5 ms·

The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this spac

The age of the Linux desktop might actually finally be coming Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in . On top of that it could be great to see SteamOS continue to gain share and become more than just something people run on gaming purpose hardware. And thirdly would love to see a more simplistic but super lean and functional OS built on something like the BSD.

upcoming-sesame 7mo ago
honestly since the browser has more or less become the real operating system the host OS doesn't matter so much anymore. most people do 90% of their work in the browser anyway
- red_admiral 7mo ago
  There's an xkcd for that ;) https://xkcd.com/934/ https://xkcd.com/934/
jodrellblank 7mo ago
> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro" Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile
- bostik 7mo ago
  They killed any Linux device development at Nokia in 2011. Still salty about Elop shooting down a project we had spent 5 years working towards. The holistic platform security for a combined phone/tablet base system would have been really interesting.
  - sn 7mo ago
    I'm not sure if I would have started using Linux but for buying an n800, so thanks for that. We never did get around to our funeral for Nokia, sadly.
    - rbanffy 7mo ago
      I'll make sure I toast Nokia at Elop's funeral.
    - bostik 7mo ago
      Hah, if you ever used the N800 media player you will have been exposed to a tiny bit of my code. Some of the UI polishes and usability tweaks were mine. (Well, someone else had figured out they needed to be done and the bug landed on my lap...) "/* Here be dragons */" in a particularly hideous d-pointer punching chain must have been a surprise for whomever eventually picked it up.
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
> Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space... And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge. Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon. I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it. The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof. Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option. Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.
jjcm 7mo ago
I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year. There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a typical user would need. I'd love to see either Valve or Nvidia really put in effort into creating their own hardware/software integration on a level that Apple does. I think it'd go a long way to legitimizing it.
- Terr_ 7mo ago
  Yeah, for example a bunch of my system updates began showing scary error notes because somehow there is a header inconsistency between the amdgpu driver and the kernel. I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.
  - chopin 7mo ago
    One can call Windows support? And get help?
    - paulryanrogers 7mo ago
      Arguably there are more support options for Windows because it's got fewer derivatives than Linux, and was historically more common on desktop.
- olivierestsage 7mo ago
  Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.
  - rbanffy 7mo ago
    This is the saddest part - they actually think computers suck that much and don't know their lives could be a lot easier.
red_admiral 7mo ago
big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration? The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeoffs like Microsoft or Google or Apple have to make today, and somehow deal with the "curl ... |sh" problem.
- fao_ 7mo ago
  > but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde-plasma-again/ https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...
- 1718627440 7mo ago
  Why does there need to be a standard application for everything? Is there a default pencil vendor? A default printer vendor? Paper? Car manufacturer? Taxi company? Just let people buy/get whatever vendor/application they like. I rather see more interoperational standards.
  - red_admiral 7mo ago
    I guarantee you, in a large enough organisation, there will be exactly one approved pencil supplier. That's how corporate purchasing works. There's a lot of cases where this actually makes sense for compliance, support, and service level agreements between your org and the vendor's among many other cases. It just gets annoying when you absolutely cannot buy coffee beans from shop B on the team consumables budget because we have an exclusive contract with shop A. In a governmental organisation, you might even need a public bidding process for any supplier contract big enough to cover printers and their ink/toner, as well as a support contract if something breaks.
cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
Personally i think there is a huge innovationspace for pipe connected agents doing work for the user.. a example: A firefox agent downloading pictures of cats.. piping them to a graphics program drawing mustaches on them piping them to a moviemaker piping them to a firefox video uploading "the longest catswithmustaches" shorts compilation ever.. all clicked together in a "incredibble machine" like explorer by a user who doesent even know how to code..
- tim-projects 7mo ago
  But you can do that already with bash pipes. Doing it through the GUI just adds mega complexity
  - cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
    You can. I can. But with ai writing the glue code from a visible editor everyone can.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
dschep 7mo ago
> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro" SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  Does SUSE normally come up in conversations about "easy to use" linux distros for "normal" users? I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.
  - alecsm 7mo ago
    Suse is easy to use, just not mainstream.
  - Neikius 7mo ago
    I am suse user for 20+ years with a big break in between. To me it fits the best. Ubuntu I gave up on a while ago and came back to find things so much nicer. They have a slightly different take on immutable than redhat but it also works well (rollback and all). Also the tumbleweed rolling is quite stable for a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Using it on a few boxes for the last few years and also installing it for other PC noobs and they seem fine with it.
  - dismalaf 7mo ago
    Yes. It was as easy to use as Windows was like 30 years ago. It's still easy to use. The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)
  - looperhacks 7mo ago
    I remember SUSE not being harder to use then any other desktop distribution. But it has a lot, and I mean a lot of knobs to turn if you want to. But you don't have to.
krsw 7mo ago
Yeah, I think if Windows 11 is going subscription based (plus all the copilot pushing garbage and even more baked in ads) that will be a strong incentive to switch to Linux or SteamOS. I barely even play games enough anymore to make a desktop worthwhile. Might just jump to Mac only.
- wolvoleo 7mo ago
  They can't do that, when they've already sold you lifetime licenses. They could however introduce a subscription-only windows 12 and have harsh cut-off requirements like they did with windows 11.
  - boznz 7mo ago
    A subscription-only OS would effectively kill Windows, but MS have made enough pretty weird decisions to cripple the product I wouldn't put it past them.
  - estimator7292 7mo ago
    They also "can't" screengrab your credit card numbers or upload all your private data to their cloud for inspection, or steal your email password and download all your mail to a Microsoft server, or send fake emails about full OneDrive to trick you into subscribing. "Can't" only applies when someone is willing to stop them, and nobody is. Microsoft can do pretty much anything they want and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
    - babypuncher 7mo ago
      I'm pretty sure "can't" in this context is legally binding. Windows licenses up to this point have been sold without expiration dates. If Microsoft suddenly started charging a subscription to keep using the same copy of Windows, evey law firm on the planet would jump on that in an instant. What GP proposed is the much more likely avenue they would take: New version of Windows with a new licensing model. It would probably kill their consumer business overnight, but at least it wouldn't get their lawyers laughed out of a courtroom.

