[hpaavola]

Year of the Linux on the desktop might never come, but we do have Linux on everything else. Servers have been mostly Linux since at least -00, smartphones have been mostly Linux since about 2010, various embedded devices have been mostly Linux, if they need a full OS, since about 2000 I guess and now Linux has a serious bid in game consoles also.

[kodah]

I use PopOS as a daily driver. Linux gaming has picked up quite a bit, to the degree that the Steam Deck runs on it. Linux now comes as part of Windows. QEMU is now running on any developers Mac who uses containers. Anecdotally, my girlfriend (who is not a technologist) is now a Linux power user, to the extent of fully customizing her Gnome environment.

If that isn't Linux on the desktop, then yeah, it may never come.

Personally, I would say that Linux lacks two things:

1. Cross platform integrations. The way MacOS can intelligently switch AirPods over or share with your tablet is nice. Linux doesn't really have that.

2. DirectX that's compatible with Windows DirectX. That would slay Windows gaming. For now, there's Proton.

[MayeulC]

> 1. Cross platform integrations. The way MacOS can intelligently switch AirPods over or share with your tablet is nice. Linux doesn't really have that.

KDEConnect (and its compatible Gnome counterpart) is pretty good, though I understand it's not exactly what you asked

> 2. DirectX that's compatible with Windows DirectX. That would slay Windows gaming. For now, there's Proton.

Well... I'm not sure why you'd want that specifically, or what you mean by that. There's DXVK which is a compatible implementation, and which you can use natively. There's also gallium-nine, and the wine implementation of DX (including VK3D for DX12). All are pretty feature-complete, can be used for native apps, and there are a few more alternatives (like ToGL, which Valve developed a while back).

[kodah]

I'll have to give those a shot and see if they work on games not running in Proton. My criticism is a bit dated to the last time I did this assessment for the purposes of discussion. Thanks for the callout!

[MayeulC]

If you want to try DXVK natively, DXVK-native has been upstreamed in the latest release, though I guess the fork still contains the instructions:

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v2.0

gallium-nine can't really be targetted however. While most distribution with AMD or Intel graphics will have it enabled as part of Mesa, it can't be used for nvidia (unless... well, you could theoretically use zink to run that on top of vulkan as well). It's DX9 in any case.

Winelib has been a thing for a veeery long time, I think it was always possible to build a native executable and link against Wine's DX->OGL translation layer.

[vondur]

If you wanted to try out out, Nobarra, a Fedora based distro which has been tweaked for gaming. It’s done by the person who does the glorious egg roll Proton version.

[Abishek_Muthian]

I'd caution against using Gnome Connect, Like most Gnome extensions it leaks memory and would lead to sudden killing of Gnome shell.

[happymellon]

There is also Intel who have made DXVK as the DX implementation in their Windows driver in certain scenarios.

[zamalek]

> Anecdotally, my girlfriend (who is not a technologist) is now a Linux power user

I got my 80+ grandmother-in-law onto a System76 and she has been having a hoot "learning things." For reference, her tech aptitude has involved phone calls where I remind her to plug things in. And, as a bonus, it makes her completely immune to tech support scams.

[kodah]

This warms my heart. Thanks for sharing!

[jorvi]

- Dropbox on Linux hard-locks when trying to sync some files that happily get synced on Windows and macOS

- Google Drive doesn’t even have a good client and you must resort to 3rd-party tools like OverGrive

- Spotify has had broken shortcuts for more than a year now

- Many of Linux it’s file managers still don’t support file thumbnails

- system sleep is still unreliable (one could say broken?)

- power management on laptops is atrocious without deep manual tweaking

- sound on laptop speakers is atrocious without a Pulse EQ profile

- it often still feels like a hodge-podge of different projects slapped together, which it is. Distros that try to tackle this (Elementary) receive nothing but scorn

I like running Linux, but pretending it’s even halfway as user friendly as macOS or even Windows is just deceitful, either to yourself or, even worse, to others.

Hopefully Valve’s hard push into Linux might get 3rd-party developers to improve their Linux clients, because Steam Deck users will be too big a usergroup to ignore.

[evilduck]

My Lenovo Legion laptop gets an hour and a half more battery life on PopOS than Windows 11 for casual uses (gaming is about the same but I don't do that on battery). No tweaking or arcane config needed, this is just a plain, regular out of the box experience from a fresh Linux install. If I boot Windows, it will randomly lose the correct time while sleeping and sometimes power itself off. No amount of BIOS or Windows tweaking has resolved it. On the Steam Deck side, Linux sleep seems to work perfectly, I never experience the device struggling to wake from sleep or restore itself and it doesn't drain the battery over night on a whim either. OTOH my wife's Surface laptop with Windows seems pretty great too.

