Does anyone even use desktops anymore?
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Anyone that wants power and more than a couple screens.
What? yes?
I do... and always will.
Fuck it, we CLI
According to this data, desktop devices still make well over 50% with over 75% in Europe.
Thatโs for desktops and laptops combined though, so doesnโt really answer. Iโm curious as everywhere I work transitioned to laptops and tablets since COVID.
Oh, translation mistake on my side. Is the word "desktop" really still in use for tower computers? ๐ค I only know it for the kind of computing, not the device type.
Anyway, can't quickly find proper statistics for that. I once read an estimate done by what I think was Valve, that's obviously scewed towards the gaming bubble though. Still, I think it "only" was about 50-60% desktops over laptops and "other". They won't vanish anytime soon though, you can't squeeze highest performance into a laptop and game streaming only works very selectively.
I'm really curious how it will shift in the future given Linux becomes more and more popular, and that ecosystem is already offering a synergy approach (not just the way SteamDeck does, but also with both GTK and Qt apps able to shift depending on display size and touch capabilities).
Do you mean as opposed to using phones/tablets, or do you mean like having a tower computer and peripherals? People still use laptops and stationary computers for work, like office work and computer related hobbies and anything like it. For doomscrolling and simple games, phones are more popular though.
Weโll, I mean as in desktop PCs. Iโm assuming the โYear of the Linux desktopโ thing is a joke that itโs been that long coming that people were still using desktops when people first started saying it.
Some people include laptops in "desktop" since it's the same paradigm of the interface, especially if you hook up an external mouse and have a regular screen and keyboard. Laptops are still widely used. Some people use the term workstation. If 90% of people used linux on laptops for browsing, writing, programming, editing media, spread sheets, etc, I'd say that was the year of Linux on the Desktop, even if they don't have a Compaq with a CRT screen sitting on their desk.
Maybe some people do that, but theyโre literally called โlaptopsโ to distinguish them from desktops.
Yes, well, such is language. What word better describes the combination of devices where you carry out typical desktop computer tasks in a desktop manner? I'm open for using a different word.
Who said Wayland was going to be the death? (Excluding canonical) Everyone knew X needed to be replaced and that the transition will be slow until its not.
And systemd is not that bad these days. I do think it's more complex than it needs to be and startup is a bit slow, but that's about it.
GNOME making the huge changes inspired the refugees to build Cinnamon and injected some sense into KDE development. Now even GNOME is getting more sensible.
I saw someone giving a talk either about Wayland and they said someone told them they "don't like Wayland because it violates the Unix philosophy." (Do one thing and do it well.) The speaker said they responded by asking "What one thing does X do well?"
I sure as f don't miss x, but for the fing love of God can I get some access at the shell level to my input devices? The death of Autohotkey is killing me slowly.
systemd is not that bad these days
It never was bad, in fact it was better than the alternatives even in it's beta releases.
ayo this the bigger than sign
ok came back im stupid
It's probably countered by the "year of the Linux desktop" claims. Keeps it in a limbo.
I don't quite get why massive Gnome changes would imply a death of Desktop Linux. There are so many great alternatives to it. It's been many years that Gnome has been considered bad by many, and that many have used alternatives. I just think it's positive that Gnome continue to get worse, because like that more distros may default to better alternatives to begin with.
I hated Gnome 3 when it came out, but it got better over the years. If you want to use it as a traditional KDE-style DE, you're going to fight it and have a bad time. If you use it as intended, and that works for you, it's good.
Kde is not traditional. It looks like disgusting microshit garbage. Same as cinnamon.
I don't know why people would want to sue desktop environments that like that like garbage product made by billy gats
I like systemd
Systemdeez nuts
OOL: whatโs the beef with systemd?
I'll just copy my comment from the other day.
Some people think it handles too many low-level systems. It's a valid concern because if systemd itself were to become compromised (like Xz Utils was) or a serious bug was introduced, all of the userland processes would be affected. People who are stuck in the 90s and think that the Unix philosophy is still relevant will also point out that it's a needlessly complex software suite and we should all go back to writing initscripts in bash. The truth is, it's complex because it needs to solve a complex problem.
Red Hat, the owner of systemd, has also had its fair share of controversies. It's a company that many distrust.
Ultimately, those whose opinion mattered the most decided that systemd's benefits outweigh the risks and drawbacks. Debian held a vote to determine the project's future regarding init systems. Arch Linux replaced initscripts because systemd was simply better, and replicating and maintaining its features (like starting services once their dependencies are running) with initscripts would've been unjustifiably complicated.
it does too many things, thus going against the unix philosopy of "do one thing and do it well"
Systemd does one thing, it manages services, and does so reliably, without messing around with spagettified shell scripts, with a fuckload of options, and all of that easily is configurable by dropping in files without editing stuff that arrived from the package manager. Seems pretti "do one (complex) thing and do it well"
If you add other things built around it, it can do more. For example, if you install systemd-nspawn it can start and stop containers like it starts and stops services.
Other things that you think of as systemd are entirely separate things (like systemd-networkd) that are just built around systemd. You don't have to use them if you don't like.
On the other hand, you know what does not follow the Unix philosophy? The Xserver, which manages screens, graphic acceleration, input devices, printers, remoting, etc. And it doesn't even do it well
I need systemd-run to start a process in my startup scripts (that are a systemd oneshot service) so that the process won't get killed when the startup scripts have run (subshells, nohup, ... still keep the same systemd cgroup so get killed with the tree).
I need journalctl to get output from services, so basically every system and user process I didn't explicitly start in a console. I don't even know how to get info from systemd stuff in any other way, as they don't have alternate logging facilities to my knowledge.
Systemd also ate my fstab at some point and translates mounts into services, but I haven't really looked into that.
I think there were a few more components packed into this systemd core. Without the init system/servixe manager, logging, ... you can't really use systemd stuff including parts of that core.
Past that, things like networkd, resolved, ... are very modular in my experience.
I can imagine running resolved under a different init system, and I have migrated both to and from resolved on systemd systems. They do still change old paradigms, resolved replaces a file not a service for example, but they do provide adequate translation layers and backwards compatibility in most cases (Though the mounts for example has lead to me getting 5 "run daemon-reload" info messages on every execution of mount before). An issue here might be when something only supports the new systemd interface not the old stuff, say a program directly calling resolved instead of looking at resolv.conf. But I haven't seen that, and most of those interfaces seem decent enough to implement into systemd-alternatives.
Maybe someome who actually tried cherrypicking some systemd stuff into their system can provide some more experience?
There is no such philosophy and it was never practiced.
Itโs definitely a thing.
I don't disagree that term itself exists of course. But it was and is bullshit that those philosophers themselves never actually followed.
See also: the Linux Kernel
Most people do
There are places I wouldn't use it but for most systems it makes things simpler
It's impressive how much hatred linux gets, by people who generally try to say it's insignificant and unnoticeable.
But eh, better them say that it's going to die, than with Windows where everyone agreed to say that it was dead after 7 and stopped having any expectations.
It's even more impressive how much hate Linux gets from people that love it
We call that "Star Wars Syndrome."