Remember folks, it doesn’t have to be the year, it only has to be your year.
Mine was about 19 years ago. I’m no genius, and I haven’t regretted it once. Linux has come a long way since then, while windows is deep in the enshittification trenches now, and has been for years. Your YOTLD can start today if you want it to. Tired of being actively abused by your OS? We’ve been here all along.
And if you are happy where you are, that’s fine too.
Nah, this is the year of Linux on desktop for everyone. The old Mayans foretold so.
Modern installers definitely make it easier than ever before. WiFi even tends to work immediately.
When my elderly, and tech illiterate family ask how to switch from Windows; I’m sorry but I’m not telling them to use Linux because they’re going to harass me nonstop for tech support.
At best this will be the year of macOS, because there’s a store I can send them to for all their questions.
Lain is what prompted me to switch to Linux! Watching a character who doesn’t yet understand computers fuck around with a computer really inspired me to fuck around with my computer
I am mid switch, but it’s not been smooth or easy. I chose Manjaro and maybe I chose poorly. I am a lifelong techie, and have used Ubuntu and Mint in short stints in the past, but the transition is rough.
I didn’t attempt the switch before because I primarily played Destiny 2 and Bungie hates Linux. The enshittification of Destiny drove me away, and in theory the games I am playing now should work. I have had mixed results however.
I play Darktide and Vermintide 2 and heavily use their modding scenes to make them fully playable. Vortex mod manager is a huge bonus for this, and I still haven’t been able to set this up.
My Elgato equipment has community support, but has a bunch of steps to get working that I haven’t spent the time to fully research or attempt.
I still haven’t set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don’t have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.
I am going to keep trying, because I hate Microsoft right now more than I dislike the learning curve and limitations. Not sure if that is enough to make this the year of the Linux desktop though.
Manjaro isn’t the best choice if you value ease of use and stability.
There’s the rub. Every distro has vocal supporters and detractors, and appears simultaneously good or “dog shit”. Determining who is accurate is a crapshoot, and there apparently is no right answer. Manjaro was attractive because of built-in automatic snapshots for recovery when I inevitably break my installation. There was also previously a well reviewed gaming focused Manjaro fork, though I stuck with the main fork.
Mint had just as vocal of detractors saying it was unstable. Same with Ubuntu and I dislike the company focus anyway. Arch is Arch, and Manjaro is an Arch fork anyway. It’s the same problem someone looking at starting One Piece or Bleach or Naruto have: there is too much and even the fans appear to hate it more than anyone else, lol.
I don’t want to distro hop, that doesn’t interest me at my current stage. I want long term (at least a year) in between reinstallations. More self hosting is lined up for the future, so desktop is dipping my toes in the water as my server is piecemealed together.
Anyone who says Mint is unstable doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Mint is great if you just want to install and forget. Any rolling release distro will always require more effort to keep it running. Mint updates are largely painless.
stupid. Manjaro is dog shit
I still haven’t set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don’t have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.
i’ve been fine mounting my C drive under linux using ntfs3g under arch linux (similar enough to manjaro) though this was prior to ntfs being natively supported in the kernel, so that may have different consequences, realistically i would advise you to use a network storage for inter device compat since you can run samba or something, which is well integrated into linux and windows (though it’s a little fucky in linux, it does work, and it works reliably) It makes life so much easier. Either that or use an external drive that you intend to be intercompat, not running NTFS, but using ext4 or something. That’s another decent option.
My best advice to you going forward is be thoughtful about the devices and software you spend time and money on, it’s really easy when you’re in the windows environment to just use whatever exists, but on linux you do have to spend a bit more time thinking about it, but that’s just the nature of the beast.
Thank you for the insight, that is actually useful information for me. I currently have a 4tb nvme with a small (250gb) C drive and the rest as an E drive (Program installs and Games) for Windows, the same general setup with a second 4tb nvme for Linux, and a 3rd separate SATA SSD that acts as my “home” drive with Documents/Pictures/Downloads /etc. I planned and sharing that third drive between Windows and Linux so I don’t require duplicating data.
A home server/NAS is also in the works, and I’ll be looking into Samba. It’s just been a bit enlightening finding out all the unicorns and rainbows on the Linux side of the fence are equines of indeterminate parentage with paper cones glued to their foreheads and RGB light strips soldered together with a “trust me” sticker on them.
Microsoft is still a ghetto, and Apple is a WASP country club where the HOA president lives next door and is “retired”. Computers are both at an all-time high for choice and in some of the worst states it’s been in.
I have mint running on my laptop now.
Pro tip for anyone who wants to try Linux and maybe attempt to set up dual boot with Windows:
TURN OFF BITLOCKER ENCRYPTION IN WINDOWS FIRST.
