Is 2021 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/09/18/0050255/is-2021-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop

by KlimYadrintsev • 5 years ago

33 86 5 years ago

linux.slashdot.org

Darmody6• 5 years ago

Doesn't load on Firefox on Android.

The year of the Linux desktop was 2016, when Ubuntu 16.04 was released. It went downhill ever since.

kaladin-jasnah• 5 years ago

Did Proton exist in 2016?

Darmody6• 5 years ago

I can play more games now but my overall experience is worse.

I am not happy with the desktop environments we have now. I have to use a custom Gnome Shell to make my experience acceptable.

sneak3• 5 years ago

I think "Linux Desktop" means something other than "a computer running the Linux kernel that runs desktop applications".

ChromeOS is as much a Linux computer as is a Tesla automobile. Sure, there's a linux kernel down in there somewhere, but it's not the thing we mean when we say "Linux Desktop".

Darmody6• 5 years ago

Linux Desktop means Linux being a good Windows alternative on your computer.

sneak3• 5 years ago

Interesting sidenote: both ChromeOS devices and iOS devices (and, to some extent, macs), as well as all consoles, are sold as single bundled hardware+software integrated products.

There's very little computing done where the hardware is not designed with the software in mind and vice versa.

The days of "software x running on hardware platform y" might be behind us for the majority of the planet's population.

pjmlp• 5 years ago

Which basically means being able to have a GNU userspace, which neither Android nor ChromeOS do.

On Android, Linux kernel is an implementation detail not exposed to userspace APIs as official stable APIs, even for basic stuff like bluetooth or accessing files outside the sandbox, Java APIs have to be used.

Then on the ChromeOS side, not all Chromebooks support Linux based applications, and even that is actually a design similar to WSL 2, by running it into another VM on top of the Linux kernel used by ChromeOS.

smackeyacky• 5 years ago

This already happened for most developers who are the last real users of PCs.

WSL is microsoft giving up. Other users dont really need PCs any more, you just use a phone or a web browser.

II2II• 5 years ago

I am going to disagree.

As far as I can tell, Chrome OS is the Linux desktop and the GNU user space. The user space may not be exposed by default, but it is there. It may not be considered complete by those who expect compilers and X to be installed by default, but those tools can be installed since the underlying infrastructure is in place. It is not another Android where, as far as I can tell, very little of the GNU user space is in place.

Having to switch into developer mode (on older Chrome OS devices) or run Linux applications is a sandboxed environment is beside the point. These are just a security model layered on top of the OS.

everdrive• 5 years ago

If Linux ever really gained mainstream appeal (say 40-60% adoption) it would be ruined by many of the pressures which ruined most mainstream operating systems. I think we’re far better off with Linux at 1% or so.

nickjj• 5 years ago

it would be ruined by many of the pressures which ruined most mainstream operating systems

I think Linux is different than other operating systems because if something goes mainstream that you don't like you have tons of viable options. With each component of the OS being tweakable you can choose opinions that others have made or forge your own path.

For example if you don't like whatever the latest window manager is you can pretty easily replace it with i3, bspwm or any other window manager that you prefer. Want a different desktop environment? Great, there's plenty of them. Prefer the ethos or core values of one distro over another? Sounds good, I'm sure you'll find something you like.

AnIdiotOnTheNet3• 5 years ago

This same quality may be part of why it has never gained significant traction though, the proliferation of components and resulting fragmentation have made it a difficult target for application developers. Oh, sure, FOSS applications work fine... because they're open source and rely on unpaid third parties to integrate them into whatever absurdly interdependent ecosystem (a.k.a "distro") you happen to be using. Well, for some definitions of "fine", since they're often out of date, sometimes altered, or otherwise not packaged at all.

It also makes troubleshooting a lot more difficult, since any efforts to find solutions will invariably land me in posts primarily about some other combination of components and it's up to me to sort out their relevance to my issue.

quantumsolace4• 5 years ago

This "year of the Linux Desktop" joke is getting a bit tiresome. What is missing exactly?

