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Things currently stopping “YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP”
- Anti cheat
- Adobe
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Nvidia
- No availability of Linux PCs in physical stores
These but to a lesser degree
- AutoCAD
- Obscure research/academic/industrial software
- Music production software
Music production software RIP. Not to mention the Lovecraftian horrors of the Linux audio stack. It’s gotten so much better with REAPER and there are many great VSTs but there’s still a long way to go.
Too bad there is no Valve equivalent in the music industry
It’s so frustrating that I can’t run office software. But why is adobe a problem?
Adobe has a huge presence in the creative industry. Lots of professionals (read majority) can’t use a FOSS graphics suite because Adobe is an industry standard. And Adobe cannot run on anything except Windows because (I forgot the exact article) certain portions of Adobe are highly entangled with Windows, and porting it to Linux makes no financial sense.
Before others talk about the alternatives, Adobe still has huge inertia. It will be years before they are dethroned, assuming they continue to fuckup.
Good summary.
I’ve been working a while and think the latter things combined with the unfamiliarity of MDM/IT management tools in Linux has stopped much wider adoption.
So many industries just MUST run a few key apps that were designed and battle tested in windows long ago, as in wet lab science, manufacturing, and medicine to name a few I’ve seen.
Also stability (sorry but it’s hard to beat a MacBook).
I feel like most industries didn’t run Mac books as standard.
My solution was to pick a distro that came with Nvidia drivers set up already (pop os) and have had zero problems with it.
Me too, Bazzite. That doesn’t solve that it runs 15-25% slower than windows in heavy games. Thank god I play mostly indie games.
My experience is that games run just as well (if not better) in Linux. I’m also running Bazzite. The difference is that I think I had an nVidia driver issue once in about 10 years under Windows with this computer and hardware combo. It was such a rare occurrence that I assumed my card was dying, but it turns out that the next update fixed all the problems.
Meanwhile, the time between hitting a driver bug in Linux is measured in months. For a long time I couldn’t play SNES games with an emulator because something about how it initialized the display (on systems with 2 monitors attached to the card) caused the driver to completely lock up.
For me, on CachyOS, there does appear to be some fork of the drivers that the OS maintainers have kept up; I haven’t really had any complaints. In my case I don’t use ultrawide monitors or any unusual features, but maybe others with specific use cases would struggle more.
That doesn’t improve the quality of the drivers though… But you seem to not have had issues yet… Are you on wayland though?
There’s always a new issue. One time I can’t resume of suspending (I think this is still an issue…). Then shutting off a monitor leads to a crash of the driver-stack. I could go on. Just the fact that Nvidia took so long to support GBM properly is a tragedy.
No not on wayland as one of my monitors does not behave with the existing options.
It doesn’t fix the drivers but for many the installation and set up is where things go wrong. That’s how it was for me.
So you haven’t had “zero” problems. AFAIK wayland is already usable with AMD since almost a decade or so… (well not every program was supported yet a decade ago obviously, but, at least these kind of issues that Nvidia has/had are non-existing AFAIK).
It doesn’t fix the drivers but for many the installation and set up is where things go wrong. That’s how it was for me.
For me it was never the installation, just the risk after updating the drivers that yet another issue appears (sometimes old ones were fixed though, to be fair).
PopOS today is a beta version. Apps sometimes crash. They just switched over to a brand new desktop environment and although it used to be a good recommendation for first time users that’s not the case at present. Once they polish the new cosmic DE fix all the bugs, it would be back to its former glory IMO.
I had it before the new DE and my PC didn’t switch over to it. I agree it’s a bit rough right now and might switch to cachy or something when I have time to fool with it.
I managed to get hibernate working on opensuse with an Nvidia card, so I guess I’m lucky as hell.
No you fucking didn’t.
I had to remember that I’m trans and furry and channel that energy during drive partitioning.
There are limits to a furrys power
Call me Icarus baby
No way I’m configuring that. It needs to position the same amount of space as your ram amount right?
I’ll just sleep or turn it off.
I made a dedicated hibernate partition on nvram, and gave it enough space for my cpu RAM and the DRAM, plus like ten percent. In the opensuse setup you give it a particular name, then you look up the right kernel config parameter and boom done.
This is even with the Nvidia drivers.
I was shocked too. I decided to that that after faffing around trying to get sleep working. 😄
Maybe Microslop is secretly paying Nvidia to be shit specifically on Linux?