upcoming-sesame 7mo ago

honestly since the browser has more or less become the real operating system the host OS doesn't matter so much anymore. most people do 90% of their work in the browser anyway

red_admiral 7mo ago
There's an xkcd for that ;) https://xkcd.com/934/ https://xkcd.com/934/

jodrellblank 7mo ago

> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro" Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile

bostik 7mo ago
They killed any Linux device development at Nokia in 2011. Still salty about Elop shooting down a project we had spent 5 years working towards. The holistic platform security for a combined phone/tablet base system would have been really interesting.
- sn 7mo ago
  I'm not sure if I would have started using Linux but for buying an n800, so thanks for that. We never did get around to our funeral for Nokia, sadly.
  - rbanffy 7mo ago
    I'll make sure I toast Nokia at Elop's funeral.
  - bostik 7mo ago
    Hah, if you ever used the N800 media player you will have been exposed to a tiny bit of my code. Some of the UI polishes and usability tweaks were mine. (Well, someone else had figured out they needed to be done and the bug landed on my lap...) "/* Here be dragons */" in a particularly hideous d-pointer punching chain must have been a surprise for whomever eventually picked it up.

TacticalCoder 7mo ago

> Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space... And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge. Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon. I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it. The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof. Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option. Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.

jjcm 7mo ago

I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year. There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a typical user would need. I'd love to see either Valve or Nvidia really put in effort into creating their own hardware/software integration on a level that Apple does. I think it'd go a long way to legitimizing it.

Terr_ 7mo ago
Yeah, for example a bunch of my system updates began showing scary error notes because somehow there is a header inconsistency between the amdgpu driver and the kernel. I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.
- chopin 7mo ago
  One can call Windows support? And get help?
  - paulryanrogers 7mo ago
    Arguably there are more support options for Windows because it's got fewer derivatives than Linux, and was historically more common on desktop.
olivierestsage 7mo ago
Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.
- rbanffy 7mo ago
  This is the saddest part - they actually think computers suck that much and don't know their lives could be a lot easier.

red_admiral 7mo ago

big player + (standard) linux desktop may well be coming, but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. Will the standard be gnome or KDE or XFCE or ...? If gnome, version 2 or 3? Firefox or chrome as the default browser (or derivatives like waterfox or plain chromium ...)? AI integration? The moment you're developing for people with no IT experience and no CS degree, you're going to have to make tradeoffs like Microsoft or Google or Apple have to make today, and somehow deal with the "curl ... |sh" problem.

