On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.

As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…!

[0] https://sandstorm.io/news/

Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html

I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.

Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.

I recently heard that Star Citizen of all things, still in eternal development hell, runs really well on Linux.

Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)

I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.

One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.

Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.

league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!

Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.

I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous.

I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.

What distro?

Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.

Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)

The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks.

Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.

This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.

> I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.

I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.

In step they're now renting their gaming GPUs to players with their GeForce now package.

The market share for Nvidia of gamers is a rounding error now against ai datacenter orders. I won't hold my breath about them revisiting their established drivers for Linux.

When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired.

You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.

I'm surprised to hear you are having trouble with wheels / pedals, we should be there already!

https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels

Hopefully vr headset support will get better

Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.

I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat.

EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer.

I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client.

I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.

My VR glasses work on Omarchy, to my surprise, I plugged them and they work. I have XReal, older model.

I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.

>but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows

Many games refuse to run in VM, even if that VM is windows one. I bet there is a trick to bypass, but then you are at risk of being banned or can't receive support when needed.

> Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pit

That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.

These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.

Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.

Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).

I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.

SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.

FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.

Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.

> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .

This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already.

Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works, you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they like.

You don't.

So use an OS that requires less from you and that tries to just work out of the box, not one that is notorious for being something you break and tinker with constantly (Arch).

I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.

I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.

Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.

You are definitely doing it wrong, I rarely have issues and when I do I just switch comparability tools. I play multiple indie games, marvel rivals, I played lots of among us on my machine in 2020. Running Pop OS

I use EndeavourOS, I just installed Worms and Among Us and they are playing right out of the box for me.

You can force a Proton version in the game settings. "Proton Experimental" almost always fixes any issue you may have.

Ironically, quite a few Linux-compatible games only work for me in compatibility mode.

Yeah, the same. I sometimes google "wine WoW issues" and every time there are recent threads, so I don't even try. Linux has the long way to become gamer platform.

> Worms, Among Us, Parkitect

All three games works perfectly well on both Steam OS and on my kid's PC running CachyOS without any intervention.

As other have said, it's usually driver or configuration issue, which is why I prefer using the prebuilt, pre-installed steam deck.

The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.

There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?

Don't use Arch unless you don't mind spending time troubleshooting and configuring.

I switched in 1999. I've never really had any problems in all that time.

Although it was to BSDi then, and then FreeBSD and then OpenBSD for 5 years or so. I can't remember why I switched to Debian but I've been there ever since.

I'm sat here now playing Oxygen Not Included.

> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.

Interesting, I've had to switch off from Gnome after the new release changed the choices for HiDPI fractional scaling. Now, for my display, they only support "perfect vision" and "legally blind" scaling options.

But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho

> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.

Amazing that high dpi still doesn’t work. I tried to run linux on 4k in around 2016-2017 and the experience was so bad I gave up.

Did you start using Linux on the Mac hardware or on PC hardware? I have a late era Intel Macbook and was considering switching it to Ubuntu or Debian since it is getting kinda slow.

I'd say it's both... In particular 6.16 seems to be a defining point in terms of stability and performance at least for me. My RX 9070XT is finally running with no issues since 6.16 that I've noticed in any of the admittedly few games I play.

Mesa, the kernel drivers and Proton have all seen a lot of growth this past year combined with a bunch of garbage decisions MS has doubled down on... not to mention, enough Linux users in tech combined with Valve/Steam's efforts have made it visible enough that even normies are considering giving Linux a try.

Yup. I fully understand that X11 is a shitshow under the hood, but it works and Wayland frequently does not work. Screen recording, window positions, various multi-monitor and calibration issues, ...

On my laptop I use to write blog posts, that never ever gets plugged into a second screen? Sure, Wayland's great. On a computer that I expect normal people to be able to use without dumb problems? Hell no!

I think Wayland is good for more technical users. Going from i3 to sway or bspwm to river feels like essentially nothing has changed. On the other hand, Gnome X11 to Wayland might be a bigger shock.

Unfortunately, Wayland inherently can't be like Pipewire, which instantly solved basically 90% of audio issues on Linux through its compatibility with Pulseaudio, while having (in my experience) zero drawbacks. If someone could make the equivalent of Pipewire for X11, that'd be nice. Probably far-fetched though.

