My first Linux desktop in 1995 was Slackware Linux installed off a cd-rom inside the pages of The Linux Bible. I ran Blackbox window manager and loved every minute of it.
I became a strident anti-windows Linux propagandist, and spent untold hours configuring and compiling everything.
Many years later I recall being in a room with 3 other devs who sat down and got to work while I spent 30 minutes getting my wifi recompiled to support whatever the AP was using that I’d never seen before. The guys paying my hourly rate glared at me over their MacBooks.
A year later at another contract they put an old MacBook in front of me, and by the end of the day I had ordered my own personal one too and never looked back. Everything just worked. I had been trying to do music production on my own in Linux too. Switched to Mac and instantly my results massively improved.
A year ago I built my first gaming rig in a long long time and gave Linux on the desktop another shot. I tried valiantly. I’ve been a hacker and professional programmer for 25 years. I just couldn’t deal with all the brokenness. I paid for windows and enjoyed using the applications I was there for.
Linux is amazing, has dominated the world, and I use it every day all day in my work. I just won’t waste my time on desktop until I try again in 10 years.
I started with Windows, in 94, because in France it was the reference system for work, then I stayed on it for a long time because of games and Office, although I used Linux for servers. In the end I'm glad I avoided Macs altogether, I probably would have spent more money, learned less and done less computing.
Then around 2016 I tried Linux on desktop and it gradually became the only system I use, for development, games and work. For 2 years now, I haven't had any issue with games, the performance is even better than on Windows.
I have hardly touched a Mac (mostly trying it out in Apple shops) and used Windows almost daily in the workplace.
I have been full-time GNU/Linux at home, though... since around 2005. Other than the learning curve + trial-and-errors, I hardly have any issues with networking or even nvidia cards.
There was one time when the wifi did not work. From memory, I think the kernel version I was using did not support it. Other than that, I cannot say I share the same issues.
In the early days I tried many distros. Started with Ubuntu. I even tried Slackware. Today, I mostly stick with Debian but like to keep an eye on GuixOS.
There was one contract job I took which I used Debian exclusively. Everyone else was using Macs. I did not have any loss by comparison other than converting some videos for a web application. I was missing some video formats. For development, I had emacs, apache, etc... no problem. They had their vim, or objective-C, for their applications, etc.
I use Windows for just one job: Multi-Page scanning of documents using HP's Software for my HP Multi-Function-Printer. And even then it's Windows 7 as a guest in VirtualBox on that Linux Desktop.
My Year 1 of 'Linux on the Desktop' was my Year 10 of 'Unix on the Desktop'. I've never had a 'Year of Windows on the Desktop'
I'm not an advocate for Linux use for other people. (Like I was about 20 years ago.) If they insist on Windows or a Mac, that's not my concern at all.
I often liken it to choice of brand of motor car I drive. I prefer to drive a Mercedes and have done for about 20 years. If other people want to drive a BMW or a Ford or a Chev, that's no concern of mine either.
Pretty good list, but some of the recommendations I would call "hyper modern", even in 2024. Apologies but I think I'll be mounting with fstab for awhile. Good to learn about the existence of discoverable partitions though
The author recommends either Arch or Fedora. I prefer Fedora because if you use that then like 90% of this stuff is set up for you. I know that a lot of articles like this tend to attract comments about like "wow I need to learn all this just to get a desktop going?" but for Fedora at least all this is already set up and just works.
> Use a Desktop Environment that supports the aforementioned technologies and works without requiring editing config files just to change the resolution of an external monitor.
I keep hearing about this, but... what DE does that? Heck, arandr works fine on those window managers that don't have it built-in.
Nah Linux still has problems that Windows had years ago: supporting everything with a mess of drivers. It works well if done in an Apple model of software and hardware all integrated. Chromebooks get close to this.
Don’t get me wrong I use Linux every day, it has come a long way. One bad package update can kill an rpm-stree setup (not mentioned) and the boot isn’t partitions if you use ZFS these partitions aren’t needed.
