The thing is: it already is the year of the Linux Desktop for me. I don't care about 'OS market share' or how many people use something; I have no control over them.
I also don't care about "OS-maxxing", either--quibbling over 'Wayland', or which OS has the best window manager, arguing about 'gaming', etc.
What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.
So my desktop? It's Linux. The Year of Linux on the Desktop arrived for me years ago. And it can be that year for anyone, anytime. Today.
I love Linux and think it's better than ever to have Linux as your daily driver, especially thanks to the work of Valve with Proton, but I'm gonna be real and say "the year of the Linux Desktop is a personal journey" is a retrofit. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme came out of Slashdot in the 90s/early 00s where people were insisting that Linux was due to overtake Windows as the way an average, non-technical user interacted with a computer.
Of course, this did turn out to be true... in the form of Android, which is maybe the most monkeys-paw-curling way YotLD could possibly happen.
> What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.
I think a lot of this comes down to what we're looking for out of an OS. For example, it is orthogonal to what I care about most: "Provides a low friction interface between my body and arbitrary software"
Relevant: I do think about the freedom and control aspect about computing; I (personally) tie it to the software or hardware design instead of the interface. Or in some cases, the use of creative software. (DAW, CAD, document writers etc)
The object-level discussion is interesting, but I disagree with the premise to such an extent it feels like a moot point. It feels like the article doesn't play out the line to its logical conclusion.
Why would agents want GUIs made for humans? It's already the case that, like everyone who's good at computers, agents want a terminal and good APIs, not some ad-ridden crap.
If anything, AI is a reason why it will never be the year of the linux desktop but also it doesn't matter anymore, because if the higher-order bit of productivity is defined by AI, then my tmux+vim is as good as your Visual Studio.
I've always interpreted "Year of the Linux Desktop" as a personal journey, like Hot Girl Summer. It's not about the year that there's a watershed and suddenly everyone is rolling custom distros, it's about an individual's journey with discovering and trying Linux. Every year can be the year of the Linux desktop if you believe!
For me the Year of the Linux Desktop is every year since around 2000.
I dual booted Windows since 95, also tried Mac OSX on $job but nothing comes close to the peace of mind of using Linux.
I have lived through spotty hardware support (fixed), install editing too many files (fixed), no games (fixed) and several other problems, but even in the worst of times it is a software that respects you as a user.
LLM’s run well in a Linux VM and you can run Linux in a VM just about anywhere. I expect that we will see more and more Linux VM’s. Maybe it will be like Sqlite, ubiquitous but hidden? They don’t need a desktop. Why go through an accessibility tree when you can make http requests?
Yeahhhh…this is not really how Linux works, though.
Most of LLM world is kind of anti-linux right now because the most popular LLMs are walled off by these huge companies and hella expensive. At some point, a nerd will realize they could hack together a surprisingly ok homebrew version of what everybody else is using, and do. Then a company realizes that they can build a brand on the anarchist, grassroots vibe of the homebrew thing, and capitalize its development (software development, but also community development, which is brand development for the company). Now, it’s much later, but the open source thing is competitive, and popular for being open-source.
At one point I got interested in why Red Hat handed over tens of millions of dollars in stock to Linus leading up to their IPO, in exchange for…nothing specific. Nominally it was a gift of appreciation, but handing out random gifts is somewhat opposed to maximizing shareholder returns. It’s because Linus controls merges to the Linux kernel and doesn’t have to care about Red Hat, and the board wanted him to care at least a little bit. They were stuck between “people trust our business because it’s built on this populist OS” and “this populist OS is mostly controlled by a guy who doesn’t work for us.” It’s hard to have one without the other.
I’m glad Apple is taking accessibility seriously, and I wish accessibility worked better on Linux, but I don’t think Linux is ever going to make developers “do their homework,” because the community wouldn’t trust a Linux like that. If the author is right, it’ll happen because “AI for the People, Inc.” builds a business on it and sponsors the work.
Interesting explanation of a subject I had no knowledge of! I'm familiar with browser accessibility trees, but I've never thought about how operating systems do it themselves.
