alt Hacker News2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
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There is no such thing as "desktop Linux". What we have instead is a large collection of distros, each with its own UX, unlike Windows or macOS which present a relatively unified platform.
I switched to Linux many years ago because a new laptop was unusably slow under the Windows Vista it came with, and I have not looked back since, yet I'd never recommend Linux to "the masses". Linux can work well for people who just browse the web and read email. Beyond that, the experience quickly becomes dependent on having a knowledgeable person nearby to help with choosing software and supported hardware or troubleshooting it.
To me, articles like this show how disconnected many technically inclined people are from average users' experience. Things like bloated software or aggressive advertising may be annoying to us, but to most users they are just part of using a computer.
> At the very least, when something goes wrong on Linux you have log messages that can let you know what went wrong so you can search for it.
It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
Been following this blog for a while and this is the last person I would have expected to be a Windows user.
I run Kubuntu on this gaming machine (AlienWare) and I run it on my 16 year old Dell laptop I used for work back then. Runs great and with RAM prices high and people looking to make their older machines useful instead of trashing them, there's a really good chance they can run Linux.
Let's use the influx of new users to get some money flowing!
It would be great if all those "I switched to Linux" articles would mention a few ways to donate to some important projects, helping to make FOSS thrive.
I recently switched to Linux for all development. I still use my Mac for everything else.
The main reason was to protect my personal data from possible supply chain issues or LLM agent mishaps.
I’m 99% in VSCode, a browser, and a terminal. There’s hardly a difference day-to-day.
Funny that at the last minute of 2025 (at least in my country), I wrote a blog post titled "2025 is the Year of Linux Desktop, at least for me".
It is just a short post to note about how in 2025 some of my friends are finally migrating to Linux. And that was something awesome for me.
https://blog.juliardi.com/2025-is-the-year-of-linux-desktop-...
Last year I got a laptop with Linux, after a Mac gap of 6 years (work) and it's been super smooth with NixOS and KDE.
My main issue now was the 16GB of RAM using a VM and working on rust, which would kill the system, but now I have more, so all the issues are gone.
One of the machines has become a media-center, with a remote keyboard, anyone at home can operate now.
Multiple screens, bluetooth, drag and drop, night/light all seems to be working
For me, 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop. I wanted a replacement for an M1, something beefy to build side projects etc., so I custom built a PC and put NixOS on it. Still rocking it and quite happy with it.
2026 will certainly be the year of the 'I'm switching to Linux' thinkpieces
Tempted to do the same. Like it’s a good OS but Microsoft seems intent to drive it into the ground by being insanely annoying. PowerToys is the only bright spot right now.
With the new PopOS Cosmic and them dumping GNOME for their own UI framework based on Iced [0] (and based on rust), I have high hopes that things will move to more linux (especially for folks here who are rust-heads).
[0]: https://iced.rs/
It will be mine as well but only because consumer agentic AI became available and good. Only it makes all quirks and hardware incompatibilities bearable. I tell it to investigate the problem and it does an incredible amount of digging to help find the cause and eventually, after several iteration, either fix it or implement a good enough crutch. Even then it takes minutes to hours and I would take months.
This rings true...outside of users that play competitive FPS...the anticheat continues to be a challenge
As a side note - if you're in that venn diagram overlap group of linux and gaming...check out "beyond all reason" RTS if you haven't. High chance it'll tickle you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wxwIxz4PaY
edit: not affiliate to linked yt - organic enthusiastism
I started using Linux Mint on my Framework laptop. That's 99% of my desktop usage. I do have a gaming PC that's rarely used that I keep for windows. Mainly for the odd game and/or the odd windows thing but it's pretty rare since nearly all my gaming is now on my Steam Deck.
I installed Ubuntu in October just to play around with AI models (python and CLI in general was so hard to deal with in Windows) and I realized that I didn't ever need to boot back into windows, not for gaming, not for anything. It was really relieving.
For me Windows XP was the intolerably ugly release that made me switch once and for all in 2002. Never looked back.
I do what I can by serving webapps from my Linux server, or using command line, but I haven't had much success with a Linux RDP or VNC server that can compete with MS RDP for performance. If I could do that I'd switch fully. Does anyone have recommendations?