In my experience, if it's not made by Apple you can't trust it to handle power management without hands on experience to prove it first.

[encryptluks2]

The only two issues you mention that are real have nothing to do with Linux itself but third-party support. As you even acknowledge there a multiple functional third party cloud drive clients.

The other complaints like not all file managers have thumbnails is like complaining not all windows apps have tabs. There are great file managers in Linux with thumbnails and they are the defaults in not the major window managers.

Spotify shortcut works fine but maybe you were using a broken package?

I never had an issue with Pulse but Pipewire is the new king on the block and works so smooth.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Third party support has a lot to do with how Linux works though. There's a reason Valve basically abandoned the idea of native Linux games and invested in Proton instead, for instance. It's because everything above the kernel in Linux is kind of a garbage fire when it comes to consistency and compatibility. You usually can't even run a binary compiled for Ubuntu 20.04 on 22.04 despite them theoretically being the same OS two years apart.

Driver support is hindered by the lack of stable driver ABI, basically forcing drivers to be FOSS and mainlined. Granted, this also has some advantages.

[encryptluks2]

Valve isn't abandoning the idea of native Linux games. It is up to the game manufacturer. There are probably about 150 games in my Steam library with native support.

I think the issues you are referring to about compatibility have to do with dynamic compilation and something like glibc, which mostly is a compilation risk that you end up taking but the only times I've encountered it the other packages were already available in my distro and so it was just a matter of updating packages. That is why you should find a distro that is quick to update.

[jorvi]

> The only two issues you mention that are real have nothing to do with Linux itself but third-party support.

If you don’t think sleep or power management issues on Linux are real you should do a cursory google. You not having the flu doesn’t mean the flu doesn’t exist and isn’t running rampant.

Also, third party support is critical. The majority of user would not want to use Linux if it didn’t have any access to Dropbox, Spotify, Slack, Discord, VLC, or any of the other creature comforts people expect to be able to use these days.

> Spotify shortcut works fine but maybe you were using a broken package?

Ctrl + right and Ctrl + left (next & previous track) are broken and have been for a long while now. Again, do some research.

> I never had an issue with Pulse but Pipewire is the new king on the block and works so smooth.

Pipewire uses PulseEQ. Also, this has nothing to do with what I mentioned (internal speakers not automatically being EQ’d with a ‘small speaker’ EQ). If you ever hear a MacBook, you’ll be flummoxed by how good it sounds in comparison to the tinny sound of your laptop. EQ is king.

[smoldesu]

> If you don’t think sleep or power management issues on Linux are real you should do a cursory google.

It's probably terrible on unsupported hardware. Having used Linux-compatible hardware for a while now though, neither of these are an issue.

> majority of user would not want to use Linux if it didn’t have any access to Dropbox, Spotify, Slack, Discord, VLC

Good thing all of those programs are natively packaged for most distros, then.

> Ctrl + right and Ctrl + left (next & previous track) are broken and have been for a long while now.

...because Spotify migrated it's shortcuts to the more technically-correct MPRIS implementation. If you want shortcuts, set them globally and Spotify will respect it.

I'm not going to make the argument that 'everyone should use Linux', but it makes me sad listening to software developers level outdated complaints against the ecosystem. Linux is fine these days, if you don't edit video or do intensive creative work then I see no reason to avoid it.

[blix]

> Having used Linux-compatible hardware for a while now though, neither of these are an issue.

I have a laptop with that is specifically designed to support out-of-the box and the first thing I had to do with the stock PopOS was disable sleep and hibernate because it reliably crashed the system. Even "Linux-compatible" hardware is extremely hit-or-miss.

[jorvi]

> It's probably terrible on unsupported hardware. Having used Linux-compatible hardware for a while now though, neither of these are an issue.

Even on supported hardware there are often tons of snags. You either get a ‘blessed’ device (XPS, some Lenovos, System76, Framework) or trouble lurks. And note that many many more devices are considered ‘supported’!

> ...because Spotify migrated it's shortcuts to the more technically-correct MPRIS implementation. If you want shortcuts, set them globally and Spotify will respect it.

And yet most of the other shortcuts work fine. I also don’t want global player control, because it always ends up activating on the program I don’t want it to.

I also don’t want to have to configure shortcuts manually. They should work out of the box.

Imagine how laughable it would be if Davinci or Darktable or Krita asked you to set all shortcuts yourself.

> Good thing all of those programs are natively packaged for most distros, then.

And yet they nearly always have rough edges the other platforms don’t seem to have. See my Dropbox problem. Or Discord running on such an old Electron that it creates problems with Wayland. No, Webcord isn’t a solution as it is missing a bunch of features and in maintenance mode.

