I’ll go ahead and say