2025 Year Of The Linux Desktop - Victoria Gavrilova

okay so as some of you may realize I'm not Mike Whitehead so if you guys were here for this talk uh I'm sorry to disappoint but um so I'm Victoria um I'm going to be talking about how the year of the Linux desktop is never going to happen so the year of the Linux desktop it's been said for decades and as it has lost its meaning over time people still believe that every year it's going to be this year and there's a reason keeps coming up right people get more concerned about privacy and freedom each year and with all of that Linux feels like a breath of fresh air so why hasn't Linux hit the mainstream and what's

stopping the average user from using it in their day-to-day starting with the state of windows so quick show of hands who's used Linux in any capacity okay uh who uses it on their desktop okay so yeah undoubtedly some of you know that Windows has some pretty severe privacy issues um actually the other week I had to set up a Windows VM and the amount of telemetry uh you have to opt out of is actually insane like app usage um location data searches Diagnostics it's all disguised Under This Promise of improved user experience and of course it's fair to understand that you know we don't really know what's going to be going on since it is closed source and the fact that

there's ads riddled throughout the OS it's fair to be skeptical about their privacy claims I mean even XZ had a you know back door that no one knew about for some time and it's true that Linux has been on the rise after the release of Windows 11 and it's like clear to see why so Windows is pushing AI everywhere with their co-pilot release and even more notably recall and if you haven't heard about Recall yet it's basically this new feature they've been releasing now about basically it takes a screenshot of uh your screen whenever it changes and it stores them locally but we don't really know about that yet and you essentially need a co-pilot plus PC

to run it and those are uh Windows 11 PCS that are powered by an npu and I found that quite interesting because why would you need a processor that can handle 40 plus trillion operations per second okay so quis time uh how long do you think recall snapshots are saved for anyone for 12 hours no 3 days three months okay well yeah you all guessed right that is uh way more than enough time for a hacker to start trying to get access to that and then you know if they get hung up on it they can just go on holiday and come back with a fresh piece of mind so in addition to that they have um

their new pluton chip which they claim to be the future of Windows PCS but they're essentially just Hardware level tracking with their chip to Cloud technology so even if recoil snapshots are local there's definitely still a risk with that but despite those security risks there's you know obviously some restrictions that could come with that so you know it could stop you from using certain apps like tour or even stop you from dual booting Linux which feels quite concerning right and it's no surprise that people are looking for alternatives with the Windows 10 support date ending in around a week or so a lot of people are choosing to switch to Linux after that so could the year the Linux desktop

be here but first you have to know what like the D of the Linux desktop is and I think the closest way to describe that is if any average user can install and navigate Linux without encountering any major issue that can't be fixed in addition to that all of their you know personal and work tasks must be able to be done and those of you who do use a desktop Linux you will obviously know that this can already be done now well while it's true Linux has come a long way and for most users all you really need is a couple office apps and a web browser you can do anything that on Windows that you can do on Linux there's

literally a free open source app for everything whether it's like art or video editing or office apps so in addition to that Linux does outrun windows in a lot of different ways boot times for example response times Linux is the clear winner and there is still that preconception that Linux isn't fit for gaming and it's complicated because it's the games that with that kernel level anti-che like valerant or Rainbow Six Siege that's never going to be able to run on Linux but for basically every other game you can run it on Linux and often with better performance but even but despite that it's completely fine for everyday users so why aren't more people using it obviously most devices that you get

are going to be pre-installed with Windows on them just August this year the market um market share for Windows was sending 1.5% with Linux sit at just 4.6% and there definitely has been quite a steep rise but when Linux is pre-installed it's only marketed towards enthusiasts think Linux laptops or a steam deck and people kind of just want something that works and what they're comfortable with and we can't really blame them for that I mean we all know someone who struggles to use Windows never mind Linux so people just don't really have time or interest to learn a whole new operating system or rather unlearn one but when I do witness one being like okay how do I get started I really do

get excited about that and they'll go off and do their own research about it and you know they'll come back to me be like okay but what Dro should I use and that's a really complicated question because I tried to put a tree of all the distributions that stem from Debian and I couldn't even fit that on the slide but if you are interested there's the entire tree of all the Linux distributions on that QR code underneath it so it was way too big to even fit on the slide I think it's like 5 megabytes or something that image is really big um but if you ask anyone in the L Community like what's the best Dr for beginners or

what's the you know what Dr should I start out with you're going to get 10 different answers and at first when people used to ask me that I would try and ask them questions about like how do you use your system what do you use it for you know what specs do you have and that ended to be like quite time consuming so over time I've just kind of been like setting to the default being like just use Mint or Debian and Katie plasma and you know there's even more stuff to to choose from even the you know thousands of distributions out there you know things like desktop environments or window managers in it systems display

managers and so much more and it's like if you're at a restaurant and there's like a thousand different options for what you could order and the waiter or waitress just keeps coming to you like are you ready to I'm like no and this freedom of choice is really good for advanced users I actually it's one of my favorite Parts about Linux to be able to choose everything that you want but for beginners this can seem really really daunting and even after all that effort of you choosing you know the distribution that you want and all these types of things you're still going to get hate for what you get because it's the wrong answer and then when we do talk about

trying to support new users um we often talk about the so-called pain points of Linux and these are essentially just the most difficult things for a new user to get used to so these are things like the installation compatibility ISS ues learning the command line which is really difficult even from someone from a technical background but especially if you're not that seems like a completely different language and the most important thing the most important pain point is just understanding how Linux is different to Windows a lot of people can go into it and kind of think you know it's going to be kind of similar but once you realize literally everything is different that's where you know some

