Hear me out — it really is the year of the Linux desktop
To the point:
- macOS Tahoe's liquid glass redesign isn't just bad aesthetics — it's a signal that Apple has lost the plot and it's priorities have drifted away from the devs who stayed for the Unix underpinnings.
- The Linux that burned you five years ago is not the Linux you'd install today. You've been carrying an outdated memory.
- A new generation of distros, and new ways of working, have made the desktop something you build rather than something you accept.
- Ricing isn't a hobbyist sideshow. It's part of the point. And the fact that Mac users have been trying to import it tells you where the energy actually lives.
- Gaming is real, Proton works, and the 'but I need to game' excuse is officially retired.
- Better ARM (M3+) Linux support when?
I’d like to declare 2026 the year of the Linux desktop. I promise it’ll be different than before, and even though it’s been a running joke for quite some time, something interesting is happening. More people are installing Linux on their PCs (and on their macs) than ever, driven by the increasingly hostile operating systems being shipped to customers.
As I’m writing this from CachyOS, let me declare this the age of the Linux desktop.
The deal you made with macOS is getting worse
If you’re a developer who’s been on Mac for years, you stayed for a reason. It wasn’t the price. It wasn’t the marketing. It was the Unix/BSD underpinnings — a real terminal, real tools, a dev environment that didn’t require fighting the operating system to get work done. macOS was the pragmatic choice. Great design running on great hardware surrounded by a great ecosystem where you could actually ship things without losing a day to configuration hell. Even though many of us have and continue to run Linux on the server, macOS has been the choice for a daily driver.
That deal is eroding.
I say this as someone who loves and respects Apple, which is why I hold them to a higher standard and won’t hesitate to call out what I see as failings.
macOS Tahoe’s liquid glass redesign is the most visible symptom, but don’t let the aesthetic debate distract from the real issue. The problem isn’t that it looks bad — though it does, in the particular way that happens when a design team has lost the plot. The problem is what it signals: Apple’s attention is elsewhere, and increasingly diffuse.
Pair that with genuine stability regressions that have been creeping in across recent releases — performance hiccups, UI inconsistencies, things that just feel less reliable than they used to — and the picture gets clearer. The platform you chose because it got out of your way is now very much in your way. The trajectory matters more than any single release. And the trajectory is not pointed at you.
Windows, meanwhile, was never really in this conversation. If you’re reading this, you already know. I think there’s still time for Microsoft to address some of the concerns around Windows 11 from customers (especially gamers), but there’s a reason that it’s been now dubbed “Microslop”.
What actually changed
It wasn’t one thing. It never is with this kind of shift.
A generation of Linux distributions quietly got serious about the whole experience — not just the kernel, not just the package manager, but the complete arc from installation to daily use. They started asking what it would feel like to actually live here. More people cared enough to continue the struggle of open source to build something as an alternative expression of computing.
That’s where the interesting stuff is happening. Hyprland and Niri are window managers that don’t just replace your taskbar — they ask you to think differently about how a desktop works. Tiling, workspaces, keyboard-driven navigation that actually makes sense. The first hour is disorienting. The second hour, you start to see it. By the third, going back to a floating window manager feels like driving with one hand tied behind your back.
Fish shell is a smaller example of the same philosophy. Better defaults. Autosuggestions that work the way you’d expect. A scripting syntax that doesn’t feel like archaeology. It’s not revolutionary, and despite some minor drawbacks around POSIX compliance, it’s a wholly new and thoughtful way to interact and drive your operating system.
I’ve mostly used Ubuntu in the past for stability, but there are so many more distros now. I first installed Red Hat and Debian back in 1998 — and Debian in particular was brutal. I even ran Enlightenment, but it asked quite a bit of you in those days. That was the Linux I used, but filed under “not for the faint of heart”, and I continued to leave it mostly for server usage for most of my career.
My current daily driver is CachyOS, which sits at the performance-tuned end of the spectrum. It’s Arch-based, and built for people who want control and are willing to engage with the system to get it. It’s not where everyone should start. But spending time with it pushed me into corners of the Linux ecosystem I’d not returned to in a long time, and for the first time in a while I’m enjoying tinkering with my desktop again.
The desktop as craft
There’s a word for what happens when you start treating your Linux setup as something you build rather than something you accept: ricing. In some corners, this can be considered a pejorative (and apparently has some questionable origins), but for our purposes let’s consider it as the practice of customizing your desktop environment — window decorations, colors, fonts, layouts, animations — until it reflects the way you actually think and work rather than the defaults someone else decided on.
This is not a hobbyist sideshow. This is the point.
