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Remember folks, it doesn’t have to be the year, it only has to be your year.
Mine was about 19 years ago. I’m no genius, and I haven’t regretted it once. Linux has come a long way since then, while windows is deep in the enshittification trenches now, and has been for years. Your YOTLD can start today if you want it to. Tired of being actively abused by your OS? We’ve been here all along.
And if you are happy where you are, that’s fine too.
Nah, this is the year of Linux on desktop for everyone. The old Mayans foretold so.
They thought it was a great idea to remove the feature to unlock the taskbar and move it to the top or side of your screen in windows 11. I don’t care if it was a design choice, it was a fucking stupid one.
I can’t believe this is still impossible. Surely engineers at Microsoft are suffering from this too? But I guess they really want to push the search bar and ai features that don’t fit on a vertical taskbar.
Edge really said “There can be only one!”
Adwaita is the one and only!
I don’t even want it vertical. I just want it up top. 🤣
Who uses Windows like that? The UI gets all screwed up anyway
This shit drives me bonkers lol. I have to use windows for work but use CachyOS outside of work on all my PCs minus my mac mini.
Aka every other fucking PC in my life I have the bar up top lol
This right here drove me to dual boot Manjaro. I can’t be the only person who has stacked monitors instead of side-by-side monitors. The UI is an abomination and the telemetry even moreso.
Linux is not turn key, and as a significantly PC gaming user it has limitations. I still have not set up modding yet, and whether Vortex mod manager will work or not is still unclear. I can’t get more than 60Hz out of my monitor on HDMI, which is required if I want 175Hz and 10bit color due to DisplayPort 1.4 limitations. Sleep causes my motherboard to permanently display a “CPU unknown” QLED Code. Instructions on simple tasks like creating a permanent drive mount at boot are confusing because there are steps that seem to be just assumed by everyone writing them. Etc.
I am working my way through these, but still find myself in Windows 11 most of the time because unfortunately it just works. Software is natively written for it, there is no searching for how to get peripherals or programs to work. I say this as a lifelong tech nerd who started on Windows 3.1 and DOS, and who’s job involves working with Linux based equipment. This shouldn’t be as hard as it has been to transition, but it is.
Can we stop with this? It was an over hyped slogan and we can give it a rest. People are slowly switching to Linux and that’s good enough
The slogan is a complete meme at this point. A meme that indicates it’s the year of the linux desktop!
Yeah, it just comes off sarcastic to me, which apparently means people think Linux is not popular enough to talk about or something. I don’t know, it just rubs me the wrong way.
You can like something and still make fun of it, you know?
I’ll have you know I’m completely serious and not poking fun at myself when I mention I use Arch, BTW!
I think the year of Linux memes are fun. :D
You can, but Linux needs good press, and many would see this “joke” as another reason to avoid the whole ecosystem.
If someone sees it that way, that’s not something any of us can do anything about.
That’s not true. Attitudes can slowly change over time. Reminding people “it’s not there yet” doesn’t serve that.
I guess the hope is that a large amount of people will suddenly switch to Linux, maybe because of social media popularity, a breaking windows change, or maybe a popular computer manufacturer shipping only Linux by default.
But even if that does happen, I would think it would result in an increased adoption rate, not everyone switching to Linux over the course of a year.
It is sarcastic.
Wanna know the first time I heard “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop!”? 1999.
Yes, nineteen ninety-nine. Twenty-five years ago.
Linux as a desktop is still a laugh. It still doesn’t come close to Windows of twenty-five years ago.
But it’s killer as a server, or a purpose-built system. My NAS/VM server kicks ass under Linux, way better than running windows. Even VMware recently switched their desktop virtualization to using Linux. This is where Linux shines.
You could make a Windows killer desktop, except which distro? Which shell? Which set of base tools/utilities? Define “killer desktop” in the Linux community.
Windows is the general purpose OS, with a common shell. That’s what MS did, settle on one UI (mostly), so it’s a common experience everywhere.
Linux as a desktop is still a laugh. It still doesn’t come close to Windows of twenty-five years ago.
Pfft, several Linux distros are an excellent desktop OS and I think people who argue against that aren’t worth my time.
Naive take imo. No distro is an excellent desktop. They all have flaws and issues that are not present in windows to an “average user”. Regular users barely know how to install apps on their phones. To be excellent all intelligence groups should be able to easily use it
When people say shit like this, they seem to forget the vast amounts of issues that windows also has. How long has it been since the last time an update bricked millions of machines? Even when you only talk about things MS is directly responsible for, that timespan rarely exceeds a year. And this is even with their enormous budget and army of vendors essentially beta testing and partnering with them to keep shit like that from happening.
I’m mostly of that opinion also :D
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If only the Linux desktop stopped getting offended when it’s not treated like a server and has to shut down. “Wait, you had audio settings that I was supposed to remember? Cool story bro…”
I had this TV box that came with windows on it. After booting I had to turn up the volume and click away a noise warning.