Sure the desktop is a bit ugly. But pretty much everything works out of the box. If MS released a native Office for Linux I could get rid of my Mac.

pjerem• 5 years ago

tbh, the last decades have been « year of Linux on my desktop ».

Linux is already totally ok for a vast majority of usages (and even gaming is less and less an issue).

At the end of the day, who even cares of Linux market share on the desktop ?

Because this hides an insidious and bigger issue : PCs, even if it’s a 1% market share os, HAVE alternatives OS. Other modern platforms don’t.

I’d rather prefer « xxxx is the year of the 1% Linux on phones » than any evolution on the desktop which would have pretty much no impact on a Linux user day to day usage.

ogogmad2• 5 years ago

Have you tried running Office over Wine?

Have you tried LibreOffice? Admittedly, I don't have to share complicated MS Office documents with other people, but I do like using LO.

[edit] Actually, there are some things about LO I'm not sure about: For instance, I don't know how to use their formula editor, and when I tried using it, I got confused and found another way of inserting mathematical symbols into my document. Also, I don't know how good the spell-checking is, since I don't have a spell-checker working on mine. So these are some caveats in my endorsement of LO.

type0• 5 years ago

I don't have to share complicated MS Office documents with other people, but I do like using LO.

If you do share documents, Excel files especially, you'll quickly find that people using MS Office wouldn't like you using LibreOffice.

cassepipe• 5 years ago

Especially with the new HUD functionality in LibreOffice to find useful commands super fast : https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOff...

quantumsolace4• 5 years ago

I appreciate all the effort put into LO, or any complicated and sophisticated free (as in libre) project. I despise LO. I use gnumeric when I need a spreadsheet. Or grab my Mac.

I haven't tried running office in wine in over a decade, although I've realized they've achieved great things (by the games they support). I don't game, and all I need the Mac is MS Office, so I never tried again.

lordgroff6• 5 years ago

I find ugly very... subjective. Which DE are we talking about? Windows 10 vs GNOME? I pick GNOME personally, I think it's much easier on the eyes. I don't find Mac OS particularly amazing in comparison either. And even the highly "inflexible" GNOME lets you customize its look a hell of a lot more than Windows or Mac.

selfhoster113• 5 years ago

I don't think it's a joke. I consider this concept a milestone, an "are we there yet" check for whether Linux is actually ready to use as a desktop OS. So far, the answer has been varied.

rreyes19792• 5 years ago

Good calendar apps with solid integrations to Google Calendar, Zoom, Microsoft 365 Calendar, etc are missing. Using Fantastical on Mac. Have not found anything close to it for Linux :/

arepublicadoceu• 5 years ago

But pretty much everything works out of the box.

Things that didn't work out of the box "for me":

- Using multiple displays with mixed DPIs without wayland.

- Using wayland with nvidia (Even with the latest driver that supposed to give a half-baked support for it)

- On my HP laptop when I close the laptop lid, instead of suspend, it will turn airplane mode on. The only fix is to remap the key that send airplane mode to suspend.

- Multiple functions keys doesn't work, They don't even send keycodes so I can remap it.

I had to delve deep into Arch Wiki to fix most of my issues, at that point, I just gave up and installed windows 10.

Yeah, "everything works out of the box" should always be replaced by: "everything worked out of the box for me".

BrightGlow5• 5 years ago

For the first one, you should probably be using Wayland. X11 is considered an obsolete legacy window system, it's simply not going to stay relevant for modern uses.

For the second one, I don't have any tips for you, nobody can fix that but nvidia.

For the third and fourth one, you might be able to get someone to fix that if you search around for long enough, but it will take work.

Next time you buy hardware you may want to make sure it's supported with your OS first. Sadly that's still necessary in this day and age.

thrower123• 5 years ago

No, it's never going to be the year of the Linux desktop.

Right now all the distros together can't crack 2.5% of the desktop market.

fsflover• 5 years ago

Your first point doesn't follow from the second one.

simonblack2• 5 years ago

To paraphrase your comment:

"No, it's never going to be the Year of Mercedes on the Highways.

