Tl;Dr “I want my~ I want my~ I want my NixOS~”. Yes, I am that old. Shut up.

I love the enthusiasm… but I must disagree :( unfortunately, much to my sheegrin bacuse I want to spite Linux commenter on this sub so badly because they are a bunch of brogrammers, but for me the year of the Linux desktop has to happen at the hands of device manufacturers. “Monopoly-by-default” is real, always has been, and never ever really left. Don’t take your eyes off Microsoft or Apple for one second - the bastards - because when you do, you fall into the vendor lock-in trap.

I personally think the EU should publish a bespoke bootloader with a gallery of operating systems that can be fetched using PXE, with image signing and checking of course, sort of like the “browser choice” alternative for OS’s. It doesn’t need to be the main bootloader, but it has to be available - and most likely GRUB2… because GRUB2 is everywhere. It’s what boots MacOS on M* machines. It’s the one boot loader to rule them all. What I’m saying is we’re in the year of GRUB2.

Anyways, outside my ideal there’s really nothing that will bring the “year of the Linux desktop” popularity wise, besides a large vendor relying on the actual Linux desktop stack - which is possible, but there’s probably a reason why Samsung bet on Enlightenment, and it’s not because it’s creator is so enlightened. MIT spelt in South Korean translates to MINE.

One thing 2024 has also stood for is cleaning house. GNOME was caught breaking their own strict rules, KDE keeps ironing out the ancient from the Plasma desktop paradigm, though now KWin has better Wayland support than Mutter for some reason, even though one has had Wayland support for years (a real tortoise and the hare situation this), and people are obsessed with a display server that nobody develops for anymore. (XWayland is XWayland, not X11). So finally we’re in the year of Wayland. Good bye, screen tearing. Hello breaking with protocol and causing screen corruption. Oy vey.

In regards to developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, and developers, then I look at the Rust stack, I look at the Zed stack, even the C# stack, or even a certain GUI framework with its own IDE built entirely using its own Emscripten SDK (can’t remember the name for the life of me). Here I see some new ways of doing the same thing and creating cross-platform solutions from the get-go, that might bring in new products and services on the Linux side.

But we already have access to more private and public services in software form on Linux than ever before before, so maybe the year of the Linux desktop passed us by but as a lackluster metric and Linux as a desktop (or LaaD as I’d like to call it, because I’m a moron) really won’t be popularized until one of the major vendor completely screws the Pooch, and then someone brings a solution based on the Linux stack. Come on, Copilot+ and System76…

Also, NixOS is finally trying to fix it’s issues, which is great, because Nix could realistically be a reproducible stack across systems, which can be tested by spitting out a single flake file. I see it as an addition to Flatpaks, Snaps and even AppImages. I want to petition Ableton to bring Live Linux, because I know in my heart of hearts that they’ve hired people with NixOS experience and that the Push 3 standalone needs some form of OS. But NixOS is a perfect example of why people are asking what happened to the year of the CoC’s? Maybe we can do a reboot.

So in conclusion, I’m over here waiting for the year of NixOS, which will be a lackluster event where nobody is happy with, most likely celebrated by another institutional figure having to walk it off. See you in 10-15 years.