I know that phrase is the most beaten dead horse around at this point but the year of the Linux desktop is going to be different depending on what your requirements are.
If you just need to browse the web, it’s been there for over a decade. Same for most dev work.
For gaming, it’s already there for most titles. Pretty much everything I try works now unless it has anticheat. It’s been in a pretty good state for 2 or 3 years now at least.
For media creation and specialized software, it’s not there yet. The big stuff like adobe will probably never get ported and the free alternatives vary wildly in quality. Blender is awesome. GIMP is not. There’s also issues like lacking color management and iffy HDR support.
I do wonder about that, Gen Z and Alpha are less tech savvy than millennials, so there’s non zero odds that it doesn’t work out because Linux isn’t easily accessible in the tablet/phone space yet.
Mobile Linux is a thing, though I think it would take governments mandating unlocked/user-unlockable bootloaders to gain literally Any market share. It would also probably take a compatibility layer for running Android apps similar to Wine in desktop Linux, but Android already runs a Linux kernel, so projects like Waydroid are most of the way there already by just running Android inside a container.
I think we need rock-solid Wayland before we can expect TYLD. So I’m feeling 2026 minimum, then add a couple for some padding; so 2028 realistically. Think of how far we’ve come in 5 years, then imagine 5 years more.
If Nvidia’s consumer GPU market share dropped a bit too, that’d help.
Why do you think that Wayland is necessary for adoption?
In my opinion it is the missing hardware drivers, compatability issues and “getting your hands dirty” while constantly tweaking stuff.
Yeah it got better over the years, but most people want things to just work.
Wayland is necessary because Wayland will be necessary in the near future, if it was next year then that would put a lot of people who don’t know about X.Org and Wayland through a major shift which could rock-the-boat a bit too much and cause them to go back to Windows for the “just works” experience.
Look, I just finally tried steam on Linux and the game booted up. I am absolutely amazed as I thought I’d never see that day. Also windows is somehow just getting worse and worse. It’s like they just want an entire ad platform. They lost me at this point. I have 0 need for any ms products again and that’s a great feeling.
So what you’re saying is, 2024 will be the year of Linux on the desktop?
I know that phrase is the most beaten dead horse around at this point but the year of the Linux desktop is going to be different depending on what your requirements are.
If you just need to browse the web, it’s been there for over a decade. Same for most dev work.
For gaming, it’s already there for most titles. Pretty much everything I try works now unless it has anticheat. It’s been in a pretty good state for 2 or 3 years now at least.
For media creation and specialized software, it’s not there yet. The big stuff like adobe will probably never get ported and the free alternatives vary wildly in quality. Blender is awesome. GIMP is not. There’s also issues like lacking color management and iffy HDR support.
I do wonder about that, Gen Z and Alpha are less tech savvy than millennials, so there’s non zero odds that it doesn’t work out because Linux isn’t easily accessible in the tablet/phone space yet.
And no android doesn’t count
They are also less wealthy than X and millennial were at first computer purchase age. GNU/Linux is cheap
The OS is but the hardware ya gotta install it on could be another story, especially with gaming distros becoming more and more common
Sure for gaming you want a pretty expensive machine, but for a user who wants web and email a used low end laptop will perform great
Mobile Linux is a thing, though I think it would take governments mandating unlocked/user-unlockable bootloaders to gain literally Any market share. It would also probably take a compatibility layer for running Android apps similar to Wine in desktop Linux, but Android already runs a Linux kernel, so projects like Waydroid are most of the way there already by just running Android inside a container.
I think we need rock-solid Wayland before we can expect TYLD. So I’m feeling 2026 minimum, then add a couple for some padding; so 2028 realistically. Think of how far we’ve come in 5 years, then imagine 5 years more.
If Nvidia’s consumer GPU market share dropped a bit too, that’d help.
Why do you think that Wayland is necessary for adoption? In my opinion it is the missing hardware drivers, compatability issues and “getting your hands dirty” while constantly tweaking stuff. Yeah it got better over the years, but most people want things to just work.
Wayland is necessary because Wayland will be necessary in the near future, if it was next year then that would put a lot of people who don’t know about X.Org and Wayland through a major shift which could rock-the-boat a bit too much and cause them to go back to Windows for the “just works” experience.
Look, I just finally tried steam on Linux and the game booted up. I am absolutely amazed as I thought I’d never see that day. Also windows is somehow just getting worse and worse. It’s like they just want an entire ad platform. They lost me at this point. I have 0 need for any ms products again and that’s a great feeling.
but WHY is it necessary??
But which distro though?
yes he did and if it doesn’t happen we can shame him for all eternety, but i’m right with you there buddy: 2024 lets gooooooo!