Right now all the Mercedes models together can't crack 2.5% of the motor vehicle market."

(It makes no difference who drives a Mercedes and who drives a Ford, or a Pontiac, or a Volkswagen, or a Skoda, or a BMW, or a Lamborghini. One is just as useful as another. It's pointless arguing about such irrelevant trivia. Ditto for Windows, Linux and OSX.)

cloudbonsai• 5 years ago

The original article is:

https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/2021-is-the-year-of-linux-on-...

The basic thesis of the author was:

1. In 2021, Chromebooks are everywhere.

2. Chrome OS is Linux.

3. Therefore, 2021 is the year of Linux Desktop.

Honestly, I'm not sure this is such a great argument. Isn't it rather like "2021 is the year of Chrome dominance"?

Foobar8568• 5 years ago

I would say because of WSL, it will be the year of the Linux Desktop, it just works™. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...

lordgroff6• 5 years ago

I mean I guess it's trivial (is it? it used to be) to run regular Linux applications on Chrome, so the fact it shares the kernel is useful, but how many people do that?

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

I agree not a great argument, they even mention the difference between Linux and chromebooks and Android, but call it political. I don’t think it’s political but really technological. Android and off the shelf chromebooks hide Linux away and might as well be a toaster running the Linux kernel.

“There's a difference between Linux the technology and "Linux" the political movement, and the political side of Linux has always obscured the practical. Listen to Linux fans all the way back to the 90s, and you hear at worst a mashup of "fight the power" free software advocacy and triumphalist hacker manifestos. But most buyers rank philosophy really low in their purchase choices, behind things like price, ease of use, and software availability.”

goda902• 5 years ago

I think 2022 has the potential to be the Year of the Linux Desktop due to the Steam Deck. Valve has promised that Proton will allow almost all Windows games to run on it. Guaranteed they'll also be working hard on SteamOS polish. If Windows 11 turns out to be messy, then gamers could consider Linux more attractive now.

yissp2• 5 years ago

Millions of people are using Linux via Android and Chrome OS, but I'm not sure the success of either of those has benefited the general Linux ecosystem in a meaningful way. I think the Steam Deck will be a similar situation. It's cool that it's Linux-based, but I suspect most users will just think of it as a Valve product and not really care about the internals.

ajvs3• 5 years ago

The Android ecosystem has. Currently most mobile devices in the world run the Android Common Kernel, which is only a few patches of differences from mainline Linux kernel, plus proprietary drivers. Considering the current state of fully Linux phones, we'd have never had a shot at being the market leader on mobile otherwise.

In Android 12-based devices these drivers will become simply plug-in kernel modules, so all devices will run the same kernel and it will finally be able to be updated without messing with the drivers. This is in addition to less and less out-of-tree patches each year as more of them get upstreamed.

This means Android is creeping very close to mainline Linux, and already some projects like postmarketOS have devices they've done the last few tweaks needed to run it on existing phones like the Poco F1. I don't think it would have happened otherwise that most mobiles worldwide would run almost-mainline Linux, so I'd say the Android project has been a net boon for Linux enthusiasts.

goda902• 5 years ago

The thing about the Steam Deck is that it's an x86 handheld computer. It can be docked to a monitor, mouse and keyboard to be a desktop. And the improvements Valve makes to SteamOS and Proton for the Steam Deck can be used on any other x86 PC. Unlike Android and Chrome OS, it is directly competing with Windows for PC gamers.

pdpi• 5 years ago

Unlike Android and ChromeOS, The Steam Deck runs a vanilla KDE desktop and they explicitly support using it as such.

AnIdiotOnTheNet3• 5 years ago

I think that is some combination of naïve and optimistic. Steam Deck's OS is just Arch with KDE and Steam on it. It might have games working well enough to make the product itself a success, but there's no reason I can see for people who use a Windows desktop computer to switch to using a Steam Deck as a replacement or to install Steam OS.

jasoneckert• 5 years ago

I've heard this question every year since 1999, and I somehow feel like we're stuck in a bash loop with no break:

YEAROFLINUX=1999

while :

echo "Is $YEAROFLINUX the year of the Linux Desktop?"