> but it makes me sad listening to software developers level outdated complaints against the ecosystem

I’m getting so irate because they’re not outdated problems. You’re plugging your ears and going ‘la la la la’ thinking that if you don’t acknowledge the problems a lot of others are having, they don’t exist.

[survirtual]

What are you using for GUI with Linux? Given these are complaints you have, I’m guessing you aren’t using a userfriendly / more integrated distro. Ubuntu is not totally GNU and has proprietary code, but it is pretty userfriendly.

Anyway, in general:

If you like Mac, use Gnome. That is the default in Ubuntu.

If you like Windows, use KDE. That comes default in Kubuntu.

Ubuntu is debian-based, so you need to use packages that support that if you use Ubuntu. Dropbox and Spotify both have installation instructions for using it on Ubuntu and, when I used those instructions, everything worked fine.

There is also Maestral for dropbox: https://maestral.app/

It is an open source dropbox client. Needs less permissions and the performance is good, it works well in linux but I had some issues on arm based Mac. Used it a year or two ago so perhaps it has gotten better.

I’m willing to bet there exists an open source solution that integrates with the Spotify SDK as well.

Sleep, power management, etc all work well for the userfriendly focused Ubuntu distros. It was a major pain point for me for a while many years ago when I started, but I found that KDE Ubuntu distro and it made everything a lot easier for me migrating to linux. Give it a shot.

I do think Valve involvement will help the landscape a lot, I just hope it doesn’t bring must-haves that are proprietary.

[jorvi]

I’ve tried KDE, Gnome, Zorin and Elementary. All have their own sets of problems.

I know of Maestral. It uses the public Dropbox API which means any files Dropbox deems ‘grey area’ (think console BIOSes but there is a ton of stuff that gets erroneously flagged) refuse to sync.

I’m not a first time Linux user, and I can somewhat deal with these pain points, but recommending Linux to layman people, especially when telling them “it’ll work smoother and be more bug-free than Windows and macOS” is just setting them up for a world of technical pain.

[survirtual]

In my experience, linux as a technical expert can often times get messy. I’m probably just not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I often got in my own way. The default distros work pretty well these days for a laymen, because they mostly won’t tweak it to the extent, say, I would.

You are experienced and I share some of the pain, so I won’t beat the point in. But I do think every OS has its pain points and advantages — and linux has a unique adaptability that just about anyone can find their niche in. Nothing is bug free but it might just be smoother, given advertising has infected the major corporate Oses.

[mejutoco]

I use Dropbox on Ubuntu, ipad, iphone without any trouble. I tried Google Drive a few years ago, but it could not even do the initial sync (I know because I waited 30 days for it before giving up).

[reissbaker]

Isn't Bluetooth multipoint what you're looking for re: intelligently switching Airpods? There are a decent number of non-Apple Bluetooth headphones that can do that with any manufacturer's Bluetooth capabilities (it even works switching between an iPhone and a non-Apple laptop!). For example, the extremely well reviewed Sony WH-1000XM4 can do it — those are over-ear headphones, not the earbuds, but Sony announced that they're updating the earbuds (the WF-1000XM4, to use the nearly-inscrutable Sony product name) to support Bluetooth multipoint too — as well as earbuds and headphones from Anker, Panasonic, etc.

[lillecarl]

I own the Sony headphones, and the multipoint stuff isn't great. If I as much as get a notification on my computer it'll mute my phone playing music, I can't be in "high quality audio mode" while talking (Bluetooth ext that doesn't seem implemented).

It works, but in my day2day I Bluetooth with my phone, join meetings on both Android and Linux at the same time.

[bioemerl]

Number zero, Linux lacks usability.

I've got Ubuntu on my home machine and it is an absolute buggy mess.

I tried to right click and format on a flash drive yesterday, the button did nothing.

No errors.

No pop-up messages.

No little spinning wheel.

It did literally nothing. Did not respond, tried to click it multiple times, continued to do nothing.

I have to open up the partition manager and reform at it through there.

I've tried before to drag files from my archives into the window manager, and it doesn't work. The program's not talk to each other so you can't drag and drop between them.

I've tried to use network paths as a folder on tons of different programs, and they rarely handle it well. Best can be a problem on Windows too, but it's so much more common on Linux.

The user experience on Linux is just so incredibly buggy, you have to dig down into the command line at times to fix things, and so much stuff just doesn't work so often, or doesn't work with each other.

Linux on the desktop needs a team of like five people to actually use it every day like a normal user would, but no understanding of the command line, and then constantly complain to the developers so that all of these issues get fixed.

Until that happens Linux on the desktop will not be able to compete with Windows, no matter how many features it has. Because at the end of the day I want my operating system to just work.

