It has been near for the past 15 years.
Its getting nearerer!
The year of the Linux desktop will happen when a large (EDIT: large, CONSUMER-FOCUSED AND CONSUMER-FRIENDLY) company decides to donate a remarkable amount of resources to the development and maintenance of a specific distro to make it user friendly and give it the feeling that someone who actually knows better than most users is taking care of important stuff in the background.
…Valve? 👀
To put this in perspective, it fell by 0.48%
Windows 10 grew by 0.89%
Linux actually dropped by 0.26% in that same period.
Not that I’d be too concerned about any of that, because that’s all data from reported OS in website visits, so all those are well within the margin of error.
You mean the year of unpatched Windows 10.
As long as the browsers keep getting patches we’re all good.
I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.
It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.
Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.
Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.
Look, I like Linux too, and I think governments should definitely use it to move away from Microsoft.
But as long as prebuilt PCs and laptops are sold with Windows, people will stay accustomed to it and be way more hesitant to switch. You can tell them, ‘It works just like Windows! It just looks a bit different!’ Yet their minds will still think, ‘New = scary.’ and won’t use it.
The issue for me as a potential advocate to my immediate circle of friends and family is that I don’t want to become the only source of tech support. Now realistically they’ll probably have fewer issues, but as soon as they want to fix something they’ll have to come to me. No they won’t Google things, and if they do they won’t understand it.
When new OEM PCs comes with Linux pre-installed is when stuff happens. Not before then. Windows 11 adoption will be slow cause of their exclusion of old hardware. That old hardware will be scrapped or people just keep Windows 10 on it, regardless of security warnings.
The Desktop Linux experience, with gaming and all, seems pretty close to fulfilling everyone needs at this point. But it would not surprise me if Microsoft goes around paying OEM manufacturers to not bundle anything but windows with their products.
I recently made the switch and motivated a friend who is still on win7 to go to linux. While installing and setting up his system i realised that you still need some konsole handling skills, that normal windows user not really have. To me thats normal, growing up with dos and win311, but if you started with win 2000 or later. Thats all new stuff.
I think laptops/computers that are all ready setup completely usable, should be a thing, thought.
I think that a lot of people are missing this, my first Windows was Windows XP, so I’m pretty much used to doing everything through a GUI
