So people are starting to proclaim it the year of the Linux desktop. I’ve been a Linux user on the personal (and some professional) side of things for the past 4 years or so and even then I’ve seen a lot of people proclaim the death of windows is right around the corner and you can find tech people proclaiming this littered across hacker and tech spaces. E.g.
The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft’s anyway.
But, to risk being yet another incredibly wrong commentator, this time seems different. There are two main flavors of Linux that I’ve been using recently that is driving this assessment: Omarchy and Cosmic’s newly released beta. I’m typing this up from a System76 Thelios running the pre-installed PopOS! upgraded to cosmic. It’s good, great even. The environment is clean and professional, I’ve had only minor headaches getting some keyboard shortcuts to work. I also installed Omarchy on my Framework laptop and its a completely different ballgame. Just look at this stuff man:
The big thing about these two flavors of Linux that is getting me a bit hyped is just how easy they are to use. It looks like the community is really starting to take the many lessons learned from people’s hobbies of ricing Linux to extreme degrees into a way to make a riced-up version of Linux the preinstalled version with no real effort on the side of the users. For Linux this is quite unusual, normally to figure out this kind of stuff you need weeks or months putzing around with settings. I used a standalone Arch setup on my framework before switching to Omarchy but I never really got around to creating anything this particularly nice and downright fun to use.
In fact its even got me to using Komorebi on my Windows machine for work, and holy crap trying to get a Windows machine into anywhere near a comparable experience to either PopOS! or Omarchy has been akin to pulling teeth. Just tons of minor problems and jank to work through as opposed to just flashing the device and getting it working out of the gate. I’ve spent literal weeks of my life slowly editing config files and still getting tons of jank, flickering windows when moving, laggy animations, etc. My hardware is quite good too, being a modern Thinkpad. This isn’t a diss on Komorebi either, I think what they’ve done is great! My point is merely that it is *heavily* limited by underlying OS it’s working on. Whereas on Omarchy you can get set up and installed in under 2 minutes from fresh and everything works correctly out of the box.
This whole thing is a total reversal of the normal narrative that Linux is for nerds who have too much time on their hands.
But not to get the “out of the box” functionalities of tiling windows managers and the productivity improvements from there on a windows machine I need to install Komorebi, install a bunch of other software, figure out a working config set-up, or… I could just install Omarchy in 2 minutes. Now to be a coder on windows I need to waste a ton of time figuring out software conflicts and just generally waste a ton more time doing things at work at a lower quality than my own personal side projects. That’s crazy, I should be *more* productive doing economics and data analysis at an enterprise that is actively profiting from my work and leveraging a ton of capital to enhance my productivity relative to just leveraging my own personal equipment.
Even aside from the time needed to get windows set up and together in some kind of mimic-setup (which one could argue you shouldn’t even bother with), there’s also just the fact that windows these days is just incredibly slow relative to my Omarchy and PopOS! setups. Windows take a while to load, my RAM is constantly above 50% usage whereas my Framework laptop is just much faster at everything than my Thinkpad running windows. Even running medium-large excel and word documents takes forever and is a laggy experience. And don’t get me started about how long it takes when you’re working on documents simultaneously with coworkers, I’ve had shared excel and word documents crash on me just on startup multiple times a day. It’s just a very frustrating device to use. But what’s interesting here is just the reaction I get from people which basically amounts to the Linux mantra of ~5-10 years ago: git gud dude here’s a 25 minute guide on how you really need to use the OS. Here’s a 30 minute guide on how to eliminate all the useless crap from your computer.
This is all stuff we heard from Linux nerds since the kernel was published on how the users are to blame for the software running poorly that has been totally flipped on its head. Now the Windows users are having to justify why their OS is difficult to and unnatural to use.
Or if you want to install windows 11 on an older machine you just need to do what all Linux users know how to do: flash a USB drive and boot from there. But now if using Windows 11 on an older machine entails basically installing linux… why not just use Linux and get speed ups from your machine instead of having it slow down? It’s also not just me that’s saying this. Microsoft itself is kicking off many of its users, and users are noticing more and more delays from the plethora of bloatware installed to the point where Microsoft needed to introduce “game mode” to shut off the unneeded bloatware.
All this bitching and moaning being said though, I don’t think this is going to be the year where people flee Windows entirely. Windows 11 seems to be progressing smoothly and is not in a horrific state (despite some gnarly reviews). I do think that Microsoft has reached (and been at for some time now) a plateau of enshittification (to borrow from Krugman) where they have market dominance by a hair, and by that I mean I don’t think Microsoft can handle another windows-8 level screw up anymore. If Windows 12 winds up being on that level of a screw-up, I think you’ll see Linux going from ~5% of the market to something like 10-20%. Between Linux being free (and therefore, giving OEM’s a higher margin for placing Linux on the machine), the user friendliness of modern Linux distributions, the only thing windows has going for it left seems to be just first-mover inertia from widely used proprietary software. And don’t get me wrong, that inertia is a massive advantage and will carry them at least to the next Windows release. But that inertia is something that will be dwindling if they don’t improve substantially. They’ll need to up their game if they’re going to keep on being the gorilla in the OS market, at least in my opinion.