- NTSync coming in Kernel 6.11 for better Wine/Proton game performance and porting.
- Wine-Wayland last 4/5 parts left to be merged before end of 2024
- Wayland HDR/Game color protocol will be finished before end of 2024
- Nvidia 555/560 will be out for a perfect no stutter Nvidia performance
- KDE/Gnome reaching stability and usability with NO FKN ADS
- VR being usable
- More Wine development and more Games being ported
- Better LibreOffice/Word compatibility
- Windows 10 coming to EOL
- Improved Linux simplicity and support
- Web-native apps (Including Msft Office and Adobe)
- .Net cross platform (in VSCode or Jetbrains Rider)
What else am I missing?
Nah, the average “just werks” user won’t leave Windows even if it took money out of its credit card.
We say this every fucking year! Come on, this is getting ridiculous! Stop it! There will never be a year of the Linux desktop and if anything, this post shows why.
So much of the Linux community is utterly detached from what really matters to most users and focus on things that 80% of people won’t ever understand, care about or even use.
We focus on this and meanwhile, little quality of life features constantly get ignored when these are the real things that users will encounter and that will piss them off. They get treated as trivial. They get ignored in favor of other things.
Somebody mentioned it here. I saw it and I didn’t need them to mention it to want to say it. It’s already something that’s pissing me off. On Fedora for my Framework Laptop there is no way to adjust the scrolling speed on my trackpad which is moronically fast.
We are on the 40th release of Fedora, the 46th release of GNOME, and somehow this still isn’t baked in. I still have to go look around and use the fucking terminal to do something this basic. When some of them try Linux and will eventually push them to go back to Windows. And when users complain about this, what do we get? A bunch of elitists telling them to fuck off to go back to Windows, which I also saw as responses to this complaint about the trackpad.
Listen, Linux is an amazing project and I love it. I daily drive it. I don’t use Windows anywhere in my life. I haven’t touched OS in like two years at the very least. So many things that we are celebrating as brand new things that are finally working properly are things that already work by default on Windows and have been for years. We’re not going to convince people by mentioning that, “oh, we fixed this thing that’s been working forever on Windows.” It works on Linux now. People need more than this.
You want to know the sad truth? Here we go. We, collectively here, users of platform like Lemmy, are a vocal minority who are detached from the reality of most users. We care about ads, we care about privacy and so on, but the reality is most that people don’t. Most people won’t even notice that those things are there. For so many people, Windows is just the thing that stands between them and launching Chrome. It already works for them. There’s no reason for them to switch.
We are all way too invested in what runs on our computers and we forget that we are just us. Most people are not like us. Privacy scandals stop us from using stuff like social media and so on, but it clearly hasn’t stopped most of the world.
People heard about the shit that Meta was and is doing. Did people stop using Instagram? No, they didn’t. People know what Google is doing, how many of them switched to DuckDuckGo? A clinical moron turning the platform into a far-right haven didn’t stop most users from using Twitter.
The API bullshit didn’t stop most users from using Reddit. Sure there were protest, but I guarantee you that 99% who took part in the blackout just went back to it after. A lot of us didn’t. We left. We’re here now. But we’re still a tiny minority.
Ask a Firefox user did telling Chrome users that privacy was important ever worked? I’m sure you will get examples of it working but it’s a minority. Most people don’t give a shit and they use Chrome.
I don’t have a solution. I’m sorry, I made this long-ass comment but I don’t have much else to say. I don’t have a good solution to this problem.
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Lol and we’re forgetting the biggest QOL feature of all: actually coming installed with pre built computers.
Chrome OS was the only one to ever make a dent.
Without that this will always be a “power” user OS. People just want it to work.
I think this is the only feature that matters. For a user switching away from Windows I would love to hear about the user experience between buying a system76 (or another Linux system seller) vs a Mac laptop. Complaining that Linux doesn’t work with your hardware is like complaining that the hackintosh that you built doesn’t work with your hardware.
Seriously. I think Linux users expend 10x the energy worrying about ads on Windows than actual windows users. If you’re used to seeing hundreds of ads / day on the web, why the hell would you care about an occasional onedrive popup.
Re touchpads totally agree as well, I installed fedora kde on my mom’s abandoned laptop a couple weeks ago and it was atrocious. Limited gestures, no configurability, no smooth scroll, no scroll momentum except in apps that implement it manually, scrolling speeds totally off. I managed to fix most of these, but regular people can’t be expected to.
Battery life, for another is unpredictable and quite bad. Most people I’ve talked to seem to assume performant/light = efficient when it comes to Linux. This is not the case. Once again, solutions exist, but they are not accessible to a regular person.
Bro just trust me bro it’s year of the Linux desktop bro everyone will use Linux bro
That’s been true every year since I stated paying attention. In 1997.
Ah yes, this year is definitely the year of the Linux desktop. For real this time!
There’s a real opportunity here and we can either take it and run or we can let it pass us by.
- Windows 11 getting Copilot+ Recall
And a shit-ton of ads.
And the kitchen sink
Oh wait that’s the next KDE release
Most of the points listed here don’t matter a hoot to the average user.