I have to use Windows sometimes at work, and of all indignities, this is surely a small one, but it is an indignity. Everyone complains about ads, which is a real issue, but to me the biggest issue is how blatantly suboptimal everything is. Nobody has put any effort into making Windows good for a very very long time. The terminal and/or powershell is incredibly slow - ls should not take perceptible time to execute. The settings menus are made with 3 to 5 different layers of UI frameworks and design guidelines. Forced OneDrive. The pestering about copilot... I even like LLMs, but my user experience is so clearly subordinate to some KPI that it annoys me anyway. I'm sure I could come up with more if I had touched it recently, but I thankfully haven't.
Proprietary, closed user experiences are like microwave home dinners. There’s every reason to hope they can be good, it is very common for them to be crap, and while its possible to hack your own microwave meals you will be doing so in a sub optimal environment with limited options.
An open, modular, diverse UX is like having a stocked kitchen of staples, pans, tools, fresh produce, and a stove. You add a toaster oven, smoker, water bath, grow a kitchen garden of your own, find local butchers and fishmongers. Over time you build up a small collection of both your own and others’ recipes and books and articles on food theory and trends. You can also have a microwave of course, but you’ll use it in many different ways than before.
It’s harder work but so is walking instead of driving or reading instead of watching TV. It can seem irritatingly virtuous to some that you put this extra effort into your daily life but they’ll be swayed when they see you serve up a ZFS snapshot to temporarily test an edit over 20GB of data, or pop up a new niri workspace to track and purchase concert tickets, or dive into editing your journal in a custom distraction free mode you put together showing only your editor and this week’s GPS logs.
You aren’t making everything from scratch, but you do make a few ingredients yourself — pickles and bread in the kitchen and scripts and local web hacks on your computer — and you certainly have complete control over the finished product in a way that simply isn’t possible with a microwave and a boxed lasagna, or a copy of Windows 11.
You don’t even have to cook! You can have pre-made microwave meals with a Linux desktop. They still taste better because they were made with love by a global network of friends and family instead of by Nestlé, Kraft, and Heinz.
Are there any alternatives to Lightroom that are not as complex or overwhelming as Darktable. I understand that people say it’s more powerful, but it also looks like it has a steep learning curve I’m not particularly interested in tbh.
There are still so many issues around Wayland and fragmentation. Gnome is the most popular and has lots of issues and sometimes is downright user hostile. Luckily some of the distributions try to revert some of the insanity sometimes. But there are still many protocols and portals needed and much more standardization.
I switched to Linux from Win11 a few months ago, because of all the CoPilot junk. Not sure what the native vs. HTML UIs is all about, though. Are the HTML UIs slower, or is it a question of developers' time?
Maybe Microsoft knows Windows is terrible and won't last forever, so their short term goal is to exploit their marketshare as much as possible to grab as much cash as they can until the market moves to something else.
"I'm going to go with Fedora on my tower and Bazzite (or SteamOS) on my handhelds."
Why not Bazzite on both? Bazzite is a fantastic desktop OS! Easier to use than naked Fedora and virtually unbreakable.
Funnily enough today windows pissed me off with a random breaking bug (no login screen yay) so now only have Ubuntu installed. Only one application I use that's windows only anyways and can use a VM for that, so sayonara...
I have been using arch for a while now everything is good except BIOS updates after which I need to reset & fix secure boot everytime
I'll still be a Windows/Unix dual user. But then again I don't do the Windows "Home version" experience so many here seem eager to humiliate themselves with over and over.
Cool, see you back on Windows in a month. There's always something. It'll be like the New Year's resolution of going to the gym.
I've been using Linux now as my personal desktop OS for 10-15 years. I actually really liked windows, and still think that windows XP and 7 was great OS for me. My Linux mint is still in style of the old windows versions.
But this year I used windows at a new work, and tested using my wife's windows computer. And for the first time I really feel it's shit.
First when I moved to Linux, 10-15 years ago, windows was better and smoother. 10-5 years ago Linux was getting close and worked equally for everyday, only being problem when things really break. Now is the first time that Linux actually is equal and probably overtakes windows. Microsoft making the move of discontinuation windows 11 puts the nail in the coffin
So I agree, 2026 is the year of Linux desktop.