IF you don’t, here’s what happened to me:
Mint live USB instance booted easily at first. I started the install process and selected dual boot. Mint setup then proceeded to prompt me to enroll a MACHINE OWNER KEY… And then realized that bitlocker encryption would prevent it from setting up dual boot.
It said, to paraphrase, “exit mint setup, log back into Windows, disable bitlocker, then you can come back and install”
Well that was a fucking lie because YOU CANNOT GET BACK INTO MINT!
WHY? Because mint FORGOT the MOK!
When you try to get back into mint from the boot selection menu, it says
Something has gone seriously wrong: import_mok_state() failed: Not Foundthe upshot is that you computer will never let mint live USB session ever boot again UNLESS you disable secure boot in BIOS and rename grub to mmx64.efi in the ISO image.
And if you DO those things chances are mint will never present you with the option to detect and set up dual boot with you extant windows instance ever again.
I went ahead and nuked my windows 11 instance on my laptop because it was being a bitch and clearly was never going to be a good neighbor to mint. I have no major regrets because mint is nice and I like it. It just didn’t turn out how I would’ve ideally intended. But one way or another Windows 11 HAD TO GO. So, in the broad sense, I wanted to switch to mint… And I have! All good.
That is a blessing in disguise. Congratulations on cleansing your laptop of that horrible operating system. I did so last month and my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.
As the old Mayans foretold.
Can we stop with this? It was an over hyped slogan and we can give it a rest. People are slowly switching to Linux and that’s good enough
While we’re at it, can we stop with “enshittification?” It’s Reddit and Lemmy’s favorite word. Such a dumb term.
I’m mostly of that opinion also :D
The slogan is a complete meme at this point. A meme that indicates it’s the year of the linux desktop!
Yeah, it just comes off sarcastic to me, which apparently means people think Linux is not popular enough to talk about or something. I don’t know, it just rubs me the wrong way.
I guess the hope is that a large amount of people will suddenly switch to Linux, maybe because of social media popularity, a breaking windows change, or maybe a popular computer manufacturer shipping only Linux by default.
But even if that does happen, I would think it would result in an increased adoption rate, not everyone switching to Linux over the course of a year.
You can like something and still make fun of it, you know?
You can, but Linux needs good press, and many would see this “joke” as another reason to avoid the whole ecosystem.
If someone sees it that way, that’s not something any of us can do anything about.
That’s not true. Attitudes can slowly change over time. Reminding people “it’s not there yet” doesn’t serve that.
I’ll have you know I’m completely serious and not poking fun at myself when I mention I use Arch, BTW!
I think the year of Linux memes are fun. :D
It is sarcastic.
Wanna know the first time I heard “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop!”? 1999.
Yes, nineteen ninety-nine. Twenty-five years ago.
Linux as a desktop is still a laugh. It still doesn’t come close to Windows of twenty-five years ago.
But it’s killer as a server, or a purpose-built system. My NAS/VM server kicks ass under Linux, way better than running windows. Even VMware recently switched their desktop virtualization to using Linux. This is where Linux shines.
You could make a Windows killer desktop, except which distro? Which shell? Which set of base tools/utilities? Define “killer desktop” in the Linux community.
Windows is the general purpose OS, with a common shell. That’s what MS did, settle on one UI (mostly), so it’s a common experience everywhere.
Linux as a desktop is still a laugh. It still doesn’t come close to Windows of twenty-five years ago.
Pfft, several Linux distros are an excellent desktop OS and I think people who argue against that aren’t worth my time.
Naive take imo. No distro is an excellent desktop. They all have flaws and issues that are not present in windows to an “average user”. Regular users barely know how to install apps on their phones. To be excellent all intelligence groups should be able to easily use it
When people say shit like this, they seem to forget the vast amounts of issues that windows also has. How long has it been since the last time an update bricked millions of machines? Even when you only talk about things MS is directly responsible for, that timespan rarely exceeds a year. And this is even with their enormous budget and army of vendors essentially beta testing and partnering with them to keep shit like that from happening.
Naive take imo. No distro is an excellent desktop.
Wow. Not a single one, huh? I’m sure manufacturers assuming Windows and lazily building hardware that does 90% of the work in giant closed-source drivers have nothing to do with the “flaws and issues” that ALL distros apparently have some of.
No Linux distro I’ve run has had a necessary parent process like “explorer.exe” crash causing the PC to mysteriously stop working with no indication of what’s happening, an issue I’m still encountering in others’ Windows PCs 25 years later… or having the main (Start) menu responding to clicks/taps (changing color like it’s activated) but not opening the menu, seen that on multiple Windows machines with perfectly fine hardware. Maybe it was too busy loading unwanted, unsolicited ads into the Start menu to do its job.
