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Comment by jamesgill | Hacker News Reader

The thing is: it already is the year of the Linux Desktop for me. I don't care about 'OS market share' or how many people use something; I have no control over them.

I also don't care about "OS-maxxing", either--quibbling over 'Wayland', or which OS has the best window manager, arguing about 'gaming', etc.

What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.

So my desktop? It's Linux. The Year of Linux on the Desktop arrived for me years ago. And it can be that year for anyone, anytime. Today.

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I love Linux and think it's better than ever to have Linux as your daily driver, especially thanks to the work of Valve with Proton, but I'm gonna be real and say "the year of the Linux Desktop is a personal journey" is a retrofit. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme came out of Slashdot in the 90s/early 00s where people were insisting that Linux was due to overtake Windows as the way an average, non-technical user interacted with a computer.

Of course, this did turn out to be true... in the form of Android, which is maybe the most monkeys-paw-curling way YotLD could possibly happen.

Agreed, mostly. To me the effectiveness of window managers is a bellwether of the control aspect. So, IMO, if you compare them on control or on the quality of window managers, you'll get the same result. Linux has ended up with many window managers (effectively catering to various styles and needs), while macos, for example, has a one-size-fits-all approach with no REAL multiple-desktops (Spaces is a joke and a toy). As a result, I can easily manage 50-100 open terminal windows on my linux box, but on macos 5 is too many (and if I use Spaces to fit a few more, I can't get to the terminal I need in less than a second. In linux, even with 100 xterms, I can). So, a macos product manager might probably ask me why I would want 100 terminal windows, to find me some alternative. In linux no one asks me that question, and hence I can have what I want.

> What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.

I think a lot of this comes down to what we're looking for out of an OS. For example, it is orthogonal to what I care about most: "Provides a low friction interface between my body and arbitrary software"

Relevant: I do think about the freedom and control aspect about computing; I (personally) tie it to the software or hardware design instead of the interface. Or in some cases, the use of creative software. (DAW, CAD, document writers etc)

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