alt Hacker News2026 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
> At this point I'm convinced that no matter how much or little Linux desktop is improved, its market share is solely dependent on how much Microsoft fucked up.
Lifelong Windows user here. If you could get the kind of driver support you have with Windows for just whatever the fuck you have lying around, I'd probably use my Ubuntu laptop as more of a daily driver.
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I switched to Ubuntu a few months back, and I didn't have any issues. It was faster than installing Windows.
Try mint on a live boot. I’ve found it to be the most “just works” on various laptops
I'm not really using anything too exotic... my hardware all works, and my printer has generally been without issue (HP Color Laser on ethernet) regardless of what I use to print from.
For me, I switched when the start menu started showing internet ads as part of the results... I ran insiders for years, often joking that WSL was my favorite Linux distro... I love the new MS Terminal, and pretty happy with a lot of things. That said, there's far more that annoys me... it's too in your face trying to sell you additional software/services/features that frankly I find offensive from an OS. It's like built in malware ads. They might as well try to sell me an X10 camera in those popups, I'd feel just as irritated about it.
I went from dual booting, to just Linux for my personal use a few years ago and been pretty happy. I'm not a gamer, and was already using Linux as my dev target for server software. It wasn't a big deal for me. Even the growing pains for Cosmic have been less annoying than some of the "features" of Windows.
Unless your hardware is exotic (or actively anti-consumer), most devices are well supported. If you wouldn't mind, what issues did you have recently?
Not lifelong, but I've been using Linux since 1993. Through subconscious selective pressure, I only have things lying around that are useful with Linux.
It's kind of liberating, to be able to ignore a huge amount of crap in the market because you can tell it is just some sort of delivery vector for proprietary Windows drivers and their dodgy installers.