"window positions not restoring at application start"

Well you see, you are actually just silly for wanting this or asking for this, because it's actually just a security flaw...or something. I will not elaborate further.

Which desktop environment do your friends use?

Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?

Same! I made a comment earlier that it's now very easy to navigate bash with guidance from ChatGPT.

This is a strange statement for me, because I'd say that since '99 almost everything has changed. Maybe your definition of quality is a bit different than mine.

I tried to use Linux back in high school. I had a Pentium 4 computer which was pretty fast for its time. However, I had a dialip windows soft modem. You remember the driver situation. I had to boot to Windows to check my email.

Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.

I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.

In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.

This is the key. It’s not that 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but rather 2026 is very much not the year of the Windows desktop.

Bazzite is rough in the way that all distributions are, but I imagine Windows 11 is rougher.

I think we've reached a point where Windows is about as rough as Linux. But the problem is still that people are familiar with Windows and have learned how to deal with the roughness; not so on Linux. And so long as Windows owns the business and education sectors, it will always have the benefit of that familiarity.

Debian (stable) is great but I wouldn't use it for a gaming PC on modern hardware. The drivers included are just too old. Bazzite or Arch (DIY option) seem better options.

I have Interstellar on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray that features HDR on the cover, Sony 4K Blu-ray player (UBP-X700) and a LG G4 OLED television. I also have an AVR (Denon AVR-S760H 7.2 Ch) connecting both the Blu-ray and a PC running Linux with a RTX 3060 12GB graphic card to the television. I've been meaning to compare HDR on Linux with the Blu-ray. I guess now better than never. I'll reply back to my post after I am done.

I find that running HDR games in standalone steam gamescope works great for my OLED tv. Not perfect, but great.

nvidia

I don't think this is true. I can go into my display settings in kde plasma and enable HDR and configure the brightness. I have a nvidia blackwell card.

Still less than the number of people bashing windows.

[flagged]

Adoption has really picked up since 1900.

FUSE will provide Dropbox in a more integrated way than Windows (eg. terminal) and a cursory Google revealed some projects for Dropbox that do the JIT download you are after - they are old, but I wager still work just fine (an inactive project can just mean that it's complete).

I just switched to Linux. It's a great gig, and I'm actively encouraging everyone I know still infected with the malware known as Windows 11 to switch.

But some of the drawbacks really aren't edge cases. Apparently there is still no way for me to have access to most creative apps (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) with GPU acceleration. It's irritating that so few Linux install processes are turnkey the way they are for Windows/Mac, with errors and caveats that cost less-than-expert users hours of experimenting and mucking with documentation.

I could go on, but it really feels like a bad time to be a casual PC user these days, because Windows is an inhospitable swamp, and Linux still has some sharp edges.

There are plenty. I run only Linux at home but CAD software for hobbies (Fusion 360), most games that want kernel level anti cheat, some embedded DRM-enabled media, all sort of just fail. Other things, like GPU tuning or messing with your displays/drivers are harder than they should be. My Bluetooth earbuds just don't work with my Linux machines.

I agree, I'd cut off dual booting and go full Linux when the hardware and software I use supports it. One of which being a PCIe Elgato capture card, another being an audio mixer with no driver support and the alternatives are very hacky and too complicated for me.

I permanently switched from Windows to Linux about five years ago. I had the same issue as you with Dropbox, so I switched to using the Maestral client for Dropbox instead which has support for selective sync. Works like a charm for me.

NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem.

It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.

It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.

Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...

I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed.

A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.

I've been using a full amd build with arch on it for years now. never had graphics related issues after an update. my biggest gripe is with the hdmi organization and how we can't have proper support with open source drivers.

It’s bad for society for the desktop OS market to be a proprietary monopoly. It basically allows Microsoft to extract rent from the public defender.

I do understand the evangelism being obnoxious. I don’t advocate for people to switch if they have key use cases that ONLY windows or OS X can meet. Certainly not good to be pushy. But otherwise, people are really getting a better experience by switching to Linux.

When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort.

Examples:

- An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format

- A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects

- A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat

The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.

Because we want the best for other people.

> why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make?

This is the sort of question an apolitical person would ask a liberal (I am aware liberalism had been tainted in the recent times), like why is it you people are so needy and constantly preaching about democracy?

Proton for games had changed things dramatically. Gamers can legit switch to Linux with barely a second thought, without being technical.