The “average user” will either pay a not-insignificant amount of money to fix issues or throw away still-good hardware and buy new every 3-5 years, at which point they will still need help backing up and restoring their data unless they are sending it all to Microsoft cloud who is training “AI” with it for profit. Environmentally and financially taxing but I guess I can’t complain; more free/dirt-cheap Linux boxes for my friends and family!
Edit: My wife and son are gaming on up-to-date OSes on PCs that are old enough to drive a car. Truth be told, my son has a slightly newer video card than that, though. Energy use is becoming a concern although it’s not really wasted when we need to heat the house six or seven months out of the year where we are.
I have that happen constantly in KDE lol.
This is going to be my Year of Linux, finally taking the plunge. Nothing special, just a used laptop running Mint to replace a Chromebook (who’s hardware has finally failed). Gonna try to replace my gaming PC next year once I’ve got more of a handle on the different distros and have played around with them (and more money).
Honest question, how would my life improve if more people switched to Linux? God bless all the maintainers that have made it simple enough for an idiot like me to understand it
Most things work right out of the box and those that don’t I could do less with anyway, Linux is perfect
Less corporate shitfuckery all around. Right now Windows pretty much has a monopoly on the desktop, which is why they have completely stopped caring about users. Once Linux gets above ten percent market share or so, they’ll take notice. And then whine about “communism” or some bullshit.
linux would gain more support, more developers, and more market share, making it more universal. All of these are going to be beneficial to everybody.
Already got lots of support and universality hat more do you need? X4 is native on Linux
Beyond games, hardware support would still be a pretty big one. If Linux is widely adopted enough, it makes more and more sense for hardware companies to make sure their new devices will be supported on launch day. Not having to worry about my network card being too new from a brand that has poor/no Linux support would be a pretty big factor in influencing my purchases the next time I’m looking for a laptop. Pretty sure I’ve also encountered people complaining about being unable to use all the features that their new GPU offers under Windows, because the company hasn’t released a Windows driver and devs working on Linux are still in the process of reverse-engineering things to write an open driver that is feature complete.
Another big one would be configuration of peripherals, as there are a fair number that assume you have Windows to run their proprietary configuration tool. I’ve come across mice like that, as well as mechanical keyboards that require some proprietary Windows program if you want to flash the firmware and customize your layout.
More Linux users also makes it a more attractive target for devs in general. That could mean you get a cool, new hobby project that someone is working on and decides to make a FOSS Linux version, could mean companies at least offer a Linux version of their proprietary software that doesn’t have a comparable Linux alternative. There’s a lot of software out there that people need for work or school, especially in more niche fields, where there’s not a viable Linux alternative and your job/school isn’t going to change their entire workflow just for you.
I’m sure others can come up with further examples that wouldn’t occur to me.
If only the Linux desktop stopped getting offended when it’s not treated like a server and has to shut down. “Wait, you had audio settings that I was supposed to remember? Cool story bro…”
What distro 😳
I find people complaining about every distro. The thing is, every operating system sucks. The good thing about Linux is how that becomes your fault.
I mean, not necessarily your fault but at least you know someone could care to fix it, and you didn’t spend $100 for the privilege.
I would love to be able to pay $100 for more great Linux distros.
Sorry, only spyware laden with ads is available currently at that price.
You absolutely can. Most open source projects accept donations.
I mean I was asking about your complaint. Never heard of a Linux desktop that needs to be treated like a server before
Plenty of Linux things that aren’t the users fault
See the arch Linux grub incident
Good to note this example is from 2022-08-30. Despite its “reputation” among some, Arch doesn’t break that often by itself.
yeah, i’ve been running arch for a couple of years now and the only time something broke was when the computer died in the middle of updating
It can be your fault, but if the distro is supposed to be easy and you haven’t messed with its internals, it’s probably the distro’s fault.
My #1 priority when choosing a distro was that it’s widely used and easy, because I don’t want to deal with that exact kind of shit.
Ultimately it’s all open source, you can make your own distro. If something doesn’t work, fork it and fix it yourself. That’s the beauty of Linux, with all that’s good and bad about it.
If you would like to address an audio issue, I’ll gladly hijack the thread.
Linux mint, occasionally my audio starts crackling. Only fix is to open terminal and run pulseaudio -k.
Happens maybe twice a day with my system.
That can happen when there’s a mismatch between the sample rate your audio device expects and what it receives. One way to fix this is to force the system to only allow one sample rate. I forget which files need to be edited for this, perhaps someone else will know, but you have a list of accepted and fallback sample rates, and you need to delete all except one.
I can’t say that it will solve your specific issue, but it solved mine and I had the same symptoms.
Tried pipewire?
I just followed this guide here. I’ll give it a shot!