Doesn’t even have to pay. With the way Microsoft pushes AI, Nvidia gets their share automatically.
I’m on endeavouros (arch) with an rtx 3060 and haven’t had any issues whatsoever in a few years, are people having more nvidia problems lately or something?
I had a similar setup (Endeavour OS + 3080). While most daily tasks worked fine I had some large annoyances.
- Monitor Sleep would sometimes prevent VRR from working afterwards
- Actual sleep would sometimes force me to reconnect my second monitor.
- Hybernation was completely broken
- VRAM swapping does not work at all, leading to stuttering instead of simply degraded performance.
I am sure I missed some more minor ones, but there were the main reasons I got an AMD card
Don’t know about ‘recently’, but I bought a new PC about 2 years ago with a 4070 super, spent about one and a half days trying to get Ubuntu to properly set up drivers, and ended up installing windows instead.
(Due to ongoing enshittification I am considering giving it another go with mint)
I would recommend endevour OS which is based on arch, so you have the latest drivers and kernel always. Ubuntu is always old and may not work properly. Try that one and things will likely just work out of the box.
If you want a just works solution for gaming, try bazzite. I Never had a single hitch
I can recommend bazzite if you don’t want to tinker much. Install took like half an hour and my 4090 worked out of the box with all games that I tried so far. (Mostly WoW, bg3 and rematch)
Even for tinkering, check out bistrobox that comes installed with it. Stupid simple to just run a Debian (or whatever) container for packages that expect a mutable os
Bazzite or Pop OS. Ubuntu and Mint are not railored for gaming much. You can still play games of coruse, but you will have more better experience on gaming-specific OSes.
It’s a mixed bag, most of the time the desktop cards work fine, but mobile gpus are a little more wonky. Had a desktop rtx 2070 super under endeavoros as well until the last 6 months (even on the sway community edition, which is wayland based), but I have to admit the rx 9070xt that replaced it was much easier to setup and get going with no fuss thus far (plus really easy to undervolt, so I don’t use a ton of power as well).
I believe I have the same GPU but the Ti version (I might be mistaken but it’s definitely 30xx ti) and I couldn’t get it to work on mint smoothly myself. Put my 7600 back in. Idk if it’s the distro or not. Followed instructions online and nothing worked. Maybe I was simply missing something simple but whatever the fix is isn’t intuitive for me.
Just to note: that I’ve only been using Linux for about a year now and have been learning as I go. I’m not a CS student or anything. Just a dude without a diploma working a blue collar job.
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No issues on Mint though
To be fair the windows driver situation isn’t much better. last time I started windows on a computer I cared about, it tried to find a new driver for my mouse for some reason and in the process deleted all the profiles I had configured on the mouse
Mouse drivers are ridiculous. Over 1 GB for just a freaking mouse driver.
You mean the software package from the manufacturer and not a driver?
Of course, but the download is still labelled as “driver”, and it’s the only (official) way to get the full functionality of the mouse.
?????
am still using my GTX 1650 till it breaks
I never understood GPU naming schemes but I’m still rocking my 1050TI lol
Just put Fedora on my desktop with an RTX 5060 a couple weeks ago. The Nvidia drivers were easy to install but they borked a bit later and it took me an hour or two to fix unfortunately. And sleep doesn’t work at all.
Still, the Nvidia driver issues are secondary to the WiFi issues that I’ve spent so many hours trying to get work, and every time I think it works for good, it breaks again. I’m buying a dongle with a Mediatek MT7601U and hopefully this fixes the WiFi issues for good.
Dunno, every single major problem I had in the last couple of years (including few month on windows) were caused by bad AMD drivers. Had to switch to wayland in large part to avoid that goddamn hw_done/flip_done timeout bug. And still, if anything tries to use VA-API it freezes the entire desktop with
amdgpu_cs_ioctl reports "not enough memory for command submission". And it also recently started to not recognize the monitor plugged into it after booting, sayingkernel: workqueue: dm_irq_work_func [amdgpu] hogged CPU for >10000us 4 times, consider switching to WQ_UNBOUND, so I have to re-plug it a few times for it to start working.Nvidia, on the other hand? Not a single hitch so far.
Funny I have the exact inverse experience. The only le nux PC I have issue with is an intel/NVIDIA. Since I switched to and/and PR just Adm and no GPU I reduced my issues drastically.
Nvidia totally borked for me.
Just now OpenSUSE Tumbleweed had an update that included Nvidia drivers for kernel v7. Depending on the device, drivers either didn’t load at all, or were very broken.