[dvdkon]

I'm not going to say your complaints are invalid, but you're setting a very high bar, one that no mainstream OS clears today. I've had similar and much worse problems on all the big three platforms.

[bioemerl]

I've never had any problems on Windows similar to the ones I've had on Linux.

On Windows I have never had a button just do nothing. Not for something as simple and common as formatting a flash drive.

I've never had problems dragging and dropping between a popular windows program and the windows operating system.

Maybe it's inherent because Linux is open source and stuff just won't work together because of that, but if that's the case then Linux is doomed to never be able to compete with Windows.

[fao_]

> On Windows I have never had a button just do nothing. Not for something as simple and common as formatting a flash drive.

Amusing, given the amount of times ive clicked on a defunct or near-to-failing drive in windows and either had the drive disappear, or just not do anything.

The amount of times I've seen windows do absolutely fucking nothing in response to a USB, at least linux screams into a console about it

[akkartik]

What app were you using to format the flash drive?

[bioemerl]

The Ubuntu file manager (disk partition manager after that failed)

[akkartik]

You're replying to a comment that starts, "Linux on the desktop may never come.." so I think you aren't quite responding to it.

[jtode]

I do find, like you have, that the GUI implementations one finds with Linux tend to be weirdly deficient in very specific ways. For instance, I'm running the latest release, not LTS, of Ubuntu right now, and at this point in time, I still cannot:

-Set a different wallpaper for each monitor -Make the OS remember where I closed a window and reopen it there

On the second one, it's possible for that to happen, but it's the app's responsibility for some reason. So Firefox does behave that way, as long as I haven't messed with my monitor layout and as long as I quit the app rather than closing the windows one after the other. Nicely nicely, Mozilla.

But my VNC app that I use for half an hour every morning? Every morning I have to move it over to the other monitor immediately after launching. There are other apps that I could try, but I haven't mustered the patience to re-solve my VNC problem when I have a lot of other things to think about as well.

It is even more aggravating that, according to the googling I have done about this, this is because of the adoption of the supposedly-better Wayland server; if I were to run X instead, apparently my window position remembering would come back. This was a solved problem, and that's apparently why it's de-solved. I have not investigated why Wayland is there, but I assume that it's for the same reasons that Systemd is there, ancient processes that have become detestable to modern programmers and needed something to replace them.

Your USB stick and network mapping issues as well, I have had many aggravated days with that stuff. I especially find that once I format a USB to linux, it requires extraordinary measures to even see it again in windows (one has to load diskpart and clean it first, which is a command line process - big deal to a Windows user). I don't know if there's anyone who could be blamed for this aspect, really, interplatform operability will always be a problem while the profit motive is a factor, and UEFI/Secure Boot makes that a minefield. It's a complex world.

Take this as you will, but I don't find I have many problems with mapped drives anymore, as long as I do it the old-fashioned way with /etc/fstab. Very occasionally I might need to run sudo mount -a in a console but that's when something else has gone wrong, network-wise. Once again, the GUI implementations are indeed troublesome, but there at least is a working solution in this case, but one which involves the console, probably.

It's aggravating, to be sure, but it's also free forever, and I have many choices I could try instead of Ubuntu/Gnome, and at some point I will (I have a lot of personal inertia on this, as many do - I've had KDE installed for weeks, haven't touched it in a good ten years now, but I also haven't had to reboot for weeks so I haven't had occasion to bother logging out). I didn't have to pay for it, I'll never have to pay for it, and at some point either someone will sort these minor irritations out, or I might even take a weekend to learn more about how these desktop environments work, and come up with a solution of my own to share and earn the love and respect of my peers.

It's a world of possibility, rather than endless rent-paying, and that is more valuable to some than this or that minor convenience.

[criddell]

> Cross platform integrations

Even just on Linux, there are multiple platforms. The big ones are KDE and Gnome. If you want to write the best possible native Linux application, you have to pick one of these and right off the bat you are losing about half of the potential Linux desktops.

I wish KDE and Gnome would merge. I don't really care which one would dominate because (IMHO) they are both excellent. Both give me icons I can double click on to launch an application and that's most of what I need from my desktop environment.

[tmtvl]

Both Firefox and Chrome use GTK under GNU/Linux, the KDE team has invested a lot of effort in keeping GTK as well supported as you could hope for. Using GTK is fine, though of course Qt allows you to ship a single application to not only Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac, but with some tweaking Android as well.

[33955985]

3. “It just works” laptop hardware

[Rebelgecko]

Yeah, I have a framework laptop which is supposed to be fairly good for Linux compatability and I'm considering installing Windows. Horrible standby battery life, random lockups when I'm in the settings app, brightness keys that don't work unless you disable other features, deficiencies in non-integer scaling, etc.

