2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

Summary

2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop Published on 2026-01-02, 398 words, 2 minutes to read The meme will no longer be a dream. TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for. I plan to unify my three SSDs and turn them all into btrfs drives on Fedora. I've been merely tolerating Windows 11 for a while but recently it's gotten to the point where it's just absolutely intolerable. Somehow Linux on the desktop has gotten so much better by not even doing anything differently. Microsoft has managed to actively sabotage the desktop experience through years of active disregard and spite against their users. They've managed to take some of their most revolutionary technological innovations (the NT kernel's hybrid design allowing it to restart drivers, NTFS, ReFS, WSL, Hyper-V, etc.) then just shat all over them with start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews, and forcing Copilot down everyone's throats to the point that I've accidentally gotten stuck in Copilot in a handheld gaming PC and had to hard reboot the device to get out of it. It's as if the internal teams at Microsoft have had decades of lead time in shooting each other in the head with predictable results. To be honest, I've had enough. I'm going to go with Fedora on my tower and Bazzite (or SteamOS) on my handhelds. I think that Linux on the desktop is ready for the masses now, not because it's advanced in a huge leap/bound. It's ready for the masses to use because Windows has gotten so much actively worse that continuing to use it is an active detriment to user experience and stability. Not to mention with the price of ram lately, you need every gigabyte you can get and desktop Linux lets you waste less of it on superfluous bullshit that very few people actually want. At the very least, when something goes wrong o...