YEAROFLINUX=`expr $YEAROFLINUX + 1`

done

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

I don't really care, as long as the situation doesn't get worse, it will always be my year of the linux desktop.

Benjaminyyy• 5 years ago

Yeah who cares. I've been using Linux on my (desk|lap)tops for over a decade. I really don't care what other people use.

leppr2• 5 years ago

I care because as supply chain issues get worse, it's becoming harder and harder to get the good Linux-ready laptops within a reasonable delay.

I recently switched to an Asus after a decade of Thinkpads (because a custom maxed-out Thinkpad would've taken 2 months+ to get delivered). What I forgot to check was Linux compatibility. With out-of-the-box Ubuntu, wifi didn't work. I was forced to switch from my usual distro, and still bluetooth doesn't work. Thankfully there are enough people wanting to run Linux on those machines that a few enthusiasts have managed to get the drivers to a point where it's usable.

Think about it, how much of your machine's stack have you actually built yourself? Probably only a tiny fraction: some dotfiles, tiling manager bindings, a few scripts, ...

It's a collective effort, and the more people use it, the more enthusiasts work on it, the better it becomes for you and I.

pg_1234• 5 years ago

What distro did you use in the end? I had to fall back from Mint to Kubuntu due to issues with both wifi and the touchpad on an acer swift.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

If you accept Android and ChromeOS count toward the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" then the "Year of Linux on the Desktop" isn't very meaningful or interesting. Wake me up when Adobe starts shipping Photoshop in a .deb or .rpm.

BrandoElFollito3• 5 years ago

I tried to install Ubuntu 20.04 on my Thinkpad P51 with two monitors. Fonts were funny and the mouse never got the monitors right. Horrible things were happening when I was recovering from sleep mode.

I installed Windows 10 on my Thinkpad P51 with two monitors. Everything worked out of the box.

So at least for me 2021 is the year of Windows Desktop and certainly not Linux Desktop.

Disclaimer: I try 1-2 times a year to install a working Linux on desktop since 1994, and have my family use it. It never, ever fucking worked. I am so pissed of because of that because I have Linux on every backend server and I lost hope that one day I will have a Linux desktop.

Comment: I may have been able to make Linux work on my computer after digging some obscure settings in x.org and whatnot. I just want my front end device to just work - so Windows it is.

canistel• 5 years ago

My wife claims that I use Linux precisely for this. To get the kicks from troubleshooting pesky little issues, endless tweaking and discovery of obscure configurations.

yagodragon• 5 years ago

Dual monitor setup is a huge problem with linux distros. I haven't found yet any DE that works out of the box. I'm really looking forward to KDE with official stable wayland support, until then 2021 is not the year of linux desktop

lordgroff6• 5 years ago

What's the issue with dual monitors and GNOME?

andrejserafim• 5 years ago

Works fine for me ;)

lordgroff6• 5 years ago

Consider me incredulous. I've been using Linux since '97 and for well over a decade now, I've rarely hit an installation problem.

I'm not saying there's never going to be a problem--especially with brand new hardware fresh off the press, especially combined with a slow moving distro. But trying once or twice every year, and it never working? Either you're running the most exotic hardware on the planet, or you're running the oddest distribution, or you should start playing the lottery.

mgkimsal• 5 years ago

Or the OP's standards are higher than yours? Things you may gloss over or accept as 'good enough' are unacceptable to people looking for "just works" on par with a comparable windows install on the same hardware.

BrandoElFollito3• 5 years ago

Is a P51 (what, 3 years old now?) and two HDMI monitors. Is that exotic?

Last time I tried it was Ubuntu 20.04 when it was out. The result is in my post above.

I work in IT for 25 years and I am a geek at heart. The state of the Linux desktop is horrendous.