Proton is actually really great for gaming, I just can't figure out how to get full screen games to render at native resolution without turning off DPI scaling across the entire system

[pmarreck]

Feeling this as someone who just installed NixOS on his "gaming" laptop and I can't for the life of me get the Intel AX200 wifi card to be recognized.

But at least, once I do, I'll be able to roll back to any known-good configuration thanks to NixOS if it ever breaks again!

[pjmlp]

That is still Windows gaming as far as game studios are concerned.

[notwokeno]

"Wine is the Linux ABI."

[tigeroil]

Indeed. I hate to say it because I love Linux but Wine has genuinely been by far the most stable ABI on Linux.

[notwokeno]

I don't hate it. The GNU user space is built around a paradigm of source sharing and using the shared source to build a very coherent and pleasant OS. Having some kind of clear separation between that and closed software makes things more pleasant IMO.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

"Coherent" is not a word often used to describe the Linux Desktop experience. How many different ways do I have to copy and paste again? Which ones are valid in which contexts?

[pjmlp]

OS/2 says hello.

[Lorkki]

> Year of the Linux on the desktop might never come

I'm not even sure what that would mean practically. By brute market share, possibly not. But I've had Ubuntu as my personal daily driver for many years, and at the moment it's honestly just a much better experience than either Windows or macOS.

Microsoft and Apple seem to have turned their operating systems into advertising platforms for their other products, largely disregarding the basics of what makes a desktop actually work well.

[pjmlp]

iOS isn't Linux, and Android isn't GNU/Linux either regardless how much people keep patting themselves on the back for having the Linux kernel.

Android userspace is Java and Kotlin based, and the NDK officially only allows for Android specific APIs, C and C++ standard library as per ISO, and that is about it.

Nothing else from Linux kernel is considered part of Android's public API.

Google could move to Fucshia on a whim and only OEMs, and people that root their devices would notice, Java/Kotlin apps would work as usual without recompilation from source, while NDK code would suffice a recompile.

[Aissen]

> Nothing else from Linux kernel is considered part of Android's public API.

Just a bunch of syscalls for apps, that yes, could be reimplemented (the number of re-implementations in the wild actually says how much Linux is becoming a lingua franca of OSes) or virtualized; the whole security model (users/selinux/seccomp) and the toolset.

[pjmlp]

A POSIX replacement for CLI and daemons, without any support for other kinds of workloads.

And for what, on cloud deployments, what matters are language runtimes and type 1 hypervisors, while GL and Vulkan are completely unrelated to Linux kernel.

[hpaavola]

iOS is not majority, not even close, Android dominates the smartphone market. Android runs on Linux, not GNU/Linux, but definitely Linux.

[pjmlp]

Android uses the Linux kernel, which is anyway invisible to app developers, that is about it.

My Sony blue ray player and LG smarttv also run the Linux kernel, so what, doesn't change anything for the movies I watch on them, and I doubt they have contributed anything to upstream

A phyrric victory.

[bee_rider]

It isn’t a Pyrrhic victory, the open source community isn’t harmed if Sony takes the code and doesn’t contribute back. Is it selfish of Sony? Sure. But it doesn’t harm the project, it just fails to help.

The open source community is in the end just a bunch of developers who share their solutions to help each other out. If other parties copy their stiff, it doesn’t make the open source community’s problems un-solved.

The year of Linux on the desktop would be a total nightmare, can you imagine a bunch of non-technical bug reports and feature requests hitting all these mostly volunteer projects? What a mess.

[pjmlp]

Ah, that is why the community tries so hard to break hardware and reverse engineer devices...

[bee_rider]

This seems like a total non-sequitur, unless there’s a link I don’t see?

The people try really hard to get working the systems they are interested in, and then share their results. I mean there are various wikis out there with big lists of printers and wifi dongles (thankfully less of a thing nowadays) that are listed in states of:

* I actually could try this on my side and it works

* This brand usually has drivers, good luck!

* Totally unusable.

Imagine if a company with a customer service relationship, like Microsoft, went around dropping support for reasonably recent hardware! It would be seen as a sure sign that they’d betrayed their customers and dropped all pretense of competence. But the expectations for a community project are happily different.

[hpaavola]

I have no idea what victory you are talking about. Linux dominates roughly everything, except desktop. You can go argue about your own things somewhere else.

EDIT: runs -> dominates

[pjmlp]

Linux kernel yes, GNU/Linux only dominates the server room, and fails everywhere else.

A kernel alone doesn't make an operating system.

[lrvick]

Modern sysadmin does not use GNU for servers.

A server is an appliance. Just needs a Linux kernel, a container daemon, and a target application binary. The end.

