ps: some slides from earlier this year https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/7FZXHF-updates_on...
full vid here https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnu...
Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.
If I could get a micro kernel with a better security profile than Linux, that doesn’t sound so bad. I could easily be using a ten year old chip for my day to day browsing and probably wouldn’t notice.
I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )
If you have a pro to help you, already for a long time Linux has been fine on the desktop for anyone. My parents, over 80 years old, have used Linux on their PCs for many years, and they did not even know what "Linux" is. That was possible because I installed and configured for them the operating system and all the applications they needed for reading and writing documents, Internet browsing, e-mail, music listening and movie watching etc.
Windows is easy only because it comes preinstalled. I have installed Windows at work on many kinds of computers and during installation I have encountered much more problems impossible to solve for a non-expert than when installing Linux.
However the recent success of gaming-related distros such as SteamOS and Bazzite seem to be succeeding where Usability-focused distros such as Mint, Pop!, and Zorin couldn't get deep traction
Ubuntu is "like Windows but not" which is mostly relevant to people boycotting Windows. Steam Deck is "a gamebox" which people who already like games might want to buy. Bazzite is "a thing that turns your computer into a game box."
Also lets not forget those distros play Windows games, because hardly any studio bothers with native Linux games.
And there's Android.
I would look into those statistics regarding desktop world wide adoption, distribution per OS.
It gives a Linux experience within the security sandbox from Android, which is why there are limitations when using it on regular devices, via PlayStore.
Also it requires working around the NDK limitations on available POSIX APIs.
Linux is not userspace. Linux is a kernel, and android is a parallel fork of the kernel. So android is a version of linux but is not GNU/Linux.
Android/Linux, if you will. We dont have to be shy this.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
GuixSD with GNU Hurd would be a really fun way to repurpose an old MBP.