I am not saying “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop”. That said, things languished below 2% for decades and now it has doubled in just over a year. With the state of Linux Gaming, I could see that happening again.
Also, if ChromeOS continues to converge, you could consider it a Linux distro at some point and it also has about 4% share.
Linux could exceed 10% share this year and be a clear second after Windows.
That leaves me wondering, what percentage do we have to hit before it really is “The Year of the Linux Desktop”. I have never had to wonder that before ( I mean, it obviously was not 3% ). Having to ask is a milestone in itself.
Manjaro - used to love it. Now the only distro I actively advise against
Garuda - just too much ( I prefer Arch / EndeavourOS )
Elementary - wanted to love it - just too limited
Gentoo - realized I just don’t want to build everything
RHEL Workstation - everything too old
Bhodi - honestly do not remember - long ago
Ubuntu - ok, let’s expand…
These days, I dislike Snaps. Ubuntu just never hit the sweet spot for me though. I was already an experienced Linux user when it appeared and preferred RPM based distros at the tome. Ubuntu always seemed slow and fragile to me. Setting things up, like Apache with Mono back in the day, was “different” on Ubuntu and that annoyed me. For most of its history, it is what I would recommend to new users but I just never liked it myself.
Debian Stable - ok, let’s expand
I really like Debian. It was also a little “alien” when I was using Fedora / Mandrake and the like but it never bothered me like Ubuntu. I ran RHEL / Centos as servers so I did not need Debian stability. As a desktop, Debian packages were always just a little too old ( especially for dev ). The lack of non-free firmware made it a pain.
These days though, Debian has been growing on me. The move to include non-free firmware has made it much more practical. With Flatpaks and Distrobox, aging packages is much less of a problem too. I could see myself using Debian. I am strongly considering moving to VanillaOS ( immutable Debian ).
I basically do not run any RHEL servers anymore. At home, I have a fair bit running Debian already ( Proxmox, PiHole, PiVPN, and a Minecraft server ).
EndeavourOS is my primary desktop these days ( and I love it ) but it is mostly for the AUR. A Debian base with an Arch Distrobox might be perfect. Void seems quite nice as well.
I have been an Open Source advocate forever ( and used to say Free Software and FLOSS ). I have used Linux daily since the 0.99 kernels and I even installed 386BSD back in the day. Despite that, the biggest “not for me” distros right now are anything too closely associated with the politics of the GNU project. It has almost made me want to leave Linux and I have considered moving to FreeBSD. I would love to use Haiku. OCI containers and the huge software ecosystem keep me on Linux though.
The distribution that intrigues me the most right now is Chimera Linux. I run it with an Arch distrobox and it may become my daily driver. The pragmatism of projects like SerenityOS really attracts me. Who knows it may be what finally pulls me away after 30+ years of Linux.
Many people have predicted the death of the small, independent window manager with the coming of Wayland. I have heard multiple times that only large projects like GNOME and KDE would be able to take on the burden of making a compositor.
Now, I do think that lots of no longer actively developed window managers could get left behind. But the idea that it will be too complicated to create a window manager now is turning out to be wrong.
First, fewer desktop environments are getting left behind than feared. XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE all seem to have Wayland plans now.
The big change is the appearance of not one but multiple compositor libraries designed to make it easier to create a window manager for Wayland. Some of them look like they might make it easier than it was under X. The approach taken by this one makes the idea of hacking around with it very inviting.
Although having to create a compositor has made things difficultly until now, I think the idea of decoupling the compositor for Wayland is going to look smart in the long run.
Being separate from Wayland, compositor devs are free to experiment and window manager authors can select the one that best maps to their goals.
I was reading up on Oasis Linux yesterday. It comes with a Wayland compositor ( SWC ) and tiling window manager ( Velox ) that are less than 20,000 lines of code combined!
It would not be practical for a light-weight distro to trim down Xorg like that. But I the compositor is separate, it can be either smaller or feature rich. SWC is XWayland compatible but obviously that is going to add more size if you need it.
Looking forward to the window manager innovation that projects like Louvre enable.
As somebody that first configured X back in 1991, I agree with this message.
To be fair though, with KMS, libdrm, and libinput, setting up X is 1000 times easier than it used to be. I suspect most users never even need to open Xorg.conf or even know it exists.
Ironically, all these technologies are also used by Wayland. A lot of what Wayland does not do, Xorg basically does not do either.