The interesting tell: there’s now a small but active community trying to bring ricing to macOS. I stumbled on this by accident when my curiosity led me to search for any projects that might be trying to replicate that experience. To start, there’s Aerospace for tiling, and Sketchybar for custom menu bars. Patches and workarounds exist to approximate the configurability that Linux offers natively. There’s an increasing amount of energy here. The appetite for a desktop you own rather than a desktop you rent has been there all along. Linux was always better suited to meet this moment.
Here’s the thing about bringing ricing to macOS though: it doesn’t address some of the core issues. You can tile your windows all you want, but won’t fix the underlying issues. You’re still working around constraints that Linux doesn’t have, especially in terms of the target audience that macOS wants to continue to serve.
About that gaming excuse
For years, “but I need to game” was a completely legitimate reason to stay off Linux. It wasn’t an excuse — it was a real constraint. The compatibility story was genuinely bad, and patching around it was a project in itself.
That’s over.
Steam’s Proton compatibility layer runs thousands of Windows titles without modification. Not perfectly, not universally — but well enough that the exception is worth checking, not the rule. Valve went further and shipped the Steam Deck, a Linux gaming device that proved the entire stack at consumer scale. When Valve is betting hardware on your platform’s gaming story, the story has changed.
If gaming was what was keeping you off Linux, it’s time to revisit that assumption. I hope to test this myself soon as a way to encourage my sons to move to CachyOS or Bazzite (gaming focused) before considering an upgrade to Windows 11.
The memory you’re carrying is out of date
Here’s what I think is actually happening for a lot of devs who’ve been circling Linux without landing: you tried it before, and it was painful. Driver issues. Half-working suspend. A forum thread from 2011 that was your only lifeline for getting Wi-Fi to connect. You put in real time and it didn’t pay off, and you filed it under “not worth it” and moved on.
That Linux is still out there. Old hardware, obscure edge cases, some of the less-maintained corners of the ecosystem — the friction hasn’t disappeared entirely. New hardware can also be frustrating, but the gap here is shrinking daily.
The experience of setting up a modern mainstream distribution and getting to a working, productive desktop is genuinely different now. The defaults are better. The hardware support is broader. The documentation has improved. The community has grown (though there are still some potentially toxic elements out there, of course). What used to take a weekend of troubleshooting now often just works.
You’ve been carrying a memory of an experience that has changed dramatically, and I encourage you to give it a try again.
Where to start
Not every distro is for every person. Here’s an honest map, not a review:
Start here, no drama
Ubuntu — The most documented Linux distribution on earth. If something can go wrong, someone has already written the solution. Not the most exciting choice, but excitement is overrated when you’re trying to get work done.
Fedora — Clean, modern, close to upstream, and backed by Red Hat. Ships newer software than Ubuntu without feeling like you’re living on the edge. This is where a lot of devs land and stay.
I will note that KDE Plasma and the new Gnome 50 are both excellent desktop environments.
Better than their reputation, underreported
Linux Mint — The gentlest on-ramp in the ecosystem, especially coming from Windows. Don’t let that fool you — it’s polished, stable, and serious. Just happens to also be approachable.
Pop!_OS — System76’s distribution, built with developers specifically in mind. Tiling support out of the box. Good NVIDIA support. A real option that doesn’t get enough credit in the conversation.
Zorin OS — Designed explicitly to look and feel familiar to Windows and macOS switchers. Doesn’t sacrifice functionality to get there. Underrated entry point for the dev who wants to bring colleagues along.
EndeavourOS — Arch-based but with a friendlier installer and a genuinely welcoming community. The on-ramp to the Arch ecosystem without the full DIY commitment.
For when you want to own every decision
Arch Linux — You build it yourself. You understand every layer because you installed every layer. The documentation (the Arch Wiki) is the best in Linux and benefits everyone, not just Arch users.
CachyOS — Where I live. Performance-tuned, Arch-based, with sensible defaults for people who want Arch’s power without assembling it from scratch. Niri works great. If you want to actually go fast and have control, start here.
One other note here: consider purchasing a used or refurbished machine. Ebay has lots of choices and it ensures we keep working hardware out of the landfill, and you also save a few quid. It’s a great way to get started before making a bigger investment. Linux also runs exceedingly well on older hardware, and it breathes new life to these machines.
The year of the Linux desktop has been a joke for so long that saying it out loud still feels a little embarrassing. I get that.
But the joke only worked because the reality kept failing to materialize. The reality has changed. The distros are better. The tools are more thoughtful. The gaming story is real. The platforms you’ve been waiting on are giving you less reason to wait.
I can’t wait until a Mac-friendly M3+/ARM based Linux ships that just works. ARM compatibility is the one place where things are still behind. But it’s coming, and I have a flash drive ready and waiting for that day.