TechRepublic argued earlier this year that there was no denying the continued dominance of Linux in the enterprise space and the slow growth of Linux on the desktop. Linux made some serious gains in almost every space. The year of the Linux desktop would be 2022. "probably not."
The idea of the year of the Linux desktop is that the free and open source operating system would reach a stage that the average user could install and use it on their PC without running into problems, according to developer Tim Wells. In order to see if he could use Linux for more than just everyday tasks, Linus Sebastian installed Linux on his home PC for a month. He concluded that this year will not be the year of the Linux desktop and that the state of gaming on Linux is simply a shit-show. My word, not his. Some games run well usingValve's Windows compatibility layer, but there are other games that run with issues. Some of the issues can be game breaking. The game is running, but its features are not working. Some games don't work at all because of the dependency on services such as Easy Anti Cheat. The main problem preventing the "year of the Linux desktop" is the fact that there are too many programs. He means the range of available distributions and the fact that each distribution has different versions of libraries and drivers that make the behind the scenes operate. Flatpak and AppImage are making progress towards fixing the issue, but they are not perfect. Flatpak makes sure that the expected versions of libraries required for that software are installed along side it and independent of the existing library. The Steamdeck will use an operating system that is immutable.
The biggest problem with the Linux desktop is that it is not yet the year of the Linux desktop. I think we're closer to solving those problems and maybe even to the year of the Linux desktop that some might think.
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