Been playing with linux for 20y or so. Used it to program, mostly. Now after 15 days only of having Claude Code I'm flipping my setup to delete windows and have ubuntu as my main. I've never been so happy using a computer in my entire life: in this short time I already have dozens of customizations, custom scripts, opensource stuff personal custom forks, etc. Not to mention the fixes, oh so many fixes that could have taken DAYS of work from me and got solved by cc in minutes.
I even tried vibecoding my own custom text editor to use for todo and notes management, but that didn't go quite well lmao. (if anyone curious about my journey: after that I vibe-coded a Sublime Text 4 plugin that kinda worked, then I discovered Dynalist and it's more structured experience was a big hit. When I found out with Dynalist I didn't own my data, I tried other outliners (liked none), then I spent a couple of days trying to sort out some sort of scheme to use Obsidian similarly to Dynalist, didn't look too promising and also Obsidian is not open source, so now I'm finally trying Emacs (spacemacs) for the first time in my life for org-mode. Wish me luck!)
> TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for.
Similarly I haven't booted up Windows in months now. Debian is super stable as a desktop OS and does everything I want at it now.
I am in this weird position where I am keeping a Windows installation around just in case I need it for something. I had a one job interview where they wanted me to use Visual Studio (C#) and it turned out they were fine with me using Rider anyway.
I already switched to Cachyos. It's Arch based with really good defaults.
Been bazzite-only since April and I love it
Niri + DankMaterialShell is an amazing desktop experience. I've heard great things about the COSMIC DE as well.
The sad part of this narrative is that Linux Desktop can be a thing, mostly because other options have gotten worse/enshittified vs Linux Desktop itself has gotten better (It has, but it is probably not the reason of the rise.)
There is something massive missing from Linux that for me has made it even less likely that I would use it full-time (I've tinkered with it in my youth): personal data. I have so much personal, important data generated regularly thanks to smartphones. Photos, videos, voice memos, notes, computer files I want to access anywhere, health data etc. etc. iOS/Mac has made this seamless, secure, and in 15-20 years it has not gone wrong for me. Sure there are horror stories posted from time to time but for 99.9% of people it works really well almost all of the time. Replicating this with Linux systems is difficult, requires lots of setup and maintenance, and incurs significant risk for me in terms of data loss.
See, now this is how a website *should* look: mainly text, with non-obtrusive ads at the bottom. It's really not that hard!
I wish iPhone users had a new os option. iOS is getting so unbearable with each update.
> I think that Linux on the desktop is ready for the masses now, not because it's advanced in a huge leap/bound.
Yeah, right, these types of shallow pieces about Linux "for the masses" have the same structure without addressing the obvious issues:
- Windows has the following 3 components that became worse.
Well, they were bad 10 years ago (the ones that existed), so you could've spent a few hours per component to replace it (Start menu), disable it (Copilot), or find a workaround (invoke process manager with a shortcut without going through the webview in ctrl-alt-del or maybe there is some non-web app the presents the same menu of a few items) or even just ingore it (what are the serious practical issues with using dumb webviews for a tiny menu?)
But the alternative would require you spending many days learning the whole new OS where many things you're used to would simply not exist.
Want to find any file anywhere instantly (including newly created)? No, impossible, there is only NTFS Everything app that does it.
Got tired of the File Explorer garbage and got used to the greatness of Opus? Well, good luck, there is not a single great file manager over there
Want to relax and play X, Y, Z games? Oops, only A, B, C have good support, will take another decade to fix that (but at least someone is working on that)
Want to use your favorite Productivity/VideoShop app? No one is even working on that, so another decade would not fix that.
So how is it reasonable (for the masses, not you!) to replace a few fixable annoyances with a bigger list of the same and an even bigger list of unfixable stuff?
Judging by the website repo readme.md, the developer seems very obnoxious.
“for me” - this should had been in the title but missed out.
Linux has got better but not yet there.
If I didnt have a macbook from work I'd use Linux, but I got a macbook
2026 marks the year of IPv6 and Linux on the desktop.
cachyos has been rock solid for me, including gaming. nvidia 40xx series, HDR OLED monitor
my 2017 mac air is getting real long in the tooth. I'd definitely considering switching to *nix with it but everything I keep reading is that process is not so easy.
I don't really understand why everyone is complaining about Windows here, I'm not at all experiencing the same issues. The ARM64 version of W11 absolutely is the best OS I've ever used. I enjoy using Fedora but it's not coming close for professional use in my opinion.