That’s slowly changing though, as the enschittification of windows continues. They may not care to know about the details, but all of those points do fall under the “it just works” catagory. And they do care about that.
I agree. However if you look through the other comments in here, you’ll see a LOT more examples of stuff that fall into the “it just doesn’t work” category instead. And most of them are a lot more obvious to casual / new users. Those would be the ones that really require priority if Linux is ever to become mainstream.
True.
The only thing the average consumer will even notice is the end of support for Windows 10. However, once the prompt to upgrade to Windows 11 appears, 99% will click “yes” and forget about it. They might be a little annoyed by the changes, but that will be all.
Nobody will notice end of support for Windows 10. Why would they? Nobody noticed end of support for Windows 7, either, and it’s still up and running in many places where it really shouldn’t.
End users don’t give a crap about security updates and as long as users don’t bump into a lack of third party driver they won’t even notice a difference. And yeah, like every other time they will eventually update to the current version once more practical issues crop up. 10 to 11 isn’t even close to the harshest upgrade path MS has deployed.
However, once the prompt to upgrade to Windows 11 appears, 99% will click “yes” and
be informed that their computer does not support Win11
and forget about it.
Tl;Dr “I want my~ I want my~ I want my NixOS~”. Yes, I am that old. Shut up.
I love the enthusiasm… but I must disagree :( unfortunately, much to my sheegrin bacuse I want to spite Linux commenter on this sub so badly because they are a bunch of brogrammers, but for me the year of the Linux desktop has to happen at the hands of device manufacturers. “Monopoly-by-default” is real, always has been, and never ever really left. Don’t take your eyes off Microsoft or Apple for one second - the bastards - because when you do, you fall into the vendor lock-in trap.
I personally think the EU should publish a bespoke bootloader with a gallery of operating systems that can be fetched using PXE, with image signing and checking of course, sort of like the “browser choice” alternative for OS’s. It doesn’t need to be the main bootloader, but it has to be available - and most likely GRUB2… because GRUB2 is everywhere. It’s what boots MacOS on M* machines. It’s the one boot loader to rule them all. What I’m saying is we’re in the year of GRUB2.
Anyways, outside my ideal there’s really nothing that will bring the “year of the Linux desktop” popularity wise, besides a large vendor relying on the actual Linux desktop stack - which is possible, but there’s probably a reason why Samsung bet on Enlightenment, and it’s not because it’s creator is so enlightened. MIT spelt in South Korean translates to MINE.
One thing 2024 has also stood for is cleaning house. GNOME was caught breaking their own strict rules, KDE keeps ironing out the ancient from the Plasma desktop paradigm, though now KWin has better Wayland support than Mutter for some reason, even though one has had Wayland support for years (a real tortoise and the hare situation this), and people are obsessed with a display server that nobody develops for anymore. (XWayland is XWayland, not X11). So finally we’re in the year of Wayland. Good bye, screen tearing. Hello breaking with protocol and causing screen corruption. Oy vey.
In regards to developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, and developers, then I look at the Rust stack, I look at the Zed stack, even the C# stack, or even a certain GUI framework with its own IDE built entirely using its own Emscripten SDK (can’t remember the name for the life of me). Here I see some new ways of doing the same thing and creating cross-platform solutions from the get-go, that might bring in new products and services on the Linux side.
But we already have access to more private and public services in software form on Linux than ever before before, so maybe the year of the Linux desktop passed us by but as a lackluster metric and Linux as a desktop (or LaaD as I’d like to call it, because I’m a moron) really won’t be popularized until one of the major vendor completely screws the Pooch, and then someone brings a solution based on the Linux stack. Come on, Copilot+ and System76…
Also, NixOS is finally trying to fix it’s issues, which is great, because Nix could realistically be a reproducible stack across systems, which can be tested by spitting out a single flake file. I see it as an addition to Flatpaks, Snaps and even AppImages. I want to petition Ableton to bring Live Linux, because I know in my heart of hearts that they’ve hired people with NixOS experience and that the Push 3 standalone needs some form of OS. But NixOS is a perfect example of why people are asking what happened to the year of the CoC’s? Maybe we can do a reboot.
So in conclusion, I’m over here waiting for the year of NixOS, which will be a lackluster event where nobody is happy with, most likely celebrated by another institutional figure having to walk it off. See you in 10-15 years.
- A non-AI generated image - it communicates to artists that they’re not welcome, while Linux is getting there in support for artists (Krita, LMMS, etc.).
- A debugger with a GUI - no, I don’t care about writing shell scripts to automate debugging.
- Server-side decorations on Gnome - just add an option for it FFS!
- A way to easily recover from a crash during an update - I was lucky that I could do it from the command line, but my Ubuntu still likes to crash the VM host if I open Nautilus.
- Drivers.
- Linux devs not throwing a temper tantrum for a driver not being GPL. I know, that would be the ideal, but corporations gonna corporate.
Also web-native apps are a web 2.0 mistake, and lead to the abandonment of many portable GUI frameworks in favor of the “what if your pops didn’t had to install Word Processor, and instead just had to type wordprocessor.com into his browser” idea of some techbro. Do you know why your ÜBERGAMERMOUSE Ultrautility is 250+MB? Because they’re all Electron apps!