I had this TV box that came with windows on it. After booting I had to turn up the volume and click away a noise warning.
With Linux no more trouble 🐧
What are you talking about? Didn’t you know that only Linux has technical problems?
I bet the users make the chocolate taste terrible
why doesn’t everybody understand that it’s ALWAYS the year of the linux desktop, you just haven’t been invited yet, that’s the only problem.
They thought it was a great idea to remove the feature to unlock the taskbar and move it to the top or side of your screen in windows 11. I don’t care if it was a design choice, it was a fucking stupid one.
This right here drove me to dual boot Manjaro. I can’t be the only person who has stacked monitors instead of side-by-side monitors. The UI is an abomination and the telemetry even moreso.
Linux is not turn key, and as a significantly PC gaming user it has limitations. I still have not set up modding yet, and whether Vortex mod manager will work or not is still unclear. I can’t get more than 60Hz out of my monitor on HDMI, which is required if I want 175Hz and 10bit color due to DisplayPort 1.4 limitations. Sleep causes my motherboard to permanently display a “CPU unknown” QLED Code. Instructions on simple tasks like creating a permanent drive mount at boot are confusing because there are steps that seem to be just assumed by everyone writing them. Etc.
I am working my way through these, but still find myself in Windows 11 most of the time because unfortunately it just works. Software is natively written for it, there is no searching for how to get peripherals or programs to work. I say this as a lifelong tech nerd who started on Windows 3.1 and DOS, and who’s job involves working with Linux based equipment. This shouldn’t be as hard as it has been to transition, but it is.
Honestly your situation is kind of a worse case scenario.
At this point Linux works really well if all you want to do is browse the web and play (single player) games.
It also works pretty well if you’re an expert who understands the system in and out and can comfortably edit any config file on their drive to achieve what they want.
But if you’re a Windows power user whose used to being able to set up all kinds of niche functionality its a rough experience when all of your knowledge is now suddenly useless and there’s a different set of things that are easy or hard to do.
Its actually kind of a similar experience going the other way. For example there are some things that Linux users are used to being able to script that can’t really be accomplished on Windows except via autohotkey, which from a Linux user’s perspective just seems incredibly dumb.
there is a new in dev version of the vortex mod manager that does work under linux available under https://github.com/Nexus-Mods/NexusMods.App … it’s not complete yet, but it works for cyberpunk for me, check it out!
You can’t unlock and move the taskbar anymore!?!?
Who uses Windows like that? The UI gets all screwed up anyway
I can’t believe this is still impossible. Surely engineers at Microsoft are suffering from this too? But I guess they really want to push the search bar and ai features that don’t fit on a vertical taskbar.
I don’t even want it vertical. I just want it up top. 🤣
Edge really said “There can be only one!”
I see Lain, I upvote. Because, no matter where they are, people are connected.
Linux would be cool but the games I primarily play ate only on windows and doesn’t play well in VMs, and dual booting just isn’t worth the hassle.
What games do you primarily play?
what’s “ate”? edit: oh it’s just a type for “are” isn’t it
i would recommend getting an extra ssd, installing a beginner friendly distro (mint or pop for instance) and just boot it up occasionally, see what works, what doesn’t. i got into linux like this, gradually, over years
Oh I didn’t even see that typo.
But yeah I’ve tried this and I just found my self booting less and less into Linux, to me it made more sense to just keep my PC on once I’m done playing, or alt tab out and work on other stuff with the game running in the background.
However this old MMO is getting a unreal update sometime in the next few years so I’ll probably give it a try again and see if it’s able to run once that comes around.
idk which mmo it is but i would assume an older engine runs more reliably on linux than a new one
actually, for me, trying and failing to run star wars republic commando a few years ago on win 10 was what pushed me to really look into gaming on linux, and after installing it via steam, enabling steam play, i just clicked play and it ran great, i was shocked
and you can add any windows executable to steam (although it’s a bit janky), enable compatibility, and most of the times, stuff just runs
heroic launcher also is great, but a bit more complicatedIt’s Mabinogi (crappy Korean MMO)
And yeah you would think so but the engine is a mess and it has something to do with the Anticheat. People have found fixes but it’s not “playable” to me at least in any content that’s end game.
You gave me an idea though so I’ll probably try on my laptop at a later date.
check out the protondb page, maybe something helps
(filter for the appropriate gpu and distro but the latter is less important) https://www.protondb.com/app/212200huh looks like some updates have been made ill look through this more later, thank you!
Chicken and egg. Can’t have the gamers without games and games without the gamers. Valve and the steam deck might have changed that. Even if small, if that portion of 0.0x percent of the market buy games and it is enough to offset the developing costs to port the game, companies will do it since it will make business sense.
Sounds like you need to play better games then