[fragmede]

The 50 or so Sony devices supported by PostmarketOS are only there because of that, but maybe that doesn't count for some reason.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices ctrl-f sony

[AshamedCaptain]

It is not a phyrric victory for Linux itself, since this is exactly the one victory they wanted to achieve, evidenced by e.g. the reluctance to accept GPLv3.

[pjmlp]

Sure, if the only thing that matters is the Linux kernel.

[AshamedCaptain]

That is exactly what I said. Notice the rest of the desktop components do not share this allergy to gplv3 linux itself has.

[rowanG077]

That's the point an OS should be nothing more then a platform to run the userspace stuff. I really don't see how it's a pyrrhic victory.

[Ygg2]

So. A Minecraft is an OS? It runs userspace stuff (mods).

What you are missing is that Linux on Android doesn't do what a normal OS is supposed to do:

- multiplex hardware resources

- abstract hardware

- protect software running on it from each other

Last time Android tried to control user resources it led to a gross vulnerability, because it wasn't aware another piece of software was actually managing it.

It's essentially locked in the attic of Android, while everyone else is roleplaying that Linux is still the operating system.

[pjmlp]

A kernel isn't an OS.

[rowanG077]

If you want to be this pedantic then GNU/Linux also isn't an OS. Debian is an OS, Arch is an OS. NixOS is an OS. Such statement muddy the water to the point of no longer matching at all what people mean. Because when people talk they don't use the 100% correct technical term.

[Ygg2]

Linux isn't the Android OS[1]. It runs on Android hardware, but so does Flappy Bird.

The sooner people realize that the better.

[1]https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo

[yencabulator]

You'd have a better argument saying Google Container Engine isn't Linux.

(Because it ain't; the "kernel" of a container running on Google Cloud is a userspace application called gVisor. It's just compatible with Linux syscalls. gVisor happens to run on Linux currently, but I don't see why they couldn't port it, you pretty much just need a KVM- or ptrace-like API, and Go platform support.)

[patrickk]

If Valve decides to make a standard ‘game console’ - miniature gaming PC with a PlayStation-like form factor, standard hardware for game devs to target, SteamOS - then add gaming consoles to that list.

There was an interview recently with someone in Valves steam deck team who mentioned that it’s on their radar but they don’t have the manpower yet to consider it. It does seem like an obvious next step, especially if Steam Controller 2 is released.

[veridies]

I honestly don't see the point. The Deck is like the Switch: easy to use in both docked and handheld mode. All Valve has to do is to bundle a dock and some new controllers and they have a full fledged game console.

[guipsp]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_%28computer%29?w...

[patrickk]

I'm aware. This time, SteamOS is much more mature and consumers are primed for such a move. Especially if it's more tightly controlled by Valve instead of allowing 3rd parties more leeway.

[Xelynega]

Those were capable of nothing but streaming games(didn't even have a native web browser). Why would it be comparable at all to a machine that runs games locally?

[haunter]

You are mistaking the Steam Link hardware with Steam Machines which were real computers made by several 3rd party vendors (Alienware, Asus, Gigabyte etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link

https://web.archive.org/web/20151008050254/https://store.ste...

[howinteresting]

Note that a defining feature of a game console is its locked-down nature, where even normal things like modding single-player games (very common on PC) are verboten. The Steam hardware is quite the opposite.

[dgunay]

Rather than Linux rising to meet the expectations of users, I think it is more likely that Windows will continue to decline in usability until it is on par with the top Linux DEs. Dunno what to make of MacOS in this.

[vladvasiliu]

> it is more likely that Windows will continue to decline in usability until it is on par with the top Linux DEs

For me, that threshold has been shattered.

I'm not even going to talk about ads and similar telemetry crap.

All in all, the Windows desktop is more sluggish and loves, LOVES, to get in my way. And I'm basing this impression on my desktop: 8 core xeon, 64 GB ram, fast pcie3 nvme drive, mid-range gpu (I can comfortably play most games with full settings in FHD). Maybe not the greatest out there, but a comfortable machine still.

It may be due to animations in part, but many, many things just lag. Try to launch some app by clicking the start menu. First, it takes a while to appear, then it waits for ages until it shows my app. I only have a few apps. I know it looks for something on the internet. I don't care. It's on Windows. I never asked it to do that. On win 10, I could jump through some hoops and disable that in between updates. I don't think that's possible anymore.

The freaking control center, or whatever it's called, which pops up when you click on the sound / network icons. One out of three times it will seemingly ignore my click, even though there's an animation. And then jump up three times when I click it multiple times. Same for opening the settings up from said menu. The gear turns, but nothing happens for several seconds.

Speaking of settings, every other update it figures it should reactivate the freaking "use alt-tab to change between edge tabs". No. I don't want that. Please. stop. changing. my. settings.

