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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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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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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).
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.
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 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’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
Upgraded to an AMD card and suddenly Linux became perfectly reliable.
I had a 3060 and it wasn’t that Linux wasn’t reliable but it occasionally would receive an update that would require a video card driver update as well. I bought a 9070xt, sold the 3060, and haven’t had a single issue since.
Yeah, the nVidia shituation is much better than a decade+ ago, nowdays I just have to manually pause upgrades (of drivers, kernel, or both) for a few weeks once evey two years or so.
I need to buy me some AMD. And AMD/Intel needs to build some high end GPU (for consumers I mean).
Still has an issue with HDMI speed since HDMI is a proprietary spec and they don’t allow 2.1 in open source drivers so it’s stuck on 2.0 speed. Displayport is very good though.
Same. Hopefully AMD still bothers making GPU with…is it 1% market share while Intel gave up entirely again? Dire.
Please explain.
Why are the drivers shitty if they are doing an amazing job protecting? Not sure from what though?
Protecting windows users from the year of the linux desktop?
Protecting microsoft from the year of the linux desktop is the intended meaning.
The drivers being shitty on linux is protecting windows from mass abandonment
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.
I’m having no trouble on mine on CachyOS thankfully. Playin my games just fine. I’m sad I didn’t kick Microslop sooner, it’s been great honestly with all the tinkering and control I have. Not only did I get a performance lift, but my PC actually feels…like it’s mine I guess?
Y’all I would happily take all yalls nvidia GPUs.
(Slackware has made using nvidia drivers easy for so long now I’m surprised the other distros haven’t fucking figured it out.)
The problem is not “using the drivers”. It’s the driver quality.
Elaborate? Cause I can use the nvidia GPGPU stuff so much easier than amd and their fucked rocm (I want that to succeed so bad)
In addition to that other answer: they are bad at maintaining their userspace tools. The basic nvidia-setup program was at times so broken that you could only change stuff as root because using su or sudo crashed the app. Which is fun if your root account is deactivated by default… And they couldn’t be bothered to fix it for literally more than a year.
I still have a script in my files that was running in early boot to change the fan speed at boot because there was no other way to change configs once booted and logged in.
Interesting, I feel like I avoided a lot of these issues as I had laptops and so had to use the nvidia prime instead to manually offload to the gpu when needed.
Just needed it to have the drivers or dkms. I probably had a worse time perf wise but wouldn’t know.
The compute part of Nvidia’s proprietary driver stack is fine. That is what they historically have been putting their resources and effort towards, since their big customers only care about compute.
The graphics part of the stack is where the problems are.
- Up until Wayland, they were bypassing the kernel’s standard GPU initialization path and using their X server implementation to do everything instead.
- As far as gaming goes, is is unable to utilize the graphics hardware as efficiently as on Windows. More time is spent stalling/blocking, as evidenced by lower power draw and performance.
- Their QA is awful. There was an issue with GTK 4 apps freezing when closed. They fixed it, and then the next driver release reintroduced it.
Their transparency and community involvement outside of the kernel mailing lists is also pretty poor. They read peoples’ bugs reports and feature requests on their forums, but they rarely acknowledge them or give status updates.
Ooh thank you for elaborating. I hope that the opening of their drivers would solve some of those issues. And we can finally have things working nicely
Every distro makes this easy. Every single one. Some have to enable a separate repo for all proprietary shit which is the limit of the challenge.
But kernel upgrades? That’s where I’ve broken mine and gave up
Everyone on earth already uses DKMS for this installing a new kernel or driver triggers a rebuild.
The common fails are
- User has neither disabled secure boot nor set it up to accept to sign with a key your motherboard is configured to accept.
You MUST do one or the other
- User is using very new kernel with very old hardware. Support window is about 10 years for mainline. Legacy for 1-3 years. Beyond 11-13 years you are either using old kernels or third party patches.
Ex: Geforce 600 series from 2012 is stuck with nvidia driver version 470.x latest release 2024. Attempting to build against recent kernels released after 2024 may not work without patches but MAY work with up to 7.0 as of this message. See
Arch just seems to work. Though I am also not seeing a single distro in this thread listed as having issues.
Use Bazzite or one of its sister distros.
This is the only reason I use a "gaming* distro. They took the single biggest pain in the ass, and made sure it works out of the box. Yes, there are other challenges (immutable distros have a learning curve) but overall I’m very happy with Bazzite.
immutable distros have a learning curve
Fr, I’ve been on Bazzite for months, and I learned last month that /usr/local isn’t protected, which is now how I’ve installed mergerFS
Its been such a ballache getting games developed on Unity to run on my 3080 on Mint. I hate having to dual boot into windows to play them but most of the time that’s the only realistic option I’m left with.
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 :)
