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Things currently stopping “YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP”
- Anti cheat
- Adobe
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Nvidia
- No availability of Linux PCs in physical stores
These but to a lesser degree
- AutoCAD
- Obscure research/academic/industrial software
- Music production software
Music production software RIP. Not to mention the Lovecraftian horrors of the Linux audio stack. It’s gotten so much better with REAPER and there are many great VSTs but there’s still a long way to go.
Too bad there is no Valve equivalent in the music industry
It’s so frustrating that I can’t run office software. But why is adobe a problem?
Adobe has a huge presence in the creative industry. Lots of professionals (read majority) can’t use a FOSS graphics suite because Adobe is an industry standard. And Adobe cannot run on anything except Windows because (I forgot the exact article) certain portions of Adobe are highly entangled with Windows, and porting it to Linux makes no financial sense.
Before others talk about the alternatives, Adobe still has huge inertia. It will be years before they are dethroned, assuming they continue to fuckup.
Good summary.
I’ve been working a while and think the latter things combined with the unfamiliarity of MDM/IT management tools in Linux has stopped much wider adoption.
So many industries just MUST run a few key apps that were designed and battle tested in windows long ago, as in wet lab science, manufacturing, and medicine to name a few I’ve seen.
Also stability (sorry but it’s hard to beat a MacBook).
I feel like most industries didn’t run Mac books as standard.
My solution was to pick a distro that came with Nvidia drivers set up already (pop os) and have had zero problems with it.
Me too, Bazzite. That doesn’t solve that it runs 15-25% slower than windows in heavy games. Thank god I play mostly indie games.
My experience is that games run just as well (if not better) in Linux. I’m also running Bazzite. The difference is that I think I had an nVidia driver issue once in about 10 years under Windows with this computer and hardware combo. It was such a rare occurrence that I assumed my card was dying, but it turns out that the next update fixed all the problems.
Meanwhile, the time between hitting a driver bug in Linux is measured in months. For a long time I couldn’t play SNES games with an emulator because something about how it initialized the display (on systems with 2 monitors attached to the card) caused the driver to completely lock up.
For me, on CachyOS, there does appear to be some fork of the drivers that the OS maintainers have kept up; I haven’t really had any complaints. In my case I don’t use ultrawide monitors or any unusual features, but maybe others with specific use cases would struggle more.
That doesn’t improve the quality of the drivers though… But you seem to not have had issues yet… Are you on wayland though?
There’s always a new issue. One time I can’t resume of suspending (I think this is still an issue…). Then shutting off a monitor leads to a crash of the driver-stack. I could go on. Just the fact that Nvidia took so long to support GBM properly is a tragedy.
No not on wayland as one of my monitors does not behave with the existing options.
It doesn’t fix the drivers but for many the installation and set up is where things go wrong. That’s how it was for me.
So you haven’t had “zero” problems. AFAIK wayland is already usable with AMD since almost a decade or so… (well not every program was supported yet a decade ago obviously, but, at least these kind of issues that Nvidia has/had are non-existing AFAIK).
It doesn’t fix the drivers but for many the installation and set up is where things go wrong. That’s how it was for me.
For me it was never the installation, just the risk after updating the drivers that yet another issue appears (sometimes old ones were fixed though, to be fair).
PopOS today is a beta version. Apps sometimes crash. They just switched over to a brand new desktop environment and although it used to be a good recommendation for first time users that’s not the case at present. Once they polish the new cosmic DE fix all the bugs, it would be back to its former glory IMO.
I had it before the new DE and my PC didn’t switch over to it. I agree it’s a bit rough right now and might switch to cachy or something when I have time to fool with it.
Maybe Microslop is secretly paying Nvidia to be shit specifically on Linux?
Doesn’t even have to pay. With the way Microsoft pushes AI, Nvidia gets their share automatically.
I’m on endeavouros (arch) with an rtx 3060 and haven’t had any issues whatsoever in a few years, are people having more nvidia problems lately or something?
Don’t know about ‘recently’, but I bought a new PC about 2 years ago with a 4070 super, spent about one and a half days trying to get Ubuntu to properly set up drivers, and ended up installing windows instead.
(Due to ongoing enshittification I am considering giving it another go with mint)
I would recommend endevour OS which is based on arch, so you have the latest drivers and kernel always. Ubuntu is always old and may not work properly. Try that one and things will likely just work out of the box.
If you want a just works solution for gaming, try bazzite. I Never had a single hitch
I can recommend bazzite if you don’t want to tinker much. Install took like half an hour and my 4090 worked out of the box with all games that I tried so far. (Mostly WoW, bg3 and rematch)
Even for tinkering, check out bistrobox that comes installed with it. Stupid simple to just run a Debian (or whatever) container for packages that expect a mutable os
Bazzite or Pop OS. Ubuntu and Mint are not railored for gaming much. You can still play games of coruse, but you will have more better experience on gaming-specific OSes.
I had a similar setup (Endeavour OS + 3080). While most daily tasks worked fine I had some large annoyances.
- Monitor Sleep would sometimes prevent VRR from working afterwards
- Actual sleep would sometimes force me to reconnect my second monitor.
- Hybernation was completely broken
- VRAM swapping does not work at all, leading to stuttering instead of simply degraded performance.
I am sure I missed some more minor ones, but there were the main reasons I got an AMD card
It’s a mixed bag, most of the time the desktop cards work fine, but mobile gpus are a little more wonky. Had a desktop rtx 2070 super under endeavoros as well until the last 6 months (even on the sway community edition, which is wayland based), but I have to admit the rx 9070xt that replaced it was much easier to setup and get going with no fuss thus far (plus really easy to undervolt, so I don’t use a ton of power as well).