Then there's the light / dark circus. Sometimes the explorer ends up in some kind of grey color for some reason. It's neither the light nor dark ones.

The task manager has a hard time figuring that my screen is quite big (4k at 100%). So it just chops off the right hand side of the memory info in the performance tab. The graph does take the whole size, though. Also, quite often, when I try to maximize it, it will take the whole screen, and end up with the bottom part behind the taskbar. I don't use any interface tweaks, everything is at its default, with a fresh install of windows when 11-22h2 came out.

Then, you decide you've had enough and what to shut down. For some reason, the task manager doesn't feel like it and will block it. There's also often, but now always, an unnamed process that will delay the shutdown.

Then, there's the whole hardware support question. I've complained about this like a broken record, but my work laptop only got full GPU support a few weeks ago. For a laptop bought in December 2021. With an 11th gen Intel GPU. Same for another similar laptop, whose webcam had only worked intermittently. Both laptops are your usual HP Enterprise fare. Both worked 100% on Linux since day one.

[rewgs]

I have an 18 core i9 overclocked to a stable 5GHz and 128GB of RAM.

Without fail, every single time I press the Windows key and start typing, the first few letters are dropped.

Without fail, every single time I launch a new Explorer window, the file path has a slow ass green progress bar, my drives (of which I only have 4, and only one is a spinner) are place-holder icons and the available storage icons aren’t there. After very literally 10 seconds or so, Explorer finally looks right.

Meanwhile, Everything search remains blissfully instant, Explorer alternatives such as OneCommander are blazing fast, and even tools like PowerToys search (the one that looks exactly like macOS’s Spotlight search) are fast as hell. I find that one surprising because I’d assume it’s just an alternative GUI for Windows search, but I guess not?

Anyways, the point is, Windows itself isn’t even necessarily the problem (though, yes, it is a mess that I grow less and less able to tolerate). Even Windows’ first party foundational apps are completely broken.

At this point I’ve all but washed my hands of Windows. I just can’t stand it anymore. Life for me from here on out is primarily Apple hardware, as many FOSS apps and services that I can find, and Linux VMs for development.

Im planning on switching my Windows PC over to a NixOS bare metal install, and will run Windows via KVM for the rare moments when I want or need Windows. But even for gaming, which I do far less of nowadays (pretty much Souls games and the odd game of Smash), my PS5 and Switch are more than good enough.

Windows is an absolute train wreck and I have every reason to believe it’s only ever going to get worse, not better. Which sucks because though I prefer the Unix paradigm, there’s still a lot to appreciate about Windows. I wish it weren’t being driven into the ground, but here we are.

[pmarreck]

After distro-hopping for a while, I've finally settled on NixOS on ZFS root. The ability to boot into any previously working configuration if you manage to screw something up that doesn't work with your hardware or whatever (which is unfortunately still far more common on Linux than on Windows or macOS, if ever... and this feature is via GRUB and NixOS, this doesn't even touch ZFS snapshots which are yet another layer of security), as well as having all configuration be declarative (and storeable in, say, a github repo, and deterministically reproducible) is frankly "the only safe way to fly" in the Linux ecosystem IMHO.

The only trouble is, it's still definitely for power-user Linux folks. There is at least 1 fork trying to put a dent in this problem, though: https://snowflakeos.org/

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> smartphones have been mostly Linux since about 2010

Although I've seen Android described as the monkey's paw of Linux phones. (Granted, Android/Linux is Linux even without GNU.)

[pjmlp]

Doesn't look like it, from official NDK documentation.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

And even if you try to be clever,

"Improving Stability with Private C/C++ Symbol Restrictions in Android N"

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/improving-...

"Namespaces for Native Libraries"

https://source.android.com/docs/core/permissions/namespaces_...

[fragmede]

ChromeOS is a similar Faustian deal.

[AshamedCaptain]

I think ChromeOS is much closer to desktop Linux than Android is. Among other things, I have seen more contributions overall from ChromeOS guys than from Android guys, despite the huge differences in user numbers.

[kaba0]

Wasn’t pretty much every battery-preserving feature made by android kernel devs? Android is just no longer in its early days to need bit kernel changes.

[AshamedCaptain]

I absolutely disagree. The early Android was using a very simplistic approach to powersaving that was not only not a good fit compared to what desktop Linux was using, but also disagreed with the previous work that had been done for Linux from other vendors (e.g. TI).

Android did not start the craze of Linux on devices, they just surfed on it...

[kaba0]

It was a question, not a statement.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Chrome OS also runs mainline kernel and uses GNU userspace

[yjftsjthsd-h]

At least ChromeOS devices (nearly?) universally support being unlocked to allow the owner root access and to flash whatever they want; I would love for Android to have the same "developer mode". Not that I really disagree with you.

