I know it sounds crazy at this point, but with popular YouTubers switching to Linux, gamers overall well-aware of Steam on Linux advantages and switching as well, plus popular software like LittleSnitch getting ported, 2026 can without irony be named as Year of Linux Desktop, right?
The year of the Linux Desktop will always be $CURRENT_YEAR + 1
To me, the year's in the past. I haven't touched Windows since 2017, and nothing bad happened to me.
But you're right, I guess for some people, there will already be a good reason not to use Linux.
I did the switch in 2013 and haven't missed it. For games I ran vga_passthrough and later VFIO and others until pretty recently (I think right after covid I switched to steam directly on linux)
The year of the Linux Desktop will be powered by fusion.
What do you call a fallacy where it is implied that the future will be like the past?
Problem of induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Reminds me about schools of thought on rates of change:
linear % change implies exponential change in absolute terms
Maybe similar to boy who cried wolf?
"The future aint what it used to be."
> 2026 can without irony be named as Year of Linux Desktop, right?
For whom? Average desktop users? Average users don't know what LittleSnitch is, let alone calling it "popular software."
For Linux desktop users. A bit of tongue-in-cheek but that's pretty much the argument that I've heard in some circles ("it works for us and not going away anytime soon - why waste time convincing others?").
That's some beautiful, text-book straw man!
?
So for whom?
I think there is a lot of talk (and this is good), but very little action. Market share is still incredibly low for LNX. I believe only a small subset of people actually attempt the jump from WIN to LNX (since most just want to play their games and run their programs without hassle) and then quickly realize that its tougher than they anticipated and swiftly return to WIN.
This is true, but also the original comment still stands: Linux desktop usage outside developers was so low that it was barely worth mentioning before, so even a small uptick like this is a serious change, and it's how bigger changes start.
I definitely don't think it's even the likely outcome, but for Linux to get serious traction this is how it has to start: power users but not the traditional developer crowd start actually moving, and in doing so produce the guides, experience, word of mouth, and motivation that normal people need to do so, alongside the institutional support from Valve to actually fix the bugs and issues.
It remains to be seen if a critical mass will find it usable long-term, but if it were to happen, this is how it would look at the start, and Microsoft are certainly doing their best to push people away right now, although I suspect the real winner is more likely to be Apple with the Macbook Neo sucking up more of the lower end.
> Microsoft are certainly doing their best to push people away right now
According to a speculative blog post by Eric S. Raymond in September 2020, Microsoft is literally moving towards replacing Windows' internals with Linux. Unfortunately, that post is now unreachable, but searching for "eric raymond article about windows being replaced with a linux kernel" finds many third-party references to it and summaries of it.
Last phase of the desktop wars? by Eric Raymond: https://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764
5% on the steam survey though. The jump isn't quite as big from previous years as it seems as they did some corrections to the statistics this year, but 5% is nothing to sneeze at.
Exactly! Me personally in 2010 would never though about the time when one on every 20 gamers will be Linux user. That is huge IMHO.
I wouldn't be too exited. Statistics like this are very problematic.
For example, I have Steam installed on my Macbook pro and I occasionally play a single very simple game there. Does that make me a macOS gamer? of course not. The vast majority of games I want to play don't work on macOS.
I suspect that most of those 5% are just Linux users who have steam installed and play a small amount of games. Some probably just installed it to check what's available and don't play anything.
Everyone I know who is a "serious" gamer, as in exited about upcoming releases of AAA games is using Windows.
Indeed. The bigger problem is also that consistently the most played games are multiplayer competitive titles with anti-cheat software that is only written for Windows (and sometimes MacOS). I suppose this issue will solve itself, once enough people start playing on Linux. Then developers will be forced to support that too in order to not lose too much of their player base, but we are still a far cry from this threshold.
That would mean that it still would be around 0,5%. If you want to split the hair probably 4,5% of this 5% is Steam Deck.
As someone who did make the jump, it was actually a lot easier than I anticipated. I encourage others to do the same. The only games I can't play are some AAA multiplayer games I wasn't particularly interested in anyways.
I think for people who are browsing this site, it will certainly be easier than expected. For the average person, most likely not.
What’s with the weird abbreviations?
He is saving 4 keystrokes out of ~400 by typing LNX instead of Linux.
But holding the shift key makes up for it, so seems like a bad strategy
You are overthinking it. It is neither a strategy nor keystroke saving (although technically with shift its 4 keystrokes as opposed to 5 for Linux and quite a few saved for Windows). I just typed that without thinking probably because it looks better and reads a bit easier (subjectively).
I hope more and more folks who want gaming computers realize how turnkey bazzite is, especially if you’re team red. It’s pretty remarkable
2026 is the year of the linux phone. We need to embrace that the year of the linux desktop (2025) was successful.
According to latest Steam stats[0], Linux hit > 5% for the first time ever, so definitely successful (to some degree).
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/steam-hardware-softw...
I wish. I'm tired of not owning my phone. But I don't see a push being done to get a proper Linux phone
Sadly year of the linux phone feels like it's getting farther away.
What does "the year of the Linux phone" mean when half the phones already run Linux?
Android/Google does not fulfill the spirit of that. Yes it’s technically Linux, but it’s not what one expects from a Linux experience. We all know this, we all know Linux is under the hood, but “Linux phone” is basically shorthand for more user control, more open source aspects, more secure/private, and far away from companies like Google/apple/etc. Android phones do not fill that request even with graphene and such. Google still has too much control.
And the other half run BSD
kde linux may make it happen. that and command line agents that help people fix their systems.
It’s definitely what converted me (steamOS first real experience, then mint, pop, and now bazzite)
Also unrelated, but more linux gamers proves my personal observation that on the spectrum of computer literacy gamers are just below powerusers and programmers. We see more less technical people migrate over to Linux gradually and now it's gamers turn. Well, that's kind of obvious for everybody except Microsoft apparently.
does wifi work yet? last year it didnt for me
Wifi has been working out of the box for close to 20 years now. On some computers with old Broadcom cards, you have to enable non-free drivers. What model are you using?
WiFi works fine if there are drivers for whatever WiFi chip you have.
Unfortunately there are no standards for OS to talk to WiFi devices like exist for many other types of hardware, so it’s not possible to make generic drivers.
Did you forget your WiFi password?
yes
Wifi and Bluetooth are pretty decent now. As far as I can tell the biggest blockers are:
* Laptop battery life. Still in the "it's fine; I get 5 hours!" stage.
* Wayland & graphics. It's still a mess. Getting there though. Probably will be ok in about 5 years I'd guess.
* RAM management. I don't know why nobody cares about this but when Mac or Windows run low of RAM I don't even notice. With Linux it either hard freezes and reboots, or hard freezes for like 5 minutes and then kills a completely random program. How is that ok? My solution here was to upgrade both my computers to 128 GB of RAM, but that isn't really a viable option today!
* Generally bugginess. Both KDE and Gnome are just not as rock solid as Windows 11. I know I'll get downvoted for this but I haven't experienced a single crash on Windows 11 (and no ads or bloatware because I did research and used the LTSC edition). In KDE, much as I love it, the taskbar crashes regularly and I cannot make head nor tail of the completely random order it wants to put windows in. You can't even drag them into a sensible order. Gnome was not much better.
Still KDE is a lot better now than it was in the kidney bean days so I reckon in another 5 years it will probably be pretty solid too.
No.