Not to mention the mess they made with older devices.
Same for me - I updated my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (zypper dup), no issues, until I rebooted and the system was completely borked. I didn’t even get into the Login Screen; just a green screen.
A few days later, I booted into recovery mode, updated again; the screens were blue now.
Then, I got a USB with the installation media and updated the system with that; I got in (with no drivers loaded); changed the values to allow nouveau to load; nouveau loaded; but Internet was broken (IP was fine, DNS was borked). I had enough and did a clean re-install. Now, I’ve got Kernel 7, NVIDIA Driver 595 and Internet all running nicely. Re-installing the software was a chore, but not that bad.
I did dual-boot into CachyOS to have a working graphics driver for the week in which I was fixing OpenSUSE, worked nicely, but was of course missing GeekosDAW (Metapackage for audio producing & routing).
That’s some dedication on your side indeed :D
I just wait for a proper update in the meanwhile.
YOTLD won’t ever happen, but getting NVIDIA drivers in order for seamless experience will definitely increase user base. It might only happen when Nova/Nouveau+NVK are mature enough to take over.
It’s happening now tbh. More people across the experience spectrum than ever before are using linux. I’m loving it
this is, indeed, the year of the linux desktop
I’m not saying the market won’t grow, yes, there’s a lot of traction lately, but it’s blown out of proportions within the Linux bubble. I still don’t see mass adoption and everyone switching over from windows just yet. Especially not within a single year. Perhaps 2030s will be the decade of the Linux on desktop, who knows.
The Year of the Linux Desktop isn’t literally when it gains 50%+ marketshare, it’s the point in the adoption S curve where it’s moved past early adopters and enthusiasts and is starting to be picked up by mainstream users.
That’s literally happening now. 2025/26. It’s happened. (Past tense).
Now we’re in the “watch numbers go up” phase of the S curve, wondering when the second derivative will go negative, as that will signal peak adoption speed.
I wish that wishful thinking to be true
I’m using it on everything except my gaming rig. Linux is way too much trouble to still get downgraded performance.
Are you using Nvidia? I don’t have a windows machine to compare against but I haven’t noticed any performance issues
It’s a mixed bag. A handful of games have better performance on Linux. Many are in insignificant difference either way. Some report 15-25% lower framerates on Linux. But VR is a massive headache and I have an old Vive VR that isn’t getting any love from Linux in the form of support. But even just running Nvidia shouldn’t be so problematic. They make the best video cards in the world and I like to game. I’m not going to buy a shittier graphics card just because it plays nicer with FOSS.
Ah the FOSS aspect and that whole ecosystem is really enjoyable to me so I’ll often pick the shittier option in terms of fidelity if it let’s me have my machine like I like it more generally.
hmm what about that valve study that showed a linux port having better performance???
I mean, Nvidia drivers have been shitty on windows too as of late
That is so ridiculously accurate. And sad. And infuriating. And then funny again because I am reuglarly going mad with those fucking drivers since I have to work with them on Linux professionally. I hate it. It is funny and tragic. Just like life.
Hilarious to see this after my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install booted to a black screen (with a cursor) and no TYY access after a 16 GB update. X_X lol.
Oh well. Been here before, thank God for BTRFS and Snapper integration! Probably just gotta freeze that Nvidia driver again for like a week. Blah.
When it works, I agree with some other posters here: It works fine. My only graphics issues have been “doesn’t boot into graphics environment and
Nvidia-smisays 'We ain’t found shit.'🪮” LOLOtherwise it’s a LOT better than it’s been. I haven’t had to go chasing down obscure issues.
Been there! Got that update borked as well, journalctl shows permission errors on /dev/nvidia*
Snapper’ed back as well, waiting for a proper update - bug already reported by others. Freezing driver update was actually problematic because it causes all sorts of dependency issues that end up hard to resolve. Nvidia made a real mess there.
Hey I really appreciate you updating me with that! Thank you. :)
It’s not always easy to know if it’s a “My machine” problem or a “They’ve gotta fix it” problem.
Thought it’s my machine, too. Got a 1060, that thing gets deprecated and requires its own drivers. Already had issues with that on TW, so expected that to be the problem.
But then checked the forums, and well…it’s not just you and me :)
the only problems i’ve ever faced with nvidia drivers is when i downloaded the wrong ones back on day 1. adobe software and kernel level anticheat are the real culprits
