[TriLUG] Linux Desktop

[John Vaughters via TriLUG]

I here rumors that Lenovo has been pretty successful lately in selling budget laptops with Ubuntu as a significant cost reduction. But Lenovo does not release numbers on these stats. I think it is great, but I do not see LInux as a desktop being huge anytime soon. I have personally had mixed results in getting regular users to enjoy Ubuntu as a desktop. There are still many gotchas in the overall platform and stuff does go wrong plenty of times. It is not a very cohesive solution overall and then there is that software they want that only runs on Windows or Apple OS. There is just no money in creating a great Desktop environment and that creates the chicken and egg situation. People will come if it is great, but it is never great because there are no people to pay for it.

All that said, for tech people there is not substitute for Linux. You can be way more productive and hiccups are solvable with a little work.

~John Vaughters






On Tuesday, August 11, 2026 at 07:23:15 PM EDT, Wes Garrison via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote: 





I still don't think the "year of Linux on the desktop" is just around the
corner yet, but I will say that more and more folks do seem to be trying it
out.

After my SSD died recently, I installed Debian on my Thinkpad and just run
QuickBooks in a VM until I can get rid of Intuit.

Honestly it's been great. There's nothing I haven't been able to do on it.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 6:05 PM Stephen Wiley via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> IMO the "user unfriendliness" of desktop Linux using the shell for most
> things makes using agent harnesses way more effective on it. You can
> just tell codex or opencode or your own custom harness "make this
> happen" and it happens with little, if any, fuss.
>
> It's also way easier to try weird stuff on that AI might make more
> practical where non-free OSes tend to have canned, highly opinionated
> GUIs.
>
> --Stephen
>
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 05:10:31PM -0400, Dwain Sims via TriLUG wrote:
> >
> https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-desktop-use-surged-on-one-workday-cloudflare-data-shows/
> >
> > I know I got a lot of naysayers when I posted something like this before,
> > but here is yet another story about the growth of Linux on the desktop.
> It
> > looks like AI workbench usage; what do I know....
> >
> > Dwain
> > --
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