Linux/x86 still is poor for battery life compared to Apple.

I'm glad that I am not the only one saying this. I made the switch 20+ years ago for my day to day use, and I have rarely experienced any problems with it.

These seem annoying, but I'd argue that these problems are in some ways less significant on Linux than on Windows. If some function of Windows is broken or unsatisfactory, there is not necessarily a way to fix it.

But you can adjust your own system. It'd be unhelpful of me to suggest to an unhappy Windows user that they should switch to another operating system, as that demands a drastic change of environment. On the other hand, you're already familiar with Linux, so the switching cost to a different Linux distribution is significantly lower. Thus I can fairly say that "Ubuntu getting worse" is less of a problem than "Windows getting worse." You have many convenient options. A Windows user has fewer.

What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).

The only real obnoxious slow-down daemons I'm familiar with are the "system indexing" things (GNOME Tracker, KDE Baloo) -- highly recommend disabling them.

I've been using Kubuntu for years with good results. I prefer KDE to Gnome, which Kubuntu takes care of, and I normally add in the flatpak repositories so I don't need snap. That has generally worked well for me in the last 5 years.

For certain timeperiods I have needed to switch to Fedora, or the Fedora KDE spin, to get access to more recent software if I'm using newer hardware. That has generally also been pretty stable but the constant stream of updates and short OS life are not really what I'm looking for in a desktop experience.

There are three issues that linux still has, which are across the board:

- Lack of commercial mechanical engineering software support (CAD & CAE software)

- Inability to reliably suspend or sleep for laptops

- Worse battery life on laptops

If you are using a desktop and don't care about CAD or CAE software I think it's probably a better experience overall than windows. Laptops are still more for advanced users imho but if you go with something that has good linux support from the factory (Dell XPS 13, Framework, etc.) it will be mostly frictionless. It just sucks on that one day where you install an update, close the laptop lid, put it in your backpack, and find it absolutely cooking and near 0% when you take it out.

I also have never found something that gave me the battery life I wanted with linux. I used two XPS 13's and they were the closest but still were only like 75% of what I would like. My current Framework 16 is like 50% of what I would like. That is with always going for a 1080p display but using a VPN which doesn't help battery life.

We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.

My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5

> Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?

No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.

With debian and KDE (both personal preference), but no snap or flatpak, it works wonderfully. Power/sleep-management has become better than a default windows install. All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, just works.

> Does this line up with others’ experience?

Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?

> If yes, what actually works long-term?

Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).

Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?

Not at all.

I've run Void Linux + Xmonad for many years without any such issues. I also recently installed CachyOS for my kid to game on (KDE Plasma) and it works super well.

As a beginner, just pick Ubuntu and get on with your life imo. Switching distros isn't that big of a lift later on and pretty much everything you learn carries over from one to the other. It's much more worthwhile to just pick _something_ and learn some basics and become comfortable with the OS imo.

Pick a popular distro, and during installation, put your /home directory on its own partition. This way, you won't have much to reconfigure if you ever have a reason to switch distros. (You might not ever have a reason; they're all pretty capable.)

If using Ubuntu LTS for gaming, you might want to add a newer kernel: https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle

Linux Mint would also be a reasonable pick.

I think fragmentation is the wrong way to look at it; they're all basically compatible at the end of the day. It's more like an endless list of people who want to min-max.

Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that.

Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.

Ubuntu stopped caring about the desktop experience when the switched to Gnome. Now they have annoying SNAPs. They are a business and they are going to continue enshitifying it.

I haven't tried Bazzite because I'm not into gaming but Linux Mint is working very well for a lot of people coming from Windows. It just works and has great defaults. Windows users seem to pick it up pretty easily.

Also, Linux Mint upgrades very well. I've had a lot of success upgrading to new versions without needing to reinstall everything. Ubuntu and other distros I've tried often have failed during upgrading and I had to reinstall.

I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years, and I've been using it on the desktop since 1999, so I lived through the infamous "Year of the Linux Desktop" era.

I've not seen anything like the current level of momentum, ever, nor this level of mainstream exposure. Gaming has changed the equation, and 2026 will be wild.

I don't think the prevalence of these articles this time of year is because the authors go on holiday, but instead is because the new year is the perfect time to ponder: "Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?"