You forgot “Recall”.
I wanted to make a wordplay here, but I couldn’t find one.
Anyway, a lot of people are worried about the OS remembering everything you are doing like it’s taking screenshots all the time.
For my part, that would be a big no-no.
it’s currently opt-in rather than opt-out, fully on-device and won’t work on devices with weak NPUs (or on any which completely lack it)
unless it changes in the future it’s not that bad at the moment tbhOf course it’s on-device. Microsoft is doing all the processing on people’s PCs, rather than their own servers, where they’d have to pay for that computation.
Data still gets reported to MS afterwards.
It must communicate with Microsoft in a way, just by the fact the “AI” must not “hallucinates” by suggesting the user to jump from a bridge or to add Glue in his pizza…
What is the bridge jumping bit about?
“On-device” has to be a half-true at best. I’m having a hard time believing that the NPUs on these new ARM chips are powerful enough for it to be fully on-device. Even more-so with “approved” x86 chips. There has to be some data sharing between the client and server, similar to how Rabbit does their shit.
Look up TPUs, like a coral tensor. Extremely efficient at machine learning, only, and cheap. If NPUs use anything like a TPU, then it absolutely can do local “AI.” Then once the heavy lifting is done, then I’d imagine all that data is uploaded.
…until a botched update or a bug sends everything to the cloud, MS makes an about face saying oops my bad, then say it was fixed.
Recall does things that weirdly, a malware would have done back in the day.
linux is at single digit percentages and that’s including steamdecks so… no, not even clsoe
Been seriously thinking of switching to linux for my desktop. I mostly use it for games. Today I was looking at mods for Mass Effect, and the mod manager says in all caps
- LINUX IS NOT SUPPORTED:(There’s probably going to be a lot of that sort of annoyance for years.
You might still try using Proton or Lutris to run it. It may be a pain to get working, but hopefully someone out there has a guide for the mod manager you’re using.
Nah. What hes saying its that they are not supported natively. The game is Gold on protondb, so its playable on Linux. Just use Wine to run your mods. Simple
I’d argue that it really doesn’t matter. Linux has taken over everything else. And the more MS fucks up, the more likely people will look for alternatives. I do believe many will go to Mac, but Linux is clearly picking up some of the slack as well. Microsoft wouldn’t be the first tech company to take a tumble. Never say never.
The problem is usability for non power users. As a server environment nothing beats it but man the UI on these apps have some horrendous defaults and the CLI is everywhere. KDE still can’t get rounded corners right.
Though I agree with your overall point, I can’t see why rounded corners (or the lack of it) might be a noticeable issue.
Whenever I install Linux on someone’s computer, the first thi that they ask is always “why aren’t the corners properly rounded? I can’t use this!”
(No, this has never happened, but it would be funny, I’d get to smack them over the head)
I love how delusional people here are.
Joking lol but serious that it will never happen. Windows has waaay too much of a monopoly for that to never happen.
Like wtf, am I supposed to tell my mom to use the terminal to download ms word? Oh wait sorry you can use libre office! It’s the same but… Well it looks different. And isn’t as functional.
I agree that it’s not the year of the linux desktop, and that people who think it is are very naive, but you don’t need to tell anyone to use the terminal for anything for many distros.
Until you encounter some weird glitch that needs to be fixed using the terminal. It happens maybe once every couple of months for me, but it still happens. Even so, I’m considering switching fully after windows 10 goes EOL.
Better than a Windows 10 glitch that requires you to dig through 10 dialogs
You’re right but I have seen old people getting some Ubuntu/Mint installed and set up and they email & spreadsheet away just fine.
I guess the only who will have to tinker are gamers (or very specific power users?).
Others just doesn’t even know or care about the OS.
People around here are delusional a lot of times, but to say that windows has too much of a monopoly to lose market, is too much of an exaggeration. Microsoft has been taking unpopular decisions, newer windows versions have been facing more and more resistance, macos has been growing and taking a share of the market, some governments and smaller businesses have been trying linux as a way to cut expenses, linux usability have been improving a lot, android devices have been taking more steps into taking functionalities from desktop systems and improving usability with keyboard and mouse, a lot of computers that do simple processing have been replaced by sbcs, like raspberry pis, etc.
Windows isn’t too big to fail, and it’s not impossible that we’re close to see it starting to fall. Now, on what os would become the bigger player, that’s another story.
Fun fact: My elderly mother uses linux, and without my help. Also, she never used the terminal.
Same thing here my grandparents and some other old age people which i know using linux mint.I installed it to their pc 5 years ago and up to date,it’s works fine for them before on windows it was nighmare while they were catching ads malware while browsing the net.
some governments […] have been trying linux as a way to cut expenses
I have been hearing such news for close to two decades but not without news where many such organisations switch back to using proprietary software due to a mixture of reasons ranging from usability to politics.
Windows usage is decreasing every year. Slowly but… And it will reach a point where it will have not enough critical mass to be “THE OS” but “another OS”.
lol
