This joke while funny, was old in 1999 and is certainly ridiculous now in 2022.
I honestly can't think of there be any reason why one wouldn't run Linux on the desktop , it's perfectly fine, I'd say excellent for 98% of the tasks I do.
Video editors, designers and photographers probably struggle a bit but I'd say nearly all of those people use a Mac anyway. I have both myself. Linux and an iPad Pro.
There is still the problem of gaming. With tools like CrossOver from CodeWeavers and shadow.tech things are getting better as well as some native support on Steam, but at this point I still need a dedicated Windows desktop specifically for gaming and nothing else (I use a MacBook Pro for personal projects, work, and Alpine for Docker to run production services at work).
I’m running games on a Linux machine just fine. It’s kinda remarkable. Steam lead the way and there especially since the steam deck runs Linux now . There is an app that will configure and launch your GOG and epic games too. (Ive tried it with a couple epic games to great effect)
If you are hard core and looking for top performance and need anti heat, maybe windows is still the way to go. I sometimes use my partners windows machine to game. It’s good but not that different from my machine. (We both have laptops with nvidia cards.
A year ago I might have been inclined to argue, but my wife's PC died horribly and I "loaned" her my Ubuntu desktop. A year later she's still using it and hos told me not to bother replacing it. Replaced her printer at one point and feared the worst, but I literally had to do nothing. It just worked. I think my support time has actually gone down!
I set my uncle (a smart but non-technical guy in his mid-60s) up with a Linux desktop running KDE Plasma several years ago, when I lived we were roommates. During the first few weeks, he would occasionally have a question about how to do something or what something was. It was a gift to replace a painfully slow old Windows computer he was using at the time.
In those 5 years, there has been no instability issues and no performance degradation. The content he likes to browse and stream all still works smoothly, and he seems comfortable and happy with the user interface. (He's actually told me that by now, it feels more intuitive to him than the Mac desktops they recently switched to at his workplace.)
Light power users are in sort of a valley along the Linux suitability vs. user technical expertise curve right now. But for non-technical users to their left and sysadmin/developer types to their right, the Linux desktop is a pretty good fit these days.
I installed Linux Mint on my elderly mother's laptop 8 years ago and never touched it again until it quit and she replaced it about a year ago. I should have checked on it, but "Windows was working just fine" for her, and on my side I forgot I had even done it since I had lived overseas for much of that time.
>This joke while funny, was old in 1999 and is certainly ridiculous now in 2022
The joke is that this wasn't a joke, it was constantly someone seriously saying that desktop Linux is momentarily about to kill Windows when $NEXT_YEAR rolls around and then getting a lot of traction and upvotes.
I honestly can't think of there be any reason why one wouldn't run Linux on the desktop , it's perfectly fine, I'd say excellent for 98% of the tasks I do.
Video editors, designers and photographers probably struggle a bit but I'd say nearly all of those people use a Mac anyway. I have both myself. Linux and an iPad Pro.