I guess everyone’s in a “fuck it I’m ready to try some new stuff” mood too so this content is perfectly suited for new years. Would never have noticed this without your comment.

2026, the year of linux

Perhaps it could have been written, but it would have been far less accurate.

What an abysmally cynical take. More good stuff is good. Be happy about it.

Except every year you didn't have people like Pewdiepie and DHH pushing Linux. As as channels like GamersNexus doing Linux benchmarks. At the same time Windows and Mac making very dumb mistakes. So this time it does feel different, even if it might not be in the end.

Thanks for the counterbalancing post. Linux isn't quite there yet.

Yeah, because getting ads and pushed to use more Microsoft products all day long isn't an annoyance when they just want to get on with using the computer.

I just got a laptop for Christmas (first thing I've bought for myself in a good while) with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a video card inside of it, AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, AMD Radeon 6550M. 144hz screen.

Not the best, but works for me.

I put CachyOS on it, using Steam just run the game's installer adding it as a game to your library -- you just select which proton you want (cachyos-proton) as a dropdown in the Properties in the Steam library. that's it.

it's lightweight, arch (I ditched manjaro), runs KDE and games perfectly, cursor IDE runs great, VMS run great.

first thing I did when I got it from fedex was remove Windows and put Linux on it. I thought 'maybe I'll just bite the bullet and sign up a Microsoft cloud account to be able to access ..my desktop' and 1/4 through its install I held the power button and popped a flash drive in. just say no to windows and you'll all be happy, trust me.

the only effort it required was for me to say f this on using Lutris and just use Steam as the wrapper.

2026 is definitely the year for linux. every year is. valve heavily invested in Arch, proton, and is using Linux on their devices and honestly: Windows is spyware, and after their vibe coded jank 25H2 update that broke a ton of things and Windows 10 being EOL, I hope more people get to enjoy throwing Ventoy on a USB stick with a bunch of linux isos copied over to it and boot and play with what they love.

so I disagree, 2026 is the year for Linux, and Linux is love.

From what I've heard most of that 3% is steam decks, so the growth isn't exactly people switching their daily OS driver.

> without it I cannot function in a work environment.

This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment.

Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly.

As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them).

One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.

I had a similar issue, but I ended up installing Debian and running Windows 10 as a virtual machine with VirtualBox. The webcam can be accessed as if were installed on the guest OS and haven't had a problem with Zoom or Teams. Just sharing in case it helps.

Same here, since 1997 though, running the tax software in a virtual machine with Linux as host.

Sounds ultra-specific to your experience. VMs, package management and networking are all things that macOS and Windows stumble with for regular usage. I've used all three OSes professionally, and Linux requires the least configuration to get work done.

Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.

Your entire comment could be written 20 years ago and it would just about fit perfectly.

Yes. The reason the year of the Linux desktop has yet to arrive is because most people don't understand this joke. Linux is powerful because it is made for power users (although certain distros are changing this)

Yes, Mint for most people.

I am using Fedora on machines with new hardware and liking it as well. It has small pluses/minuses vs Mint.

cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.

Today I'd recommend CachyOS. While I haven't connected a scanner, everything else I've tried just seems to work.

Simple, Debian with i3-wm

You're going to get everyone's opinion here. Try a bunch of the major ones and see what works best. I did this and landed on Fedora but ymmv

Omarchy is pretty streamlined for developers and you can play games as well as they work well.

the Universal Blue project has got a great suite of distributions:

https://universal-blue.org/

I have to wonder if Ubuntu's prescriptive stance on things like this is becoming increasingly outdated in an age where there's actually a decent experience out of the box for a lot more stuff on Linux. I've long since moved on from using it personally for my devices, but I'm fairly certain my tolerance for spending effort tinkering to get things working like I want is a lot higher than even most Linux users, so it's hard for me to gauge if the window have moved significantly in that regard for the average Linux user.

This is really annoying me as well. I use a program for work that can occasionally use a lot of ram, while saving or interpolating for example. On my little MacBook Air with just 8GB of ram everything works fine, it just swaps a whole lot more for a short period. On my desktop with 16GB ram and Ubuntu oom just kills it, my workaround is the swapspace package which adds swap files under high load, works so far.