[shmerl]

You don't need to wait for it to come, you can simply use it on the desktop.

[fulafel]

"Year of the linux desktop" has transformed from a mock into just a self-referential meme joke as nontechnical end-users moved away from desktop computers and the Windows competition started to slide into irrelevance.

The corpo world Windows market is still there, and "enthusiast" windows gaming is there, but personal computing for was mostly taken over by mobile / iPad / chromebook competition. And most of gaming of course is on mobile and consoles. The remaining corpo world use supplies mass market PC hardware to run desktop Linux on and we should keep an eye on its viability.

(Linux is of course a completely mainstream platform in the dev / maker / engineering world, windows only slightly ahead eg in stack overflow dev survey, has been working well and steadily improving for less technical users for 2-3 decades)

[unixhero]

The desktop is almost dead beyond corporate.

[pjmlp]

Until 3D Web APIs stop being 10 years behind native ones, the desktop has a safe future.

[cjbgkagh]

This is my biggest gripe with WebDev, followed by thread limits.

[esjeon]

The traditional desktop is dead, but we’re getting app-based desktops - something look similar, but with completely different ecosystem from developer to consumer.

[fragmede]

Which is an interesting shift in the situation, but I don't think corporations are going anywhere.

[vladvasiliu]

More and more corporations use some kind of on-line SaaS software. Those only need browsers.

What's funny, is that for a long time MS Office was one of the reasons why enterprises would stick with Windows. But now, with Office365, the web experience is better than the installed-app, one. I understand "more advanced" features aren't there yet. As someone fairly basic, I have no idea what those are, but from what I see most people do in Excel, it's just basically an easy way to get a table. That works fine on the web version.

There's also the tendency of locking down workstations, by installing all kinds of detection agents, usually billed per node.

With the two combined, I would expect more and more companies to switch to some kind of dumb terminal, that would only show a browser.

Sure, this would probably not work well for everybody, but for many office workers it would likely be perfect. Hell, even for developers, with all the "remote dev" things coming out lately.

[notwokeno]

The Linux desktop is here for people who want it and has been for years. That only 2% or so of people use it is IMO irrelevant.

[czx4f4bd]

Even if "only" 2.5% of desktops and laptops use it, that is not a small number by any stretch of the imagination -- that's like 30-50 million people. For comparison, ChromeOS has a market share of about 2.4%, and that's with a fairly concerted effort by Google to drive adoption.

Meanwhile, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey showed a massive jump from 25% of respondents using Linux last year to 40% using it this year. Even if you assume some sampling bias, that's still a huge swing.

Then you have major manufacturers like Dell shipping laptops with Ubuntu, Proton and Wine getting better and better at running Windows games and apps, projects like WSL and the Steam Deck giving more people the opportunity to try Linux out, etc.

Even if there are still flaws and barriers to adoption, those barriers are diminishing and momentum is clearly building in Linux's favor. It will only get easier to run Linux going forward.

It probably won't overtake Windows or become a huge competitor (at least, not in the foreseeable future), but I think in the near future it will become more of a "mainstream niche" like OS X was in the 2000s. Most people won't run it, but they'll probably know someone who does and it will be at least conceivable that they could run it themselves.

[mikepurvis]

Google is playing the long game on ChromeOS though, by getting it into schools— those are kids who are going to hit adulthood in 10-15 years with their primary (and maybe even only) computing experiences having been iOS devices and Chromebooks.

Which is all well and good for Google, but that's just not the kind of time horizon that open source projects can work on.

[coldpie]

Yeah. There's two camps of the "year of the Linux desktop" topic. "I want Linux to be the majority of usage share" and "I want Linux to be good enough for me to use." The 2nd goal has been accomplished for many potential users since the mid-2000s, and only increasing especially since the web has nearly killed off native application development. The first goal is one I'm not interested in, myself.

[notwokeno]

I don't think the web killed native app development as much as the OS vendors themselves did by making everything miserable trying to build moats.

[cmrdporcupine]

Desktops themselves are increasingly becoming 'irrelevant' for people who aren't specialists or using them for office-productivity tasks.

Judging from what I see from my family and people I meet, many homes no longer have any kind of desktop or laptop computers, and rely exclusively on mobile devices of various types.

The era of the 'home computer' will probably turn out to be a "brief" window between the early 80s and this decade. Some people who need specific functionality might have a laptop. But even there, tablets or other restricted mobile-type devices are making inroads.

[prmoustache]

Aren't the tablets nearly dead already now that smartphones have become huge?

[cmrdporcupine]

Yes, but chromebooks are hugely big. Also Linux.