With Linux no more trouble 🐧
What are you talking about? Didn’t you know that only Linux has technical problems?
What distro 😳
I find people complaining about every distro. The thing is, every operating system sucks. The good thing about Linux is how that becomes your fault.
I mean I was asking about your complaint. Never heard of a Linux desktop that needs to be treated like a server before
It can be your fault, but if the distro is supposed to be easy and you haven’t messed with its internals, it’s probably the distro’s fault.
My #1 priority when choosing a distro was that it’s widely used and easy, because I don’t want to deal with that exact kind of shit.
Ultimately it’s all open source, you can make your own distro. If something doesn’t work, fork it and fix it yourself. That’s the beauty of Linux, with all that’s good and bad about it.
Plenty of Linux things that aren’t the users fault
See the arch Linux grub incident
Good to note this example is from 2022-08-30. Despite its “reputation” among some, Arch doesn’t break that often by itself.
yeah, i’ve been running arch for a couple of years now and the only time something broke was when the computer died in the middle of updating
I mean, not necessarily your fault but at least you know someone could care to fix it, and you didn’t spend $100 for the privilege.
I would love to be able to pay $100 for more great Linux distros.
Sorry, only spyware laden with ads is available currently at that price.
You absolutely can. Most open source projects accept donations.
If you would like to address an audio issue, I’ll gladly hijack the thread.
Linux mint, occasionally my audio starts crackling. Only fix is to open terminal and run pulseaudio -k.
Happens maybe twice a day with my system.
That can happen when there’s a mismatch between the sample rate your audio device expects and what it receives. One way to fix this is to force the system to only allow one sample rate. I forget which files need to be edited for this, perhaps someone else will know, but you have a list of accepted and fallback sample rates, and you need to delete all except one.
I can’t say that it will solve your specific issue, but it solved mine and I had the same symptoms.
Tried pipewire?
Update, no issues since!
I just followed this guide here. I’ll give it a shot!
Pipewire is standard in Mint these days. It borked my installation, though, when I tried to upgrade with Pipewire already installed.
You don’t seem to understand
But I’m an honest man.
I have mint running on my laptop now.
Pro tip for anyone who wants to try Linux and maybe attempt to set up dual boot with Windows:
TURN OFF BITLOCKER ENCRYPTION IN WINDOWS FIRST.
IF you don’t, here’s what happened to me:
Mint live USB instance booted easily at first. I started the install process and selected dual boot. Mint setup then proceeded to prompt me to enroll a MACHINE OWNER KEY… And then realized that bitlocker encryption would prevent it from setting up dual boot.
It said, to paraphrase, “exit mint setup, log back into Windows, disable bitlocker, then you can come back and install”
Well that was a fucking lie because YOU CANNOT GET BACK INTO MINT!
WHY? Because mint FORGOT the MOK!
When you try to get back into mint from the boot selection menu, it says
Something has gone seriously wrong: import_mok_state() failed: Not Foundthe upshot is that you computer will never let mint live USB session ever boot again UNLESS you disable secure boot in BIOS and rename grub to mmx64.efi in the ISO image.
And if you DO those things chances are mint will never present you with the option to detect and set up dual boot with you extant windows instance ever again.
I went ahead and nuked my windows 11 instance on my laptop because it was being a bitch and clearly was never going to be a good neighbor to mint. I have no major regrets because mint is nice and I like it. It just didn’t turn out how I would’ve ideally intended. But one way or another Windows 11 HAD TO GO. So, in the broad sense, I wanted to switch to mint… And I have! All good.
As the old Mayans foretold.
I bet the users make the chocolate taste terrible
It won’t happen until the Windows UI becomes more troublesome than the Linux UI. We still have a ways to go.
I’ve yet to see a Linux version that can prevent the boot partition from clogging up with old kernel files. Grandma ain’t cleaning that shit up.
I mean, Grandma ain’t cleaning up the myriad of shit windows leaves clogging drives either… I see the real problem is going to be the average $12/hr geek squad agent isn’t going to be able to fix it for Grandma no matter how eager she is to pay $199.
Almost every Linux system auto clears old kernels.
Let’s get you to bed grandma
They are supposed to, for sure.
Let’s all love Linux
I see Lain, I upvote. Because, no matter where they are, people are connected.
Honest question, how would my life improve if more people switched to Linux? God bless all the maintainers that have made it simple enough for an idiot like me to understand it
Most things work right out of the box and those that don’t I could do less with anyway, Linux is perfect
linux would gain more support, more developers, and more market share, making it more universal. All of these are going to be beneficial to everybody.
Already got lots of support and universality hat more do you need? X4 is native on Linux
on the server side, sure, on the development side, sure, on the desktop side? Not very much, it’s usable, thanks to the core of dedicated users, but to be “perfected” it needs a larger userbase.
I am mid switch, but it’s not been smooth or easy. I chose Manjaro and maybe I chose poorly. I am a lifelong techie, and have used Ubuntu and Mint in short stints in the past, but the transition is rough.
