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Comment by fuzzylightbulb | Hacker News Reader

Are we about to have the year of the Linux desktop?

Despite years of random github hacks to disable forced updates, yesterday a 200GB+ file transfer was ruined by a forced Windows update I specifically said no to 30 minutes earlier. Today I'm trialling PopOS and have resolved to never install windows on bare metal again on my machines. The forced update garbage is a tipping point I'm sure now after almost 10 years.

update: Installing windows

Care to explain what went wrong?

I found the fragmentation of desktop environments frustrating, with lots of gotchas that I felt likely to lead to problems later on. A couple of days later after trying out maybe 10 distros in vmware, I eventually settled on ZorinOS. PopOS looks like it might be good with the cosmic desktop in the future. If I was going all-in on linux for work, I'd probably end up with arch and hyprland or something, but what I was looking for in the desktop environment for secondary general computing needed to be a bit more well rounded.

Tried out GhostBSD with Mate for a while, but as expected the hardware support makes it more work, e.g. USB wifi and missing drivers.

I’ve used Linux for 20+ years (on servers) and have never been satisfied enough to switch to it for my desktop PC. This move would make me seriously consider a switch for my work PC if we weren’t so dependent on Office.

My advice to young people would be to (try to) build your businesses with as little dependence on Microsoft as possible because everything is commingled to the point that switching is nearly impossible once you’re trapped.

So this! Office is literally the only thing keeping me on windows at this point. And its not as simple as "just use X". There is a lot friction keeping me from switching, a main one being that all my colleagues and collaborators use ut.

Office online solved this issue for me.

The free version works great.

It's definitely pretty decent for most things... I switched my personal desktop a couple years ago, when ads in the start menu on insiders first appeared. Haven't really looked back. I'd prefer to use it for work.

MSTeams and outlook work perfectly online. I use libreoffice, mostly calc and writer as excel and word replacement, but must admit there is not much VBA to deal with.Nobody complained yet that a document was mangled - a huge difference compared with older libreoffice. Teams also includes office components too, but I've ignored them for 2 years now.

The one remaining nasty is msaccess. I mostly manage to avoid it, but use a terminal server if I really can't avoid it for 1 last 'application'.

MSteams works better online where they can only hog the resources a browser is willing to give them.

Linux has a higher market share of desktop users than the Firefox share of browsers. 1 out of 20 people using a computer are on a Linux desktop.

No. You severely underestimate the amount of pain people are willing to endure, or how masochistic they are.

There will never be a year of the linux desktop. Linux is only for the non-masochistic.

I just want to highlight that this is very much an opinion. Many people switch to Linux to avoid pains that Windows inflicts on them.

Ironically it is power users that I tend to see having the most "problems" with Linux. I helped switch over several nontechnical family members to Linux, and tech support burden on me is almost nonexistent (yes, this surprised me too).

Just purchase well-supported hardware (plenty of resources online these days to determine this before you buy), and install one of the user-friendly distros such as Mint or PopOS. Never open a terminal and tinker with things. It's rock solid.

That opinion happens to be supported by large scale social experiments such as facebook. Time and time again, important aspects, such as privacy, were worsened, but their users stayed. People (as a whole) are lethargic, not masochistic.

To make things worse, Linux isn't for the desktop. You would first have to convince people that they really don't need all that Windows software, and then make Linux PCs (with a super user-friendly distro) a commodity. In the mean time, people are ditching desktop over mobile/tablet, and there is a lot of "niche" Windows/macOS software that isn't available for Linux. It just isn't gonna happen.

> Ironically it is power users that I tend to see having the most "problems" with Linux.

This is because things like web browsing, email, and light word processing are well supported by the software that's out there. The moment you get into applications for any creative endeavor except maybe programming, you run into a "Photoshop vs. Gimp" problem. The polish for the Linux apps just isn't there.

> Many people switch to Linux to avoid pains that Windows inflicts on them.

Yup, that's pretty much what I said with Linux is for non masochistic people. For people that don't enjoy pain.

After 30 years of using and developing for Windows, the last straw was the repeated full screen ads pushing Windows 11. A couple months ago, I took the plunge and built an AMD desktop w/ NixOS. Goodbye forever Microsoft.

Now I get to look at the continued enshittification from a distance. It's still sad but at least it's no longer my problem.

People complain for a while, but there's always an app or workflow that can't be replicated on any other system...

Linux evangelists usually annoy me, but this would actually make me switch over to Linux fully.

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