From the outside view, I still wouldn't make any bets with 100% certainty about the future of anything to do with computers.
If you grant that there is some chance that the trends of programming models' capabilities will continue for another few years, then there is some chance that software and its bottlenecks will be completely transformed. A rapidly overhauled accessibility tree for linux? A good-enough computer use model that doesn't require accessibility trees at all? A world of bespoke, personalized operating systems? All of these things (and many more) seem like outcomes with non-zero probabilities.
I personally don't find a need for "agents" to use my Desktop. If the agents need to access data, they seem to manage perfectly fine with other APIs. I'm not going to switch to macOS just so that agents can click buttons on a UI for me.
AI does not need a “desktop” at all for itself. So, what this article is talking about is AI driven user assistance on the desktop. And, for that, the limiting factor is what desktop the user wants to use.
> If you use a Mac and open the Accessibility Inspector tool that’s built into the system (you really should try it), you can see a second version of the computer, hiding inside the first one. The first version is the one you look at: windows, shadows, rounded rectangles, a little bouncing icon in the Dock from Slack announcing that you are falling behind.
Now use that Accessibility Inspector tool inside Slack (an Electron App) and you'll be welcomed to a deeply nested tree of unlabelled objects.
Codex's computer use came from OpenAI's acquisition of the Apple Shortcuts team, whose institutional knowledge allowed them to exploit all sorts of undocumented macOS APIs, not some virtuous accessibility* stack. With 99% of work happening on the web anyway, it IS fair to say that it's not the year of the Linux desktop, or any desktop, because the desktop doesn't need to exist at all.
*macos26 introduced a multitude of accessibility regressions that have real-world impact on humans with disabilities, let alone AI
It doesn't mind what Chromebooks have under the hood. They don't make the Year of the Linux Desktop closer rather the another Decade of Chrome browser.
"On Linux under Wayland" is a big part of the problem. On X11 a significant part of missing "GUI-exposed-as-api" is present.
If we concede (and I think otherwise) that we need a FOSS operating system and desktop experience to be fully on par with competitors and offer agentic-first options, I think that an open-minded developer (or one that can afford to run a fairly good LLM on local machine), presented with the problem, can see evidently that said roadblock doesn't exist: X11 can stop being a maze, or thousands of Wayland apps can be forked to make them expose an API, the FUSE filesystem kind of API.
I don't care much about agents though, I sure see as potentially useful some desktop assistant, and that is that.
Agree with OP. Not because of the accessibility API argument but because of the "small things" like Microsoft office, drivers, the sound not working out of speakers but working with headphones. These small problems have gone unfixed for years, or have become worse, and is the main reason why a non tech person won't transition to Linux.
I would like to see a non-big-corp-controlled (e.g. Open source) OS that is focused on single-user systems. (Personal /"Desktop" computers) ABI compatibilty, no sudo or permissions; "just works". Schedule software, provide a GUI, threads, memory allocation etc. But get out of the way; no complicated user system; no delicate balance of text config files scattered throughout a file system.
Currently, OSS (etc) OSes are synonymous with Linux; I don't think I will ever see eye to eye with the Linux design philosophy; too many compromises which prioritize servers, multi-user IT systems; embraces scattered state across the FS etc.
I appreciate the rec! Hah; networking is indeed one of the things I think it would be good for a GPOS to have (e.g. fits with threads, allocator etc). Also interfaces for the MB's RTC for datetimes etc... Some day?
There might be a so-called "Year of the Linux Desktop", but it'd require Microsoft either doing something so disastrous that people cannot use Windows, or pivoting away from NT.
>There are many reasons for this. Drivers. Games. Adobe. Microsoft Office. Battery life. The thing where you close the lid of a laptop and open it again later to find that it passed into the good night.
The last one is a huge problem for Windows as well. Its due to Microsoft discontinuing support for S3 sleep mode, which in turn, caused motherboard manufacturers to discontinue S3 support in the BIOS. Which means its no longer available even if you install Linux on the laptop since it requires firmware support to work. You can still find laptops that support S3 sleep if you really look hard enough. Or buy a Mac.
