O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? It has always been my wish to live honorably, and after my death, to leave to those who come after me my memory in good works. It all keeps tumbling down. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

The Eve of (My) Year of the Linux Desktop

I think it might actually, finally, be the eve of the long-awaited Year of the Linux Desktop. Not the year itself; the eve. If nothing else, it is at minimum the eve of my Year of the Linux Desktop. But first, some history.

I first learned about Linux when I was about 12 years old, in middle school in the late 00's. I was immediately enamored by the idea of an operating system that was made by neither Microsoft (who was the technology boogeyman back then) nor Apple (which specializes, then and now, in overpriced, user-hostile nonsense). A truly Free As In Freedom way of doing computing greatly appealed to the libertarian phase I was going through (as one does at age 12). It took a considerable length of time to actually try it out, owing to the fact that I did not own my own computer, but I eventually managed to get Puppy Linux (the OG by Barry Kauler) running off of a Live CD and became even more fascinated. Fast forward a few years: I got my own laptop, and one of the first things I did was dual boot Ubuntu. Except, eh, the experience wasn't that great. Lots of unintuitive workflow stuff and extremely poor design choices. So I tried another distro, Fedora I think, and it was a little better in some respects, but also really rough around the corners (see: the lack of thumbnails in GNOME's file picker, a feature present in Windows 98). I went around the carousel a few times before becoming extremely bitter and swearing off Linux-as-a-desktop as a hopeless cause.

Fast forward 15 years, and at least five things have changed:

1. Windows is crashing and burning far faster than I think people realize

The decline really started in 2014 when Microsoft fired all of their programmatic testers, but it's been accelerating with the whole Windows 11 debacle, from ridiculous hardware requirements to Copilot garbage to a generally poor UX. I say this as a long-time fan of Windows. I actually thought Windows ME, Vista, and 8 were perfectly fine OSes that got a bad rap. 10 had its mild shortcomings, but nevertheless I approached 11 with open arms and could immediately tell everything was off. The entire experience lacks the kind of polish that has kept me on Windows for a quarter of a century, literally since before I can remember. I've stayed on Windows 10 despite discontinued support simply because I find 11 to be almost literally unusable; I am constantly struggling against it when forced to use it at my place of work. None of this necessarily means people will migrate to Linux. But it is a hard push away from the current desktop king.

2. Valve finally solved a lot of the hard problems

A few companies, particularly Valve, have finally invested in resolving a lot of the long-standing hard, complex problems that Linux has historically struggled with and which I don't fully understand. Although SteamOS and Proton were developed to play games, the pipeline is robust enough that everyone running Linux as a desktop on modern hardware has benefitted massively.

3. Distros are finally accessible to non-programmers

It's taken multiple decades, but distros have finally learned some lessons about how to package an OS for normal people. Newer distros like Bazzite boot up with a full-bodied config and good defaults, which is something that Ubuntu et al. somehow kept stumbling over for twenty years.

4. Distros can finally look good and perform complex tasks without needing to be an expert

Ricing has enabled intense and often great-looking customization on Linux for decades, but it has always involved expert-level knowledge and hours of work. With Hyprland and its associated tools, users can finally have an OS UI that actually looks good without tinkering, instead of something an amateur designer cooked up in the early 2000s. I would argue that Omarchy is the most aesthetically-pleasing OS ever released. And Omarchy keeps adding checks to the "eve" column. It recently integrated very easy and seamless Windows 11 virtualization: pick it from a menu and Windows runs in a contained VM, with a shared folder between the two systems. On the one hand, that's a crutch. On the other hand, it knocks the two classic "but I need Office/Adobe" objections down a few notches. And critically, it inverts the old dual-boot trap that killed my attempts in the 2010s: instead of rebooting into Windows and staying there, Windows becomes a window you open and close, while Linux can remain as the home.

5. LLMs allow non-programmers to actually fix things

This was always one of the major stumbling blocks for me. I'd install Linux, start getting comfortable, see something I wanted to tweak, and then run into literal hours of cryptic error messages that acted as hydra heads, until I eventually resigned myself to the fact that I couldn't fix it. Newer LLMs, however, are excellent at debugging anything you throw at them and finding a solution to the problem. I recently had Claude Opus 4.8 reset my home server after admining it myself for a couple of years. Within a few days of giving it SSH access and telling it "hey, set up xyz," it was more robustly configured than I had managed over literal years. And note that this advantage cuts disproportionately in Linux's favor: Linux fails in text (logs, configs, cryptic stderr), and text is exactly what LLMs are best at metabolizing. Windows fails in opaque dialog boxes. The thing that made Linux exhausting, deciphering problems in a language only experts spoke, is the kind of thing LLMs are stellar at doing.

I'm not claiming the Year has arrived. The remaining moats Windows and macOS have are real: Linux doesn't ship preinstalled from Best Buy, kernel-level anticheat remains a wall, and Nvidia support for SteamOS is still a work in progress by Valve's own admission. But every one of these is visibly falling or scheduled to fall. But on a personal level, after fifteen years of bitterness, I am finally beginning to daily-drive Linux; it's beautiful, it does everything I need, and when it doesn't, I (with some assistance from robots) can fix it. Give it another year, and I think we'll find a substantial amount has been resolved.


⟵ Back to the opuscula