I didn’t attempt the switch before because I primarily played Destiny 2 and Bungie hates Linux. The enshittification of Destiny drove me away, and in theory the games I am playing now should work. I have had mixed results however.
I play Darktide and Vermintide 2 and heavily use their modding scenes to make them fully playable. Vortex mod manager is a huge bonus for this, and I still haven’t been able to set this up.
My Elgato equipment has community support, but has a bunch of steps to get working that I haven’t spent the time to fully research or attempt.
I still haven’t set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don’t have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.
I am going to keep trying, because I hate Microsoft right now more than I dislike the learning curve and limitations. Not sure if that is enough to make this the year of the Linux desktop though.
One thing about Linux: don’t let people bully you over which distro you use. This isn’t a competition, use what feels most natural to you. If Manjaro is too steep of a curve, start somewhere else. Not everyone needs to be running arch. If you want to use arch but want it easier, I had an easier time with endeavor os than with manjaro, but ymmv. If I were you, I’d use the easiest distro out there: mint. If you are a big gamer, PopOS has a lot of gaming support right out of the box, but these days if you are primarily on Steam then you shouldn’t hit too many issues in any distro.
I am also mid transition, but haven’t booted windows in over a year. I tried dual-access storage, and I think your best bet is to keep the two systems separate. There are ways to make it work, but they are not beginner friendly imo.
As for mods, it is really hit or miss. And kernel level anticheat is a blocker in Linux, so any games that require it will not be playable. But what I do is have a single-drive windows machine that has the software that doesn’t have Linux support installed, and boot into it when I need it. But I’ve actually found linux-friendly replacements for all the stuff I personally use, and will probably never touch the windows system again.
stupid. Manjaro is dog shit
I still haven’t set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don’t have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.
i’ve been fine mounting my C drive under linux using ntfs3g under arch linux (similar enough to manjaro) though this was prior to ntfs being natively supported in the kernel, so that may have different consequences, realistically i would advise you to use a network storage for inter device compat since you can run samba or something, which is well integrated into linux and windows (though it’s a little fucky in linux, it does work, and it works reliably) It makes life so much easier. Either that or use an external drive that you intend to be intercompat, not running NTFS, but using ext4 or something. That’s another decent option.
My best advice to you going forward is be thoughtful about the devices and software you spend time and money on, it’s really easy when you’re in the windows environment to just use whatever exists, but on linux you do have to spend a bit more time thinking about it, but that’s just the nature of the beast.
Thank you for the insight, that is actually useful information for me. I currently have a 4tb nvme with a small (250gb) C drive and the rest as an E drive (Program installs and Games) for Windows, the same general setup with a second 4tb nvme for Linux, and a 3rd separate SATA SSD that acts as my “home” drive with Documents/Pictures/Downloads /etc. I planned and sharing that third drive between Windows and Linux so I don’t require duplicating data.
A home server/NAS is also in the works, and I’ll be looking into Samba. It’s just been a bit enlightening finding out all the unicorns and rainbows on the Linux side of the fence are equines of indeterminate parentage with paper cones glued to their foreheads and RGB light strips soldered together with a “trust me” sticker on them.
Microsoft is still a ghetto, and Apple is a WASP country club where the HOA president lives next door and is “retired”. Computers are both at an all-time high for choice and in some of the worst states it’s been in.
I planned and sharing that third drive between Windows and Linux so I don’t require duplicating data.
you should definitely be able to do this, i’ve done it before and even played gtav off of it, i’m not sure if it has significant performance penalties, it might slow down game loading, or cause micro stuttering, weird stuff like that, but it will definitely work, it’s just something you should use in the meantime while you work towards moving away from it in the future.
A home server/NAS is also in the works, and I’ll be looking into Samba.
there are other options, but im pretty sure every other option is based on the SMB protocol in some way, samba is just the most barebones way of doing it, if you like tinkering and just want a file sharing server on your local network, it’ll work great, just be sure to enable that weird renaming flag that allows you to translate the character set, since windows has a very weird restriction character set for naming, while linux pretty much only prevents you from using / (directory separator)
truenas is one of the industry staples, but that’s more involved, has a lot of config and flexibility as well,
It’s just been a bit enlightening finding out all the unicorns and rainbows on the Linux side of the fence are equines of indeterminate parentage with paper cones glued to their foreheads and RGB light strips soldered together with a “trust me” sticker on them.
it’s both the worst, and the best part lol. It’s great because everything is so standardized and well implemented half the time it feels like using an open ecosystem, which is truly the best. The other half of the time you have so many options you have no idea what to use, in which case i usually like to select by popularity and it’s minimalism.
Microsoft is still a ghetto, and Apple is a WASP country club where the HOA president lives next door and is “retired”. Computers are both at an all-time high for choice and in some of the worst states it’s been in.
linux is quite literally whatever you want it to be, and that’s why its the best. Can be anything from NYC to a suburb, to a hippie commune if you so choose, just depends on what you want lmao.
