Hacker News Reader

Comment by claysmithr | Hacker News Reader

2026 year of the linux desktop

To be honest Linux desktop has been ready for the past 4-5 years or so. Long gone are the days where Bluetooth suddenly stopped, external monitors crashing and when closing the lid only put the laptop to sleep every fifth time. Heck, even Wayland, wireless printers and usb-c docking stations work these days, even with nvidia. You might even find some games.

It’s become a boring appliance that just works every time. Just they way I want it. I even forgot how to use grub.

Especially having ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini available nowadays. It’s a godsend when troubleshooting any Linux issues, and you can learn so much in the process.

I just upgraded my PC’s motherboard, CPU, memory, and video card and used Claude as a build buddy to help me lay out steps to follow. I also used it after installing CachyOS for the second time, but on this new hardware. It had me double checking to make sure I had all the proper drivers set up by running commands, but everything was already setup correctly by CachyOS. It even helped me figure out that I had a fan wire half plugged in, which was causing a fan not to throttle. I would alternate between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2. But it’s so much easier and quicker than the old days of sifting through the manuals and forums, if you could get online to a forum that is.

chatpgt has sent me wrong instructions on just as many occasions it has given the right instructions on how to fix things on linux. It's frustrating when it sends me a 'fix' on something that doesn't even need it (steps on installing a particular flavour of Proton to bypass Rockstar's launcher, when it was already done by default). And because I'm not terribly adept I only appreciate it's the wrong instructions after implementing it and it not working.

If you want error prone scripts and out of date instructions, LLMs are very useful.

Any year now!

I've always dual booted windows with some Linux and used it like 90/10.

I haven't even tried windows 11 even though my PC is compatible.

Went full Linux and I'm not sure what I was missing at this point that I needed from Windows.

Ran Pop OS (cosmic) which is the new Wayland based one but unfortunately it's still buggy and then I switched to a gaming focused Linux called Bazzite which has been perfect.

Tiny learning curve because it's an "immutable" OS but have everything I need running on it plus everything gaming related works out of the box.

I’m really hoping Steam Deck keeps on pushing game makers to support Linux. It’s really gotten a lot better, except for competitive games that need most types of anti-cheat.

If Linux supported all the games I wanted to play, I would ditch Windows on my home PC.

I ran Linux on my laptop in college over a decade ago and it worked great.

It just depends on application compatibility and to a smaller extent driver support, though that shouldn’t be a problem for an older laptop.

I don't know... Two people around me recently switched to Linux because they could not stand how bad Windows 11 got. I did not encourage either of them (I've got my share of frustrations after running a Linux desktop exclusively for 25 years, and will not consent to be the object of their ire when they inevitably get frustrated - I'd rather help them on neutral ground instead).

It was 2019 for me. I haven't daily-driven a Windows or Mac machine in almost 5 years now.

Me either.

But Firefox on Ubuntu is not very good. It can expand to fill the whole machine and get killed by the OOM killer. Sometimes during long text input it hangs and has to be killed and restarted. 8 GB isn't enough any more.

Yep, I use a tab suspender to keep Firefox in check, and use zram/swap on my laptop. Works like a charm for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com