people might start getting frustrated and all of these types of things build up and it causes users to sort of give up easily and go back to what they're comfortable with and Linux does take a lot of time and patience and some people don't often realize that and when I was writing this slide I couldn't help but um remember about this iconic video I don't know if it'll play let see I don't think it wants to play oh a shame yeah okay I don't think that's going to say but um essentially it's this woman who took case of a young woman who just wanted to take some online classes at MATC I'm so glad we could help this

woman because she called us specifically because she wanted to be able to go take those courses at MATC and she bought a new laptop to be able to do that that's when she called me she thought her laptop was coming with Windows instead she got that thing called Ubuntu pronunciation was the least of her problems it has just been a mess and um I regret ordering the she actually um I think she actually drops out later from that um so yeah um another really big problem for people who are debating whether to make that switch or not is their hardware and while it can be done it's really not uncommon for people to struggle with drivers for things like

printers or graphics cards um and some of you might already know what I'm talking about when I say the words graphics cards um and while Nvidia are transitioning to open- Source um GPU kernel modules they have been so notoriously awful for their compatibility with Linux and so much so that actually lus toval said this in in an interview a lot of chips into the Android market and Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with so Nvidia [Applause] you so despite all of those things and if you do start to learn Linux and start getting into that community and you finally got your foot in the door there's a notoriously awful community and while there are so many

nice people so many compassionate people that I've made friends with there's still a lot of elitism and sort of gatekeeping around that and um when I first uh started using Linux I had installed a buntu um actually I tried to dual boot it but that didn't go very well and I ended up just using a buntu and um every time I used it I seemed to encounter some issue but from my very limited knowledge in Linux at the time I would try and fix it and then break it even more and it got to a point where I had somehow deleted loads of dependencies and literally nothing worked um so you know I I was at the

point was like I can't fix this so I posted my issue to Reddit and as some of you might you know have guessed already that I didn't get the most you know encouraging comments um and my system was really messed up so maybe it was a little bit deserved but reading them just kind of made me want to quit and I really did want to switch back to Windows but um one one very kind person helped me and help me fix it but even if I were to switch back I was kind of scared I'll would break it even more like break my computer or something so I get it's easy to forget what it was like

when you were a beginner because once you're all fluent in using Linux and you use it every day and that's your normal you forget about those times when you had to look up basic commands or you had to read the docs like 10 times before you even understood a single word of it and the text circles that you have to be in to First even know about lyrics and then secondly to actually learn more about it and start using it can be really brutal and it's really important that as like as a community we try and create these beginner friendly spaces because I would I you know when I first started I try to join these so-called beginner friendly

spaces only to find out that they don't care about beginners at all and they will just hate on you for even trying so it's for some of us it might seem quite obvious but we really do need to be a more inclusive environment because you know especially if you're not like a sis hat white man um you know trying to join these communities can be really bad if people don't even believe anything you're saying just because you're a woman or something like that so you know in order to make that kind of space we just need to be inclusive of people though overwhelm them with information we don't just be don't be judgmental when they make mistakes or if

they don't know something and just kind of guide them in the right direction so the dream isn't dead but with all these obstacles from Windows dominance to the Steep learning curve you know all the hardware and software compatibility issues the year of the Linux desktop seems pretty far away although it's quite evolved since its creation and so many people have like been getting concerned about privacy and freedom for Linux to really hit mainstream we've got to kind of fix all those issues or at least tackle them and while companies aren't going to cater to the Linux audience the Linux desktop is still going to be a niche and I think that's all right we have our own space

for enthusiast developers and so much more so you know not everyone's like that type of person where they want to nitpick every single part of their system and know what exactly everything does and instead of chasing that impossible dream like this Utopia where literally everyone uses lyx we can just invite people who want to learn be supportive of them encourage them and you know advise Windows users you know to opt out of these Telemetry things and not use these really bad privacy features they use and if more people start to recognize those things the N can grow into something a lot bigger than we could expect so thank you um there's a QR code with my LinkedIn but in general don't

scan C people but yeah is there any questions y you use um I use artics yep I'm uh no I [Music] haven't y do you know how you get two monitors working struggled with that for five years now um it depends on what um desktop environment or Window Manager you use um but um I use a tying window manager but the documents that I've seen for um configuring multiple monitors they've worked fine for me I don't really know about other ones but the ones I I mean we could talk about it afterwards if you're interested in that but um the documentation has just been fine for [Music] me

um um as in it's compatibility with Linux or yeah I for me I've used it yeah [Music] yeah um I think I struggled with it at first but um I somehow got it to work I don't remember how because this was like years ago but um I've only had like one pair of bluetooth headphones and they worked fine I think as long as it's not Apple it will probably work um what you think about Telemetry on recent sort of mainstream distributions to in space um yeah um the Abu has uh sort of done that I think it is also opt out um I think last time I heard about it it was opt out and when you were

installing it it would kind of ask you those types of questions um I disagree with that uh in general um hence why I don't you know encourage people to use those types of distributions that do collect uh data on their users um yeah in general I don't think it's a good idea or like a good feature in general so yeah any others

yeah um it's a very good question um it'd have to be tied with um auntu and slack where probably both of them were quite a pain to use to be honest y yep trying

[Music] um yeah yeah um yeah um I used to use Alpine which not a lot of people use because I think they were mainly for containers that's not really a desktop Dro but um I've used that in the past and most people who use that tend to be quite nice yeah

y you

thinks Windows um I would probably say no because you're still going to have the issues with um like Windows boot times and then also still it does still collect Telemetry and then also um still that the performance is going to be a lot worse so I would probably say no to that one Windows um I do have a Windows VM um solely uh for you know the things I have to do for college like um Microsoft apps and stuff like that um is really really luy though so probably wouldn't recommend that yes yes exactly mhm Superior yeah are there any more yep no