I don't see why AI agents need to use the GUI very much? If anything, all the major advances with AI agents have been in CLI domains that Linux is perfectly well adapted to. Besides, surely AI agents could just contribute code allowing them to use Linux, no?
My first instinct was to just not open the article based on the headline. But I thought, "what if there's a good point that I, as a Linux user, should be aware of?"
It was worse than I imagined it would be. I now deeply regret giving this article a click.
Basically, it's all about how AI can use Mac OS features.
Eh, the point is interesting, but I'm not sure it's not solvable. Beyond that, I'm quite hopeful at linux breaking out in a big way in the next couple of years via chromebooks. My theory is that we'll start seeing a hockey stick graph of ai-found/exploited windows zero days, and in response we'll see a dramatic acceleration adoption of chromebooks. Voila, YotLD.
...I wasn't expecting the argument to be that Linux interoperates poorly with AI Agents lol.
I think the author is actually on the right track at first then dismisses it with: These are "why a person did not switch to Linux last" and not "why the desktop, as an institution, will continue to belong to Apple and Microsoft". You can absolutely get to the root cause of the former and find foundational issues that explain the latter.
The thing is: it already is the year of the Linux Desktop for me. I don't care about 'OS market share' or how many people use something; I have no control over them.
I also don't care about "OS-maxxing", either--quibbling over 'Wayland', or which OS has the best window manager, arguing about 'gaming', etc.
What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.
So my desktop? It's Linux. The Year of Linux on the Desktop arrived for me years ago. And it can be that year for anyone, anytime. Today.
I love Linux and think it's better than ever to have Linux as your daily driver, especially thanks to the work of Valve with Proton, but I'm gonna be real and say "the year of the Linux Desktop is a personal journey" is a retrofit. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme came out of Slashdot in the 90s/early 00s where people were insisting that Linux was due to overtake Windows as the way an average, non-technical user interacted with a computer.
Of course, this did turn out to be true... in the form of Android, which is maybe the most monkeys-paw-curling way YotLD could possibly happen.
> What I do care about? Freedom and control. Linux gives me that.
I think a lot of this comes down to what we're looking for out of an OS. For example, it is orthogonal to what I care about most: "Provides a low friction interface between my body and arbitrary software"
Relevant: I do think about the freedom and control aspect about computing; I (personally) tie it to the software or hardware design instead of the interface. Or in some cases, the use of creative software. (DAW, CAD, document writers etc)
The object-level discussion is interesting, but I disagree with the premise to such an extent it feels like a moot point. It feels like the article doesn't play out the line to its logical conclusion.
Why would agents want GUIs made for humans? It's already the case that, like everyone who's good at computers, agents want a terminal and good APIs, not some ad-ridden crap.
If anything, AI is a reason why it will never be the year of the linux desktop but also it doesn't matter anymore, because if the higher-order bit of productivity is defined by AI, then my tmux+vim is as good as your Visual Studio.
I've always interpreted "Year of the Linux Desktop" as a personal journey, like Hot Girl Summer. It's not about the year that there's a watershed and suddenly everyone is rolling custom distros, it's about an individual's journey with discovering and trying Linux. Every year can be the year of the Linux desktop if you believe!
The year of the linux Desktop was the friends we made along the way... fixing our Linux desktop.
For me the Year of the Linux Desktop is every year since around 2000.
I dual booted Windows since 95, also tried Mac OSX on $job but nothing comes close to the peace of mind of using Linux.
I have lived through spotty hardware support (fixed), install editing too many files (fixed), no games (fixed) and several other problems, but even in the worst of times it is a software that respects you as a user.
LLM’s run well in a Linux VM and you can run Linux in a VM just about anywhere. I expect that we will see more and more Linux VM’s. Maybe it will be like Sqlite, ubiquitous but hidden? They don’t need a desktop. Why go through an accessibility tree when you can make http requests?
Yeahhhh…this is not really how Linux works, though.