I think the drama around Wayland can be explained by the sentence “it should be a drop-in replacement like pipewire but isn’t”.
Without taking a side on that issue, I will point out that this was not a goal for the Wayland designers ( in their own words - I do not have time to go find a quote but have read this sentiment many times ). Wayland detractors agree with your sentence and, given that expectation, are legitimately upset and even confused that Wayland continues to gain mind and market share against X11.
If you feel that Wayland needs to be a drop-in replacement for X11, it is not ready and may never be. By that metric, some people see Wayland as a failed technology and perceive Wayland users as shills and zealots.
If you are interested in a display server that addresses some of the core design problems in X11 and do not mind moving to something new, Wayland is starting to look ready for prime-time.
If you are non-technical and / or unopinionated the debate is probably irrelevant. Wayland will most likely become the default on whatever Linux distribution you use sometime in 2024 or 2025. You will be a Wayland user. Maybe you already are.
If you are willing to step outside the mainstream, using X11 without Wayland is going to be possible for at least another decade. That said, I am saying “outside the mainstream” because not only will popular Linux distributions and desktop environments start to become Wayland only but the innovation is all going to move to Wayland. There will be many Wayland-only compositors, apps, and features. 5 years from now, not using Wayland is going to really limit the desktop experience. I expect some toolkits ( GTK, Qt, and maybe even WINE ) to drop X11 support at some point ( maybe not soon but sooner than 10 years maybe ). 5 - 10 years may seem like a long time but it will likely come faster than X11 stalwarts expect.
I know this is a joke comment but Linux is for sure an enterprise kernel first and foremost. It did not start that way but that is how it has been developed and managed for many years now. Maybe the most incorrect thing anybody has ever said on record in the computer industry is when Linus said Linux was “not going to be anything big and professional”.
Linux distributions, which are conceived and managed totally independently from the kernel are available for every niche. Many of them are desktop and “consumer” oriented. With many Linux distributions, I would say that it is more accurate that they are hobbiest oriented more than what Microsoft would mean be “consumer”.
As a small counterpoint, I am supposed to use Windows at work but I use Linux. I would say that I am a “very heavy” but intermediate Microsoft Office user. That is, while I am not expert level in Office, I have to create and consume multiple documents per day. I give ( or submit ) several PowerPoints per week. These typically use templates supplied by Marketing or others. I create and consume multiple Excel files daily which almost always have multiple worksheets. I must admit that I have gotten authoring Word files down to maybe one per week but I open 3 a day at least.
Of course, I do not actually use Microsoft Office most of the time. Most of the above is in LibreOffice. I spend a tonne of my day in Outlook which I use in a browser ( Office 365 ). If I am opening a document from an email, it will often open in Office 365 online ( in my browser in Linux ). So do I use Microsoft Office quite a bit but rarely author anything there. While I prefer Firefox, I use Microsoft Edge on Linux and most often that is where I have Outlook open. Sadly, I have at least 3 to 4 Microsoft Teams meetings a day. Teams and GoToMeeting are why I started using Edge. It is just a nicer workflow if Teams and Outlook are in the same browser.
Anyway, I have very little problem exchanging documents. I had to switch to default fonts that Windows users will have of course but that was long ago now. So, I would not say that “alternatives such as LibreOffice aren’t just good enough” is a fair assessment for everybody. If I was an expert user in any one app ( in Finance maybe ) I could see this being true but I bet most office workers could use LibreOffice just fine these days.
Outside of Office, most of what I use are web applications which work just as well on Linux. I use containers a lot and they work better on Linux. Linux is quite bit snappier on the same hardware.
I am just a datapoint though and the issues you raise are real. I would perhaps just be less absolute about it. Trying Linux can still make sense. Also, you can try LibreOffice on Windows before jumping all the way to Linux.
In that talk he called C “the worst language” and said he chose it to troll the industry. How does that support your point?
He also said that you should choose “least privilege” whenever possible. That is precisely the value that Rust brings over C. So how does that talk support the idea that C is more secure than Rust?
This may be a controversial opinion but I would rather use the web version of Outlook than Evolution. I have been trying to use Evolution since the Ximian days but I was never really happy with it. I gave up on it in favour of web Outlook a couple of years ago.
Please, don’t use Open Office. Dev essentially halted on it years ago when it was forked o LibreOffice. Use LibreOffice instead. The Open Office project seems to still exist to trick people into using old software.