It sounds like your primary issue is that you have a severe RAM deficiency for what you're trying to use your machine for. Any OOM killer, be it the kernel's per-process one or systemd-oomd's per-service one, only exists to try to recover from an out-of-memory scenario where the alternative is to kernel panic (in the case of the kernel's oom killer) or for the system to completely lock up (in the case of systemd-oomd).

Try doing less at once, or getting more memory.

How does Mint work? I recommended it regardless for removing snap.

What would that be useful for? A properly implemented software passkey like Keepassxc would be secure against anything short of a local root exploit. A TPM would not really help against that either.

An ex lease Thinkpad T Series with Intel graphics is a good choice for value and compatibility. eg a T490 or T14 era machine.

Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility.

Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.

Grab one of the old Windows 10 machines which are showing up from corporations upgrading to Windows 11.

Some N100 based mini PC.

The personal desktop has fallen in relevance enough for that to be possible. The goalposts moved, now linux needs to have phone, tablet, and laptop with smooth effortless integration between them all.

I recently switched to using a thumb drive to transfer files to and from my phone/tablet, I became demoralized when faced with getting it all setup.

Its going to be a decade, the slow erosion of Window's market share, and we might already be in it.

2026 YOLOTD!

I wouldn't recommend Xubuntu for the average user. What you feel is about Xubuntu, not Linux. Normies are doing well adapting to Linux Mint. It's easy for Windows users to get used to within a few days and it has sane defaults that match what users expect. It just works.

Outdated view. Regular people ask for help at the genius bar or IT poindexter all the time. And pretty icons are plentiful.

This is just not true anymore. The only things that don't work anymore are a few AAA titles that use particular types of anti-cheat systems that rely on Windows kernel drivers (League of Legends is one that comes to mind).

If I remember correctly, after the Crowdstrike BSOD-all-windows-instances update last year Microsoft wanted to make some changes to their kernel driver program and these anti-cheat measures on Windows might need to find a new mechanism soon anyway. That's a long way of saying, it's plausible that even that last barrier might come down sooner rather than later.

Spoken like a true Windows UX aficionado. Who doesn't love multiple system settings apps, a mix of minimal new context menus and overcrowded legacy context menus just one more click away.

To be clear, are you suggesting Windows is the standard of consistency?

Even modern macs fall short of the UX Apple has traditionally been known for...

Only true if those inconsistencies actually matter to your workflow. Not going to deny that they exist, obviously, but their impact is largely overplayed (and gratuitously downplayed on Windows, in my experience).

Please give an example of an "inconsistency" which makes Linux not a "viable alternative to Windows/MacOS"

Have you worked with windows recently? It basically consists entirely of inconsistensies

> Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?

> on windows all of this just works

Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.

Still no big CAD names that I'm aware of (annoyingly), Libre Calc works fine for me as an Excel alternative, I have used Matlab on it but not recently, not sure on the others.

Laptop sleep and suspend can still be finicky unfortunately.

I will say my experience using CAD or other CAE software on windows has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point that FEA is more stable on linux than on windows.

We do really need a Solidworks, Creo or NX on linux though. My hope has been that eventually something like Wine, Proton, or other efforts to bring windows games to linux will result in us getting the ability to run them. They are one of the last things holding me back from fully moving away from windows.

These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.

I hear you, and also value Excel and a few other products, but I hit my perosnal limit with Windows enshittificatoion early last year and changed my daily driver at home to Linux.

I added a couple VMs running windows, linux, and whatever else I need in proxmox w/ xrdp/rdp and remina, and it's really the best of both worlds. I travel a good deal and being able to remotely connect and pick up where I left off while also not dealing with windows nagware has been great.

Adobe works

Sounds like Darwin is finally meeting it's nominal fate.

> Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse

In case it helps:

https://github.com/libratbag/piper

My main joy of Linux is to have tilling manager and to have same machine on which I can both play games and work. Which since Windows I couldn't make happen.

anticheat is not a linux issue, its a developers issue. it seems facially easy to solve. pair players with the type of game they want.

  turn on anticheat if you want to join no cheat sessions.

 if you want a cheat game turn off anticheat and you join sessions with other cheat players.

 the whole dilemma comes out of malignant users that enjoy destruction of other users ability to enjoy the game.
  go nuclear on clients that manage to join anticheat sessions with cheats turned on.

You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.

Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.

And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.

I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.

Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.

Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.

Never had that happen to me in 25 years of Linux use.

You aren't comparing Linux to anything here.

Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.