I’m not proposing anything here, I’m curious what you all think of the future.
What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?
I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.
A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it’s now your desktop computer. That’s one vision. ChromeOS has its “everything is in the cloud” vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it’s free software.
If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?
I was always in and out with Linux.
My problem was always that something was always a bit off with the apps or environment than I got used to, and most of thr times I just couldn’t adapt. Things like my laptop touchpad worked differently, the mouse moved differently, apps had functions differently or lacking onebthing, others other things.
Also, most DEs was lacking functions (like dbl click on window icon to close), or were buggy. Then KDE4 came out and it was a trainwreck after 3.5 and I lost all my hope for a while.
And, on my mission to kinda solve these resulted always me bricking the system.
Now, to be fair, this was 10 years ago.
But, I know I won’t use Windows 11 for a while now and I kinda bored with Windows 10 so few weeks ago installed Debian on my PC with KDE Plasma. Tho I have nothing against Windows, it served me well in the past… 25 years. But now I’m more focused on dev work and productivity, and Windows 10 became slowly awkward for the different works I had. Most of the times I used WSL so why not just hsve the realdeal at the first place? Also, lots of Pis and some servers I have are also running Linux, so why not have it on my main machine?
It’s nice. Still have some minor annoyance or inconvenience with it, but I don’t care. Honestly, seeing what Linux became in these 10 years made me go ‘wow’.
So, I have hope in Linux in the future. Especially since OS and architectural boulders are rapidly disappearing.
I remember Wine being no more than a POC you can run Notepad or Solitaire on Linux. Now you can almost run any removeding game on a Linux system. This is awesome.
So, I’m testrunning Linux again before I invest a motherload of money into a new PC (I’m using a 2009 era server machine as my desktop atm) and if it’s good, I will continue to use Linux and probably Debian on my new machine and will format my drives and set up a partition table that is Linux-y, and not just mount all my NTFS drives and use them like they are native to the system.
@kuneho @pmk
I totally get it! Although I’m a few months a head of you. No more Windows for me. I used to run both using dual boot but after a while I got more and more into linux and learned to use it correctly. Then I realized there is much to control by yourself in a system rather than let windows to do it.
Just don’t give up on Linux and try lot’s of distros to find the best you need. I recommend Arch Or Debian 11. Debian 12 is still not a debian-standard distro in my experience.
I was thinking about going the Arch route, I really wanted to build up my system from scratch…
but then I was like “I’m too old for this sh*t”, and I’m not even sure what I really want from my machine, so I was looking through distros… openSUSE was my other candidate, but I used Debian based systems and APT in the past 10 years… and I like the philosophy behind Debian, so installed Bookworm.
maybe, after a while when I know what I need, what I use and how I use them, will build my own Arch installation.
I’m a big fan of retired systems for every day use. A 14 year old server has more function as a space heater and whitenoise generator than a desktop, though.
7th-8th gen Intel retired corporate desktops and laptops from Dell/Lenovo/HP are a dime a dozen on eBay man. Lenovos tend to run Linux very well out of the box. And Linus himself sent his daughter to college with a Dell XPS.
yeah, most of my machines are around 3rd or 4th gen Intel, some of those are recent buys - one for libreELEC under my TV, one for remote work, one for my mother… unbelievably cheap machines, and with an SSD and 16GB of RAM, they run happily forever. (even with Windows 10)
recommend setting up a next cloud server with the old computer, byeto google drive photos etc
thanks for the tip, but I’m not that cloud storage guy. I have a homelab running, if I need to share files, I just put them there.
Maybe OneDrive is what I used more before, but I can totally live without it.