). I suppose this issue will solve itself, once enough people start playing on Linux. Then developers will be forced to support that too in order to not lose too much of their player base, but we are still a far cry from this threshold.
      - Doxin 7mo ago
        I'm not convinced "most played" is the relevant criteria here. That's easily skewed by games which are time-sinks, like PvP games with draconic anti-cheat and DRM. That doesn't make those games more important than games which absorb less playtime.
rounce 7mo ago
What’s with the weird abbreviations?
- kwanbix 7mo ago
  He is saving 4 keystrokes out of ~400 by typing LNX instead of Linux.
  - freedomben 7mo ago
    But holding the shift key makes up for it, so seems like a bad strategy
    - dainank 7mo ago
      You are overthinking it. It is neither a strategy nor keystroke saving (although technically with shift its 4 keystrokes as opposed to 5 for Linux and quite a few saved for Windows). I just typed that without thinking probably because it looks better and reads a bit easier (subjectively).
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
Latty 7mo ago
This is true, but also the original comment still stands: Linux desktop usage outside developers was so low that it was barely worth mentioning before, so even a small uptick like this is a serious change, and it's how bigger changes start. I definitely don't think it's even the likely outcome, but for Linux to get serious traction this is how it has to start: power users but not the traditional developer crowd start actually moving, and in doing so produce the guides, experience, word of mouth, and motivation that normal people need to do so, alongside the institutional support from Valve to actually fix the bugs and issues. It remains to be seen if a critical mass will find it usable long-term, but if it were to happen, this is how it would look at the start, and Microsoft are certainly doing their best to push people away right now, although I suspect the real winner is more likely to be Apple with the Macbook Neo sucking up more of the lower end.
- sgbeal 7mo ago
  > Microsoft are certainly doing their best to push people away right now According to a speculative blog post by Eric S. Raymond in September 2020, Microsoft is literally moving towards replacing Windows' internals with Linux. Unfortunately, that post is now unreachable, but searching for "eric raymond article about windows being replaced with a linux kernel" finds many third-party references to it and summaries of it.
  - zbikowski 7mo ago
    Last phase of the desktop wars? by Eric Raymond: https://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 https://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764
aqme28 7mo ago
As someone who did make the jump, it was actually a lot easier than I anticipated. I encourage others to do the same. The only games I can't play are some AAA multiplayer games I wasn't particularly interested in anyways.
- dainank 7mo ago
  I think for people who are browsing this site, it will certainly be easier than expected. For the average person, most likely not.
Forgeties79 7mo ago
I hope more and more folks who want gaming computers realize how turnkey bazzite is, especially if you’re team red. It’s pretty remarkable

IshKebab 7mo ago

No.

Perz1val 7mo ago

Also unrelated, but more linux gamers proves my personal observation that on the spectrum of computer literacy gamers are just below powerusers and programmers. We see more less technical people migrate over to Linux gradually and now it's gamers turn. Well, that's kind of obvious for everybody except Microsoft apparently.

notThrowingAway 7mo ago

The year of the Linux Desktop will always be $CURRENT_YEAR + 1

dmos62 7mo ago
What do you call a fallacy where it is implied that the future will be like the past?
- j-bos 7mo ago
  Maybe similar to boy who cried wolf?
- xpe 7mo ago
  Reminds me about schools of thought on rates of change: > ## Accelerating Change [One School] > > Our intuitions about change are linear; we expect roughly > as much change as has occurred in the past over our own > lifetimes. But technological change feeds on itself, and > therefore accelerates. Change today is faster than it was > 500 years ago, which in turn is faster than it was 5000 > years ago. Our recent past is not a reliable guide to how > much change we should expect in the future. > > Strong claim: Technological change follows smooth curves, > typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair > precision when new technologies will arrive, and when they > will cross key thresholds, like the creation of [AI]. > > Advocates: Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler(?), John Smart https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools
  - mayukh 7mo ago
    linear % change implies exponential change in absolute terms
- almostjazz 7mo ago
  Problem of induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
- BeetleB 7mo ago

raincole 7mo ago

> 2026 can without irony be named as Year of Linux Desktop, right? For whom? Average desktop users? Average users don't know what LittleSnitch is, let alone calling it "popular software."

cromka 7mo ago
That's some beautiful, text-book straw man!
- raincole 7mo ago
  ? So for whom?
watusername 7mo ago
For Linux desktop users. A bit of tongue-in-cheek but that's pretty much the argument that I've heard in some circles ("it works for us and not going away anytime soon - why waste time convincing others?").

brainzap 7mo ago

does wifi work yet? last year it didnt for me

weberer 7mo ago
Wifi has been working out of the box for close to 20 years now. On some computers with old Broadcom cards, you have to enable non-free drivers. What model are you using?
janc_ 7mo ago
WiFi works fine if there are drivers for whatever WiFi chip you have. Unfortunately there are no standards for OS to talk to WiFi devices like exist for many other types of hardware, so it’s not possible to make generic drivers.
JoBrad 7mo ago
Did you forget your WiFi password?
einsteinx2 7mo ago
yes
IshKebab 7mo ago
Wifi and Bluetooth are pretty decent now. As far as I can tell the biggest blockers are: * Laptop battery life. Still in the "it's fine; I get 5 hours!" stage. * Wayland & graphics. It's still a mess. Getting there though. Probably will be ok in about 5 years I'd guess. * RAM management. I don't know why nobody cares about this but when Mac or Windows run low of RAM I don't even notice. With Linux it either hard freezes and reboots, or hard freezes for like 5 minutes and then kills a completely random program. How is that ok? My solution here was to upgrade both my computers to 128 GB of RAM, but that isn't really a viable option today! * Generally bugginess. Both KDE and Gnome are just not as rock solid as Windows 11. I know I'll get downvoted for this but I haven't experienced a single crash on Windows 11 (and no ads or bloatware because I did research and used the LTSC edition). In KDE, much as I love it, the taskbar crashes regularly and I cannot make head nor tail of the completely random order it wants to put windows in. You can't even drag them into a sensible order. Gnome was not much better. Still KDE is a lot better now than it was in the kidney bean days so I reckon in another 5 years it will probably be pretty solid too.

lilOnion 7mo ago

2026 is the year of the linux phone. We need to embrace that the year of the linux desktop (2025) was successful.

ta8903 7mo ago
Sadly year of the linux phone feels like it's getting farther away.
gonzalohm 7mo ago
I wish. I'm tired of not owning my phone. But I don't see a push being done to get a proper Linux phone
delusional 7mo ago
What does "the year of the Linux phone" mean when half the phones already run Linux?
- mavhc 7mo ago
  And the other half run BSD
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  Android/Google does not fulfill the spirit of that. Yes it’s technically Linux, but it’s not what one expects from a Linux experience. We all know this, we all know Linux is under the hood, but “Linux phone” is basically shorthand for more user control, more open source aspects, more secure/private, and far away from companies like Google/apple/etc. Android phones do not fill that request even with graphene and such. Google still has too much control.
lossyalgo 7mo ago
According to latest Steam stats[0], Linux hit > 5% for the first time ever, so definitely successful (to some degree). [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/steam-hardware-software-survey-welcome-to-steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/steam-hardware-softw...

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

a-dub 7mo ago

kde linux may make it happen. that and command line agents that help people fix their systems.

Forgeties79 7mo ago
It’s definitely what converted me (steamOS first real experience, then mint, pop, and now bazzite)

collinmanderson 7mo ago

France is trying to switch to desktop linux. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716043 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719486 I think AI also makes it easier to deal with issues that come up.