[inktype]

The article is disappointingly short, but at least for me, the title is true; at long last, 2022 was finally the Year of the Linux Desktop. May the YotLD meme live on in spirit.

I finally switched my desktop and laptops 100% to Linux. Some games don't run - fine - plenty of other games do. Ableton runs well in Wine, but Bitwig is native, and yabridge runs VSTs. MuseScore was saved. KDE is pleasant and productive. Blender is amazing. Pipewire is audio done right. Electron, despite its problems, makes Linux a build target of ordinary apps. Flatpak and AppImage enable simple cross-linux-distro app distribution. Critical mass achieved.

No desktop is perfect, but at least for people with a nominal, base level of experience, Linux is the least bad.

Looking to the future, I hope the Desktop Linux experience improves with respect to memory exhaustion, and I hope a Patreon-like platform gains prominence to enable easily donating to keep projects alive; it's currently cumbersome to find all the different places to donate.

With great gratitude to every free software and open source contributor, happy end of 2022!

[themoonisachees]

That has been my experience this year as well. After a frustrating bout with my video drivers on windows, my thinking was "well, that is usually what keeps me coming back to windows whenever it happens on Linux, so what do I have to lose?"

Turns out Debian+KDE +Wayland is exactly right for me, especially KDE connect. The only pain point has been VR gaming, so I've kept a minimal windows install on a small ssd. Everything else has been smooth sailing and I'm considerably less frustrated by design choices when I can just fix them.

[zamalek]

> Linux is the least bad.

Hear hear! I use Gnome purely because home-manager can configure 99% of it. I had to use Windows a few days ago in order to use Serif products and, beyond looking shit, the lack of the gnomeflow is bloody annoying.

FWIW Elementary sports a pay-what-you-want store.

[coffeebeqn]

I’m running the Steam Deck and it is an absolute generational shift in gaming on Linux. The majority of games now run totally without problems.

[flatiron]

Same. The only ones that seem to have problems are the ones that explicitly don’t support Linux via anti cheat or weird launchers or DRM. If it’s just a normal game, it runs fine.

[tasuki]

Would the assassin's creed series games work through steam deck? I've wanted to try them but not enough to bother with windows...

[adham-omran]

Before MuseScore being saved I had to run a Windows VM with Cubase/NotePerformer to get decent mock-ups. I'm waiting Debian Stable to receive a better Pipewire with the next version. Truly a phenomenal year!