fao_ 7mo ago
> but that means losing the semi-anarchist bazaar mentality. The places you mention are already receiving huge doses of industry funding funnelled through the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it looks like the standard is going to be KDE. Even microsoft is copying it for their next DE: https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde-plasma-again/ https://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-windows-ripping-off-kde...
1718627440 7mo ago
Why does there need to be a standard application for everything? Is there a default pencil vendor? A default printer vendor? Paper? Car manufacturer? Taxi company? Just let people buy/get whatever vendor/application they like. I rather see more interoperational standards.
- red_admiral 7mo ago
  I guarantee you, in a large enough organisation, there will be exactly one approved pencil supplier. That's how corporate purchasing works. There's a lot of cases where this actually makes sense for compliance, support, and service level agreements between your org and the vendor's among many other cases. It just gets annoying when you absolutely cannot buy coffee beans from shop B on the team consumables budget because we have an exclusive contract with shop A. In a governmental organisation, you might even need a public bidding process for any supplier contract big enough to cover printers and their ink/toner, as well as a support contract if something breaks.

cineticdaffodil 7mo ago

Personally i think there is a huge innovationspace for pipe connected agents doing work for the user.. a example: A firefox agent downloading pictures of cats.. piping them to a graphics program drawing mustaches on them piping them to a moviemaker piping them to a firefox video uploading "the longest catswithmustaches" shorts compilation ever.. all clicked together in a "incredibble machine" like explorer by a user who doesent even know how to code..

tim-projects 7mo ago
But you can do that already with bash pipes. Doing it through the GUI just adds mega complexity
- cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
  You can. I can. But with ai writing the glue code from a visible editor everyone can.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

dschep 7mo ago

> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro" SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.

SoftTalker 7mo ago
Does SUSE normally come up in conversations about "easy to use" linux distros for "normal" users? I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.
- alecsm 7mo ago
  Suse is easy to use, just not mainstream.
- Neikius 7mo ago
  I am suse user for 20+ years with a big break in between. To me it fits the best. Ubuntu I gave up on a while ago and came back to find things so much nicer. They have a slightly different take on immutable than redhat but it also works well (rollback and all). Also the tumbleweed rolling is quite stable for a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Using it on a few boxes for the last few years and also installing it for other PC noobs and they seem fine with it.
- dismalaf 7mo ago
  Yes. It was as easy to use as Windows was like 30 years ago. It's still easy to use. The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)
- looperhacks 7mo ago
  I remember SUSE not being harder to use then any other desktop distribution. But it has a lot, and I mean a lot of knobs to turn if you want to. But you don't have to.

krsw 7mo ago

Yeah, I think if Windows 11 is going subscription based (plus all the copilot pushing garbage and even more baked in ads) that will be a strong incentive to switch to Linux or SteamOS. I barely even play games enough anymore to make a desktop worthwhile. Might just jump to Mac only.

wolvoleo 7mo ago
They can't do that, when they've already sold you lifetime licenses. They could however introduce a subscription-only windows 12 and have harsh cut-off requirements like they did with windows 11.
- boznz 7mo ago
  A subscription-only OS would effectively kill Windows, but MS have made enough pretty weird decisions to cripple the product I wouldn't put it past them.
- estimator7292 7mo ago
  They also "can't" screengrab your credit card numbers or upload all your private data to their cloud for inspection, or steal your email password and download all your mail to a Microsoft server, or send fake emails about full OneDrive to trick you into subscribing. "Can't" only applies when someone is willing to stop them, and nobody is. Microsoft can do pretty much anything they want and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
  - babypuncher 7mo ago
    I'm pretty sure "can't" in this context is legally binding. Windows licenses up to this point have been sold without expiration dates. If Microsoft suddenly started charging a subscription to keep using the same copy of Windows, evey law firm on the planet would jump on that in an instant. What GP proposed is the much more likely avenue they would take: New version of Windows with a new licensing model. It would probably kill their consumer business overnight, but at least it wouldn't get their lawyers laughed out of a courtroom.