Maybe I'm more tolerant, but for me Linux was ready for the desktop in 2005 and windows 11 is ok for what I use it for (cubase and games). When I switched my laptop from Windows XP it was a test. 3 years later I noticed I didn't boot back into windows not even once so concluded the test successful. My desktop later was windows only because cubase (and later steam) runs on it, but I honestly don't mind. However, I had to do some development on windows once for a client and that was indeed a horrible experience.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft right now, to see if they are in red alert to get users back, planning subterfuge by breaking APIs used by Wine or what have you, or if they are taking it as a loss.

I recently jumped to Debian/KDE as a daily driver, and it feels great. I am coming after many years of running Linux via cli on my home server. I am also unironically enjoying wobbly windows.

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.

I've spent the past 8 years going back and forth between Linux and Windows. When I switched back to Linux last year I was shocked how well steam/proton/wine worked compared to a few years prior. Valve is truly making incredible progress.

Yeah. I feel the same way. If not for the fact that my gaming PC pulls double duty as a work PC, I'd seriously consider ditching Windows 11 for Bazzite.

I worry that we are edging closer and closer to a similar phenomenon with macOS as well. Apple seems intent on squandering every bit of stability and sanity that macOS used to represent. Maybe now that Alan Dye is gone, we will at least see the abomination that is Liquid Glass fixed…somehow.

I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.

Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.

I think the main problem for Linux is the fragmentation and lack of focus. If you can live without the Adobe suite and such, any number of distros and desktops can serve you well, but it often tries to do so

An initiative like Omarchy got a lot of traction just by "picking one" of all the infinite options available, writing decent documentation for how it all works in Omarchy specifically, and having the whole thing install in minutes.

Omarchy and tiling VM's are not for everyone but I think the principles are great, and can surely be applied to other DE's as well.

I’ve reached the point where I just use a Mac for most computer stuff and a console for gaming. Maybe one day I’ll set up a Linux gaming box but after spending all day at work trying to wrangle Linux boxes, that sounds a bit too much like my job to be relaxing.

Every year starting back around the year 2000, every year until now there's always at least an article from Slashdot and then HN on the year of the Linux desktop from believers and non-believers alike [1],[2].

[1] Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop (2023):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33213663

[2] Why there should never be a "year of the Linux desktop" (2009):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821673

Same.

After decades of macOS, and a bit of Windows, I tried Linux again recently and it was... good? For the first time in 20+ years, I ran into no big issues and no need to switch back.

The new UI stuff happening in Gnome-land, while controversial, has started to make the desktop feel modern and cohesive.

After years of Windows Explorer, clicking around in ~~Nautilus~~Files felt so snappy. The built-in Gnome document viewer is fantastic.

Gnome is starting to show glimmers of being the natural evolution of the Mac desktop, not a poor imitation -- which is very exciting.