If you’re okay with an iPad like locked down setup it works really well. But why not just buy an iPad? I mean it doesn’t look like it did 10 years ago but the OS is free basically.
I’m very pro-Linux but from a hardware maker point of view it is minuscule so it is still in power user territory.
For novice or semi-novice, users wanting to try a libre distro, there's Trisquel.
Trisquel 11 works fine, you get Ubuntu's 22 LTS' 'standard' software but it uses Mate as the environment.
Pretty usable from the start.
Trisquel Mini it's the same but with LXDE.
If you sadly need propietary firmware for wireless, install the Xanmod kernel and run it, then try buying a cheap Atheros 9k based USB device.
It's propietary, I know, but at least it's just for some kernel blobs on firmware, and Trisquel itself
disables some 'bad' modules such as mei and mei_me by blacklisting them.
For Windows games, if your son/daugther needs that, at least run Lutris and install all of that on a separate account.
You can always show him Xonotic or Red Eclipse. It might not have AAA graphics, but gameplay wise on Red Eclipse you can do crazy hops and parkour on arena matches.
Desktop wise, it's far faster than Windows 10 and 11, it won't install bloatware and lag like hell.
No issues with Celluloid as a video player, and you can install VLC with two clicks.
Icedove (Thunderbird) will work fine with most email accounts, seamlessly.
For developers and sysadmins, it has the same infra as Ubuntu LTS editions, so you will be covered.
This is so good and wholesome. Seeing it, it was immediately clear how needed a guide like this is, something future facing & robust, covering all the modern bases.
We haven't had stable bases of advocacy! Nothing so collected! Individual pieces crop up in submissions (inevitably to a fairly serious level of oHhhh nOO LennartOS, SysV ini-scriptd forever counter-commenting). This puts it all together, paints the vision out, makes an actionable way forward for those who are curious.
Specific & relatively accessible recommendations, a fair play by play on current state of affairs, advantages & weaknesses, a brief rundown on the situation... So so good. All the recommendations are practical & direct options. Admittedly I have yet to actually do secure boot, but I'm doing most of the rest! (Systemd-networkd is pretty manual but been fine, helpful so I can use the same tool at work. Still on iwd but yeah it periodically can hop when my router changes band too.)
I love this article. It makes it whole. This is modern, it works, it tracks with what the excited happy pro-adopters future-forward progressive folk are excited for, and is where folks are pouring their time & effort into improving today.
I'm not a power user and don't know what half of the stuff in this article means, but it got me reflecting on how much rarer glitches and weird workarounds have become since I started exclusively using Linux in 2013. I feel a lot of gratitude for whoever the heck made that possible.
No one else is even trying, of course all this functionality winds up under the systemd banner. Gods, I still remember having to explain to the old Windows dev team that Linux had no concept of a service back in the sysvinit days, just a process and bash script that might restart it if you wrote it correctly
I do believe that many of the design ideas behind systemd are good and somewhat thought out. Besides a few bad designs decisions it could have been a good system, right now it isn't, it even fails at the most basic of software engineering.
I became a strident anti-windows Linux propagandist, and spent untold hours configuring and compiling everything.
Many years later I recall being in a room with 3 other devs who sat down and got to work while I spent 30 minutes getting my wifi recompiled to support whatever the AP was using that I’d never seen before. The guys paying my hourly rate glared at me over their MacBooks.
A year later at another contract they put an old MacBook in front of me, and by the end of the day I had ordered my own personal one too and never looked back. Everything just worked. I had been trying to do music production on my own in Linux too. Switched to Mac and instantly my results massively improved.
A year ago I built my first gaming rig in a long long time and gave Linux on the desktop another shot. I tried valiantly. I’ve been a hacker and professional programmer for 25 years. I just couldn’t deal with all the brokenness. I paid for windows and enjoyed using the applications I was there for.
Linux is amazing, has dominated the world, and I use it every day all day in my work. I just won’t waste my time on desktop until I try again in 10 years.