Most of LLM world is kind of anti-linux right now because the most popular LLMs are walled off by these huge companies and hella expensive. At some point, a nerd will realize they could hack together a surprisingly ok homebrew version of what everybody else is using, and do. Then a company realizes that they can build a brand on the anarchist, grassroots vibe of the homebrew thing, and capitalize its development (software development, but also community development, which is brand development for the company). Now, it’s much later, but the open source thing is competitive, and popular for being open-source.
At one point I got interested in why Red Hat handed over tens of millions of dollars in stock to Linus leading up to their IPO, in exchange for…nothing specific. Nominally it was a gift of appreciation, but handing out random gifts is somewhat opposed to maximizing shareholder returns. It’s because Linus controls merges to the Linux kernel and doesn’t have to care about Red Hat, and the board wanted him to care at least a little bit. They were stuck between “people trust our business because it’s built on this populist OS” and “this populist OS is mostly controlled by a guy who doesn’t work for us.” It’s hard to have one without the other.
I’m glad Apple is taking accessibility seriously, and I wish accessibility worked better on Linux, but I don’t think Linux is ever going to make developers “do their homework,” because the community wouldn’t trust a Linux like that. If the author is right, it’ll happen because “AI for the People, Inc.” builds a business on it and sponsors the work.
Interesting explanation of a subject I had no knowledge of! I'm familiar with browser accessibility trees, but I've never thought about how operating systems do it themselves.
From the outside view, I still wouldn't make any bets with 100% certainty about the future of anything to do with computers.
If you grant that there is some chance that the trends of programming models' capabilities will continue for another few years, then there is some chance that software and its bottlenecks will be completely transformed. A rapidly overhauled accessibility tree for linux? A good-enough computer use model that doesn't require accessibility trees at all? A world of bespoke, personalized operating systems? All of these things (and many more) seem like outcomes with non-zero probabilities.
I personally don't find a need for "agents" to use my Desktop. If the agents need to access data, they seem to manage perfectly fine with other APIs. I'm not going to switch to macOS just so that agents can click buttons on a UI for me.
AI does not need a “desktop” at all for itself. So, what this article is talking about is AI driven user assistance on the desktop. And, for that, the limiting factor is what desktop the user wants to use.
"The Year of the Linux Desktop" isn't a time period, it's the friends we made along the way.
> If you use a Mac and open the Accessibility Inspector tool that’s built into the system (you really should try it), you can see a second version of the computer, hiding inside the first one. The first version is the one you look at: windows, shadows, rounded rectangles, a little bouncing icon in the Dock from Slack announcing that you are falling behind.
Now use that Accessibility Inspector tool inside Slack (an Electron App) and you'll be welcomed to a deeply nested tree of unlabelled objects.
Codex's computer use came from OpenAI's acquisition of the Apple Shortcuts team, whose institutional knowledge allowed them to exploit all sorts of undocumented macOS APIs, not some virtuous accessibility* stack. With 99% of work happening on the web anyway, it IS fair to say that it's not the year of the Linux desktop, or any desktop, because the desktop doesn't need to exist at all.
*macos26 introduced a multitude of accessibility regressions that have real-world impact on humans with disabilities, let alone AI
> because the desktop doesn't need to exist at all.
Which is a really strong argument for most people just buying chromebooks, which run linux.
It doesn't mind what Chromebooks have under the hood. They don't make the Year of the Linux Desktop closer rather the another Decade of Chrome browser.
Or just use your phone, remoted into any machine anywhere
macos26 is just one big UI regression. Ugh.. so much wasted screenspace.
"On Linux under Wayland" is a big part of the problem. On X11 a significant part of missing "GUI-exposed-as-api" is present. If we concede (and I think otherwise) that we need a FOSS operating system and desktop experience to be fully on par with competitors and offer agentic-first options, I think that an open-minded developer (or one that can afford to run a fairly good LLM on local machine), presented with the problem, can see evidently that said roadblock doesn't exist: X11 can stop being a maze, or thousands of Wayland apps can be forked to make them expose an API, the FUSE filesystem kind of API.
I don't care much about agents though, I sure see as potentially useful some desktop assistant, and that is that.
