alt Hacker Newsevery discussion like this has at least one of these comments. The year of the Linux Desktop must be nearly here. They've been predicting it for years already!
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For me, after 35 years of Windows, 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop. Finally. Linux has become a lot better, and my skills with Linux have too. And Microsoft screwed me over a few times too many. I had bought a "lifetime license" for Outlook, which cost me over $100 a couple of years ago. So then I wanted to upgrade the CPU on the machine running the VM where I had Outlook running, and suddenly that "lifetime license" ended due to the CPU being different. That was really the last straw for me. I moved to Linux Mint and Firebird for email, and it's been great. Now all of my VMs are running Linux, all the locally hosted services I had running have Linux binaries. The switch was a lot easier than I anticipated.
If Microsoft is alienating people like me, using Windows for 35 years, they can alienate anyone.
The forced buying of new hardware just to run Windows 11 is going to be the last straw for a lot of people. And Apple is really no better, their existing x86 machines have the same problem. We could no longer update a MBP, and other software stopped working due to the inability to update (and sorry, no we're not going to use hacky solutions to force it to update).
Yeah, except there has been a steady increase in Linux (~5% "confirmed") and a steady decline of Windows. I bet a large percentage of those "unknown" are also linux machines.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
Linux on desktop = the fusion energy of computing.
As the old saying goes, it happens slowly and then all at once. The things tethering people to Windows have largely disappeared for many/most people.
One of my sons has a desktop that is quite powerful and overwhelmingly adequate for what he does. As Windows 10 hit the end of support we were considering how to move forward as Windows 11 refuses to work on his device. We realized there is absolutely nothing keeping him on Windows, and perhaps we just replace his PC with a Mac Mini. But in the meantime he's rolling with Ubuntu and has lost absolutely nothing and gained plenty.