I believe I have the same GPU but the Ti version (I might be mistaken but it’s definitely 30xx ti) and I couldn’t get it to work on mint smoothly myself. Put my 7600 back in. Idk if it’s the distro or not. Followed instructions online and nothing worked. Maybe I was simply missing something simple but whatever the fix is isn’t intuitive for me.
Just to note: that I’ve only been using Linux for about a year now and have been learning as I go. I’m not a CS student or anything. Just a dude without a diploma working a blue collar job.
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To be fair the windows driver situation isn’t much better. last time I started windows on a computer I cared about, it tried to find a new driver for my mouse for some reason and in the process deleted all the profiles I had configured on the mouse
Mouse drivers are ridiculous. Over 1 GB for just a freaking mouse driver.
You mean the software package from the manufacturer and not a driver?
Of course, but the download is still labelled as “driver”, and it’s the only (official) way to get the full functionality of the mouse.
?????
am still using my GTX 1650 till it breaks
I never understood GPU naming schemes but I’m still rocking my 1050TI lol
Just put Fedora on my desktop with an RTX 5060 a couple weeks ago. The Nvidia drivers were easy to install but they borked a bit later and it took me an hour or two to fix unfortunately. And sleep doesn’t work at all.
Still, the Nvidia driver issues are secondary to the WiFi issues that I’ve spent so many hours trying to get work, and every time I think it works for good, it breaks again. I’m buying a dongle with a Mediatek MT7601U and hopefully this fixes the WiFi issues for good.
That is so ridiculously accurate. And sad. And infuriating. And then funny again because I am reuglarly going mad with those fucking drivers since I have to work with them on Linux professionally. I hate it. It is funny and tragic. Just like life.
YOTLD won’t ever happen, but getting NVIDIA drivers in order for seamless experience will definitely increase user base. It might only happen when Nova/Nouveau+NVK are mature enough to take over.
It’s happening now tbh. More people across the experience spectrum than ever before are using linux. I’m loving it
this is, indeed, the year of the linux desktop
I’m not saying the market won’t grow, yes, there’s a lot of traction lately, but it’s blown out of proportions within the Linux bubble. I still don’t see mass adoption and everyone switching over from windows just yet. Especially not within a single year. Perhaps 2030s will be the decade of the Linux on desktop, who knows.
The Year of the Linux Desktop isn’t literally when it gains 50%+ marketshare, it’s the point in the adoption S curve where it’s moved past early adopters and enthusiasts and is starting to be picked up by mainstream users.
That’s literally happening now. 2025/26. It’s happened. (Past tense).
Now we’re in the “watch numbers go up” phase of the S curve, wondering when the second derivative will go negative, as that will signal peak adoption speed.
I wish that wishful thinking to be true
I’m using it on everything except my gaming rig. Linux is way too much trouble to still get downgraded performance.
Are you using Nvidia? I don’t have a windows machine to compare against but I haven’t noticed any performance issues
It’s a mixed bag. A handful of games have better performance on Linux. Many are in insignificant difference either way. Some report 15-25% lower framerates on Linux. But VR is a massive headache and I have an old Vive VR that isn’t getting any love from Linux in the form of support. But even just running Nvidia shouldn’t be so problematic. They make the best video cards in the world and I like to game. I’m not going to buy a shittier graphics card just because it plays nicer with FOSS.
Ah the FOSS aspect and that whole ecosystem is really enjoyable to me so I’ll often pick the shittier option in terms of fidelity if it let’s me have my machine like I like it more generally.
hmm what about that valve study that showed a linux port having better performance???
Welcome to the Democratic Church of America.
Please explain.
Why are the drivers shitty if they are doing an amazing job protecting? Not sure from what though?
Protecting windows users from the year of the linux desktop?
The drivers being shitty on linux is protecting windows from mass abandonment
Protecting microsoft from the year of the linux desktop is the intended meaning.
Its been such a ballache getting games developed on Unity to run on my 3080 on Mint. I hate having to dual boot into windows to play them but most of the time that’s the only realistic option I’m left with.
I had issue with Nvidia and also with a Realtek PCIe RTL8125, windows work like a charm with the same configuration. Even if I preefer Linux I had to move back for stability.
I have an Intel B580 doing game streaming. My past experiences with NVIDIA prepared me for this. This is nothing.
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Why would average user install Arch?
Modern user-friendly distros allow a simple graphical install from liveUSB and manage everything, including GRUB configuration, for you. You just select drive, click “install”, reboot and see both Linux and Windows available.
And then Windows yoinks your bootloader back and your Linux boot option poofs…
More of a Windows issue than anything, but still annoying af.
It is annoying. You can avoid by installing Linux on a different hard drive. Obviously not always an optiion but maybe.
Ideally, you should install Linux on a separate physical drive, then this never happens.
But yes, not applicable for everyone. In any case, this can be trivially fixed if you went through this once before.
I had it on a separate drive and this happened to me some how. Perhaps it was my own fuck up, it was a while ago.
Just resulted in me nuking Windows anyhow, and it’s been fine ever since 🤷♀️
Maybe the BIOS/UEFI prioritized wrong drive? Or something gone wrong with GRUB.
Anyhow, congrats on ditching this shithole altogether!
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“I installed the distro known for being a bitch to install and it was a bitch to install”
In other news, water is wet!
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What the hell is “linux certified” hardware? Why would an average user install arch? Is this a troll post? Are you a real person?
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Dude Arch Linux is not particularly for beginners. Try Linux Mint, it’s slogan is literally “It just works” and is designed with this tenet in mind.
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Dont blame your stupid decisions on the tech ya dingus
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Thats like the best rant ever. Installing the most “sketchy” distro and blaming linux. Lol.
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I recently installed windows 11. I needed to search the internet for fixing the update system, use cmd and copying lines of code that i don’t understand.
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