Agree with OP. Not because of the accessibility API argument but because of the "small things" like Microsoft office, drivers, the sound not working out of speakers but working with headphones. These small problems have gone unfixed for years, or have become worse, and is the main reason why a non tech person won't transition to Linux.
Since AI is so smart now, these problems will surely be fixed in no time!
I would like to see a non-big-corp-controlled (e.g. Open source) OS that is focused on single-user systems. (Personal /"Desktop" computers) ABI compatibilty, no sudo or permissions; "just works". Schedule software, provide a GUI, threads, memory allocation etc. But get out of the way; no complicated user system; no delicate balance of text config files scattered throughout a file system.
Currently, OSS (etc) OSes are synonymous with Linux; I don't think I will ever see eye to eye with the Linux design philosophy; too many compromises which prioritize servers, multi-user IT systems; embraces scattered state across the FS etc.
Sounds like TempleOS checks all those boxes. You might miss networking though.
I appreciate the rec! Hah; networking is indeed one of the things I think it would be good for a GPOS to have (e.g. fits with threads, allocator etc). Also interfaces for the MB's RTC for datetimes etc... Some day?
Pretty sure it's been the year of the Linux desktop for 30 years for me...
There might be a so-called "Year of the Linux Desktop", but it'd require Microsoft either doing something so disastrous that people cannot use Windows, or pivoting away from NT.
I wish somebody would make a Polymarket bet out of this. I'm 100% with the author on this one
I’d take the other side of that bet if i didn’t think gambling was a cancer
Good thing health insurance is so cheap where I live. I really don't mind risking a little cancer for a good bet
I'll bet you gambling isn't a cancer
Is HN read-only? All the vote buttons disappeared
I'll never read an article with a title like that.
Having read the article, I can tell you that you chose well.
>There are many reasons for this. Drivers. Games. Adobe. Microsoft Office. Battery life. The thing where you close the lid of a laptop and open it again later to find that it passed into the good night.
The last one is a huge problem for Windows as well. Its due to Microsoft discontinuing support for S3 sleep mode, which in turn, caused motherboard manufacturers to discontinue S3 support in the BIOS. Which means its no longer available even if you install Linux on the laptop since it requires firmware support to work. You can still find laptops that support S3 sleep if you really look hard enough. Or buy a Mac.
It is always the year of the linux desktop.
Eternal September 1991
I like this take too. It’s never ending as more and more install Linux.
I don't see why AI agents need to use the GUI very much? If anything, all the major advances with AI agents have been in CLI domains that Linux is perfectly well adapted to. Besides, surely AI agents could just contribute code allowing them to use Linux, no?
Because there is a world of software out there that isn't CLI-based and much of it may never be updated to expose LLM-friendly APIs.
Of course, but how many of those are really relevant for AI agents/couldn't be done through another means.
Wrong and I’ve been saying this for almost a decade now: the Year of Linux on the Desktop is not a global event. It’s a personal event.
Lower lift to add accessibility tree as a new feature to Linux desktop environments, vs de-enshittifying MS and MacOS desktops?
My first instinct was to just not open the article based on the headline. But I thought, "what if there's a good point that I, as a Linux user, should be aware of?"
It was worse than I imagined it would be. I now deeply regret giving this article a click.
Basically, it's all about how AI can use Mac OS features.
It's been the year of the Linux desktop for a while. Someone has been sleeping under a rock.
Eh, the point is interesting, but I'm not sure it's not solvable. Beyond that, I'm quite hopeful at linux breaking out in a big way in the next couple of years via chromebooks. My theory is that we'll start seeing a hockey stick graph of ai-found/exploited windows zero days, and in response we'll see a dramatic acceleration adoption of chromebooks. Voila, YotLD.
...I wasn't expecting the argument to be that Linux interoperates poorly with AI Agents lol.
I think the author is actually on the right track at first then dismisses it with: These are "why a person did not switch to Linux last" and not "why the desktop, as an institution, will continue to belong to Apple and Microsoft". You can absolutely get to the root cause of the former and find foundational issues that explain the latter.