I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it’s not a great experience with legacy apps. You can’t completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
Which apps? I’ve discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.
*every application using xWayland looks like crap.
Native Wayland apps work great with fractional scaling.
But isn’t that still on par with xorg where you can’t have any fractional scaling?
As someone who dabbles in Linux but is ultimately a regular people, what’s the advantage of this?
A unified, bug-free, performant and featureful display stack to ensure people can use things like Variable refresh rate, which, iirc, is an impossibility on X11.
That’s pretty awesome. I imagine this would be a huge advantage with the growth of Linux gaming too
I suppose the Steam Deck experience would be a bit worse if it wasn’t running on Wayland 👍
The games on Steam Deck are already running in Wayland using gamescope IIRC
Wait, what? I’m on PopOS, with Nvidia GPU, and my “g-sync” VRR works fine.
PopOS uses GNOME which hopefully uses Wayland
I can confirm that PopOS 22.04 is definitely running on X. wayland is officially coming when Cosmic releases.
That said, I see that Wayland is “available” if I want to manually switch to it - but it is definitely disabled as a default (and current) setting.
I don’t understand this fetish. Every day I read about problems people have with Wayland, while I’ve been using X for the past 15 years without any issues.
Wayland is better at segmenting each app. On X any app could potentially see/record what happen on the entire screen while on Wayland that requires you do manually grant the rights. Similar to how macOS is requesting you to give each app the possibility to record your screen or not.
I have been using X since 1992 with lots of issues. I do not understand the fetish with X11 and why people cling to it so tightly.
No no, this year for real! Because (highly technical reason that doesn’t affect most users).
For real though, how Microsoft plays this year could be interesting considering the lukewarm reception to Win11 and the impending ewaste pile of Win10.
Not sure this is the year but my “highly technical reason” is that enough gamers switch.
Especially if Win12 is cloud-based, like the rumors say, I could see a potential influx of Linux users
Microsoft plays just like it has always played - with OEM contracts and being the default OS choice. Linux remains niche as long as Microsoft has this, unless they decide to roll out a mainstream distro themselves.
Sure, but I’m getting the feeling there’s a bit of dissent in Windows users, with many vowing never to use Windows 11. If MS keep making user hostile or even just user neutral decisions and Linux starts gaining a reputation of being easy to install, we could see people trying Linux rather than upgrading to Win 11.
Of course, I doubt MS is going to let that happen. They’re either going to walk back some of the egregious privacy violations or do a Google and prevent you from installing alternatives.
More techy people migrating to linux would be good, but that won’t change the fact that most people don’t even know that they can change their os, let alone how to do it.
More techy people joining would mean that we would hopefully get more fixes to issues linux has, as there would be more people bringing attention to them and maybe there would also be more people willing to help fix them.
When those issues are fixed, we might get to step two. Honestly not even sure what that step would be, but maybe it could be that more it-departments switch over to linux, which would get more people familiar with it, which would hopefully make manufacturers more likely to ship computers with linux.
All that is going to take a hell of a lot of time. And honestly seems unlikely to happen in the next 10, heck even 20 years. People are already so used to Microsofts shenanigans that they would have to fuck up majorly to get enough people to switch that it would matter. People are lazy, for good and bad, and as long as Windows at least mostly works fine, they’ll just be stuck using it.
Maybe we’ll climb to 4% marketshare!
This is for real the Linux desktop year for me, went through the switch just before the new year. Had to reinstall a couple times but no big deal, and I get to learn as well.
Not sure if out-of-the-box distros are now that user friendly yet or not, but I remember getting Ubuntu running several years ago was frustrating (no sound, bad sound quality etc) and now running EOS was pretty smooth. Pretty sure something like Mint will be user friendly enough for the general population.
Here’s to another year of the Linux Desktop! (been ~15 years for me) 🎉
Year of the chromeOS desktop maybe, may faith is low
I have seen stats that both Linux and ChromeOS have around 3.5% market share.
If ChromeOS continues to converge with proper desktop Linux, I consider it a distro which makes 10%+ possible this year.
The wild card for me is Linux gaming. It may not grow fast but it totally could.
Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?
I don’t really expect us to hit it but, for the first time, I feel like it is possible.
People still use ChromeOS? I just slap Linux on my chromebooks. Cheap new hardware.
I actually really like Chrome OS myself. For the people around me who are less tech literate, Chrome OS is actually great. It’s quite easy to support. It’s fast, and it’s got a really good ecosystem now thanks to all the integrations.
Have you guys fixed your graphics stack to keep up with current High-DPI and HDR displays yet? No? LOL happy new year of the eyesore desktop to you too