This is not a problem per se - Linux has a good and stable place on servers. It just means that peopel who want to run a desktop with linux must be ready for a lot of browsing, experimenting, ... Windows users do not.

selfhoster113• 5 years ago

Most laptops have issues. I have what I consider to be the best-supported Linux laptops around, and it's still so janky that it's hard to get used to.

My opinion is this: Linux does work, but it doesn't work cleanly for desktop/laptop use. There are rough corners galore, especially around support for specific hardware or hardware features. You get used to them eventually, or you're irritated, but they are there.

simonblack2• 5 years ago

I use Mint on my Thinkpad P53. Everything works out of the box.

I also use Mint on my M93P Desktop. Ditto likewise.

I used a Unix Desktop from 1991 to 2001. Since 2001 to 2021 I've used Linux as my day-to-day system.

I've never used Windows as my day-to-day system. There never was any need to.

I don't think I'm an exceptional genius, Linux just works.

open-source-ux• 5 years ago

If ChromeOS is the Linux Desktop of 2021, it surely represents the antithesis of open source ideals?

ChromeOS is a cloud operating system (OS) that tracks and records all your activity the moment you sign in. Naturally, a Google account is required to use the full functionality of the OS. It is used by millions of schoolkids with all the privacy implications that entails. Somehow, Google's promise to never build profiles of their school users is enough to placate developers. In fact, developers are more likely to defend Google rather than question or scrutinise the privacy implications of using a cloud OS.

I presume most developers are happy to sign-in in an OS to unlock OS functionality and have their activity tracked? After all, we've happy to push this model on kids.

It's ironic that so much cloud software, whether an OS or a SaaS product, is built on open source software. And yet cloud software gives users less control and more tracking than the desktop model. Cloud software has been open source's greatest success - just not in the way open source advocates expected it to be.

BrightGlow5• 5 years ago

I don't see what the problem there is. The entire goal of a school is to track the students and profile them into a set of grades and test scores.

foobarbecue• 5 years ago

Slashdot lives!

pschastain• 5 years ago

Been using Mint w/ Cinnamon for a while, tried Kubuntu as well and will probably switch back to a KDE-based distro at some point when I have time. Both are fine but I don't find either as functional for me as macOS (which has lost a lot of usability over time as well)

More and more I find myself using the CLI...

wooque• 5 years ago

For me every year after 2015 was year of Linux Desktop

AnIdiotOnTheNet3• 5 years ago

Why do people continually post this? We all know what is meant by the phrase "Year of the Linux Desktop", and it has nothing to do with one random individual on the internet using it.

66fm472tjy7• 5 years ago

A thing that still does not work well is fluid, resizable remote desktop in combination with fractional DPI scaling. X2GO enables the remoting part but does not work modern DEs[0]. Even then, there are bugs when remoting[1].

Also, MS Teams installed from the Ubuntu software store on Ubuntu 21.04 does not support screen sharing. You have to switch from Wayland to X11 to enable it. Even then it is missing features like selecting a single window to share, allowing others to highlight on your screen. It does not matter whether this is Microsoft's fault - Teams is a must have in many organizations and Canonical promotes the app in their store.

[0] https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat

[1] What I have personally encountered: on KDE drkonqi crashes all the time when remote, on GTK-based DEs I get color management prompts and gnome-keyring breaks on local sessions - even worse, it seems to block for minutes then tell the caller that you don't have credentials instead of exiting with an error.

georgewsinger• 5 years ago

What about the Year of the Linux VR Desktop (http://www.simulavr.com/)?

A new platform could give people new reasons to consider alternatives?

caeril• 5 years ago

2004 was the year of the Linux Desktop.

Fedora Core gave you everything you needed for the typical desktop use case: a browser, an office suite, and an email client, with a modern, sensible GUI.

Anybody still denying the usability of desktop Linux since then either plays vidya (which, granted, has been a perennial problem on Linux), or is simply wrong.

midrus• 5 years ago

Is 2021 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

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