LeFantome

Other than his choice of video player not supporting Wayland yet, why is this perfect for X11?

If he is only going to run one app, he can use Cage.

https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage

On a machine with 2 GB of RAM, what is going to make the biggest difference is using a 32 bit distro. Everything, not just the desktop environment but also all the apps, is going to take about half as much RAM. At 2 GB, that takes your system from functionally useless to quite useful ( especially if you plan to open a web browser ).

There is an option you did not list that impressed me recently. Trinity is a desktop environment that is essentially modern KDE 3.

The 32!bit edition of Q4OS makes it easy to install Trinity. It is basically Debian under the hood so you get access to all those packages ( at least the ones available on 32 but ).

The AUR is the best thing about Arch. yay -Syu and everything is updated. Painless.

I tend to use binary packages to avoid long compiles. If an update includes something that is going to take a while, I often exclude that package from the update. After everything else is updated, I can run it again to get the last package or two. They can just run in the background while I do other stuff. If it is a program I am going to use right away, I may put off the update of that package until I am done my session. This is pretty common with JetBrains updates for example.

I do not have a single Flatpak.

Wayland and X11 can exist in parallel. I have multiple desktop environments with some defaulting to Wayland and some still using X11. For my casual machine, I use XFCE most of the time ( X11 ) but have been toying around with the new COSMIC ( Wayland ). I switch back and forth.

So, the X11 on your system will not hold you back when you move to Wayland. Of course, at some point the old stuff is just cruft. So you do have to do a bit of janatorial from time to time.

I use a rolling release.

I upgrade in place more than once a week ( rolling release ).

You can of course use both Docker and Podman on either Fedora or Ubuntu.

Jolla is still going?

Desktop computing is transitioning from mainstream to niche. Increasingly, “normal” computing is phone, tablet, and web. Normal people increasingly use desktops as big screens for the web.

Linux is a great platform for people to access their applications on the web. It is a good option at this point to give to your aging parents to grand parents the next time you have to setup a computer for them.

The other people buying desktops are buying them for things like gaming or dev. These are more technical audiences as you suggest. Gamers are a certain kind of technical though. We are almost at the point with Linux that gaming could go mainstream. I think it already makes a good ( perhaps the best ) dev platform.

Where Linux is worst is probably “technical” Windows users as these are the desktop people that are going to have specific needs and organizations that Linux may not meet. Part of the problem with Linux is that this is the group it has been targeting. That has led to a lot of desktop complexity.

Don’t get me wrong. I am one of the people taking advantage of and contributing to the diversity and complexity of the Linux desktop. That is not helping it make the jump to mainstream desktop users though.

It is a good list ( from an “alternative to Windows” point of view ). In particular, you make a good case for the gaming side of things.

Unfortunately, even if that is all Linux needs, the hordes take time to arrive. The big impact of changes this year will be seen in the migration numbers 3 years from now. The biggest opportunity is probably the Windows 10 EOL and that is not until the end of next year. By then, many gamers will have Windows 11 capable hardware.

I do think that gamers and devs are the two groups likely to lead the charge on the next wave of Linux adoption. .NET dev in particular already has a lot of momentum on Linux with the transition from desktop to cloud and the primacy of Linux in container based workflows. Things are not quite there yet for .NET mobile dev on Linux. I bet most .NET devs that have left Windows are using Macs these days though. That said, that means they are already using tooling quite easily migrated to Linux including bath Rider and VS Code as you say. In the cloud, .NET must be “deployed” more to Linux than to Windows by now.

That last point is the most important I think. Windows is no longer the most important platform for Microsoft—Azure is. Microsoft is quite happy to let you use Linux on Azure. In fact, Azure pipelines and .NET itself are faster on Linux at this point. It is still “developers, developers, developers” for Microsoft but it is now more cloud than desktop. That changes the role of Windows at Microsoft.

I think it is perhaps less what we think about Windows and more about what Microsoft thinks about Windows that matters.

The other crown jewel is Office. Office 365 is a subscription. It is increasingly a “cloud” offering as well. Soon, they will not care about Windows as a delivery vehicle for Office either.

As Windows starts to matter less strategically, the question will increasingly be how to monetize the Windows user base more heavily. That is more ads, more data mining, more AI, and an increasingly crap experience. More and more, Windows Product Managers will be rewarded for their short-term gains and incremental revenue. Stewardship of the platform will move further and further into the background.

That is how Linux will win.

It won’t be this year though.

I know you are joking but I think the 32 bit flux box version would boot to the desktop on some of the later Librettos.

You would be running out of RAM pretty quickly but I am sure it could be done.

I love Arch but think I have too much of a koala mind for Nix.

One of us must be smarter than they think they are.

I want everybody to get this stuff as soon as possible but, in this case, I agree with Ubuntu.

They do not support Wayland on NVIDIA in 24.04 at all. So, this cannot be a bug fix. It has been worked on for a long time. It is a new feature.