2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

Posted by todsacerdoti 7 days ago

2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop(xeiaso.net)

834 points | 637 commentspage 7

faraixyz 7 days ago|

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.

hexbin010 7 days ago||

So I just tried KDE with Fedora 43 on a 4 year old Intel Dell laptop (I've used Linux pretty extensively for 15+ years). It's hilariously bad :

- I managed to make a process crash just clicking around the Settings app

- Sleep doesn't work (spins up the fans, then turns them down, then turns off off displays etc but I then the fan are spinning, so something is running). Looking at the menu, supposedly Firefox is 'blocking' sleep, but I blocked it, and that just meant the fans stayed spun up during sleep. Wtf?

- Monitor connected via dock via USB-C only worked after I plugged it directly into the laptop then back into the dock

- WiFi is preferenced over Ethernet (?!)

- KDE default panel is 'floating' which means wasted pixels below it. Looks ugly and wastes precious vertical space. And the blue highglight of the active window is over the top. And the default panel height is 44 pixels!

- Default fonts especially in Konsole look ugly on a 1920x1080 laptop LCD.

- Booting takes forever

- Impressive it can stream to Homepods out the box...but it cuts out when you open the sound widget in the taskbar. And also at random points

- The default pop-up notifications are too numerous

- The Night Light quick option is to suspend it, not to enable it. Which is interesting, as it's not enabled currently. I want to enable it! There is no option to once-off enable.

EDIT:

- And during boot, the LVM2 unlock is only shown on the built-in display. Then the Login Screen is kind of mirrored, but updates are only shown on the external display ?! (ie password characters not filled in on the built-in display). Very odd

I love Linux, and MacOS might be turning into iOS and becoming buggier, but MacOS has none of those issues.

Alupis 7 days ago|

Can you run MacOS on your 4 year old Intel Dell laptop?

I've been running Fedora full-time for years and have not experienced any of the issues you have listed here. Some of your issues sound like hardware to me?

hexbin010 6 days ago||

It was running headless Debian for a while with no issues, and Windows prior to that. The hardware is fine (it's a Dell dock too fwiw). Drives are NVMe

I'm not sure what you mean by your question.

---

So I tried KDE on Debian Stable, which is a bit less broken (it gets the Ethernet preferencing correct). But still:

- Logout causes the monitor to turn off then on, introducing more delays and flickering

- Only certain application seem blessed to be permitted to be pinned to the task manager when you right click in the applications menu. For the others, you have to drag and drop. You can only drop to the left of the existing icons, not the right. You can't change the order or remove them unless you enter the editing mode which is non-obviously done by right clicking then "Show panel configuration". You are however allowed to drag the open windows around without editing? Go figure

- Switching from the Dark theme to the Light theme just crashed plasmashell

- GWenview stutters between images because its default animation is enabled, and set to software. Much better turned off.

- Dolphin "Duration" column doesn't work for videos (I checked baloo was indexing properly, including with 'content') (edit: had to fully relaunch Dolphin...)

- Display scaling set itself to 170%. Seems like an odd number?

- Konsole configuration has many options, but none that I can immediately see to change the default font size ?! Well, at least I can configure Thumbnail generation and Memory Monitoring

(edit: oh right you have to create a new Profile - oh and you can't edit the current "built-in" profile. What a mess. Steps: hamburger menu, Settings, Configure Konsole, Profiles, New, Appearance, "Choose", Apply, OK, OK... not done yet...got to make your new profile the default one..."set as default", OK. Finally, you've changed the default font. Madness!)

I don't know how anyone defends this

hexbin010 5 days ago||

To finish my review: there are a lot of rough edges and questionable defaults, but ultimately, KDE is impressive. It's extremely snappy, full of useful features. I can live with it

I think fast + full of features gets KDE a LOT of mileage in terms of what users put up with. But it doesn't help anyone denying that there are crashes and bugs all over.

woile 7 days ago||

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

Havoc 7 days ago||

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

girvo 7 days ago||

As someone who plays competitive FPS at quite a high level (I compete in the Contenders division in Valorant's Premier tournament system, lots of fun!), honestly even that's not the biggest deal. I'll eventually get to a point where the only reason I have a Windows install at all is for Valorant. Everything else will be Linux.

zamalek 7 days ago||

BAR is definitely one of the stars of OSS game dev.

ivanb 7 days ago||

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.

throwaway894345 7 days ago|

How does this work? Do you give the AI read permissions on your system, or is it just running arbitrary commands?In the latter case, is it prompting you before each?

hexbin010 7 days ago||

BTRFS is certainly adventurous. That's one way to make sure you have a good backup policy in place.

Corey (a character of mine) says stick with ext4.

tormeh 7 days ago||

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.

vlod 7 days ago||

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/

wazoox 7 days ago|

For me Windows XP was the intolerably ugly release that made me switch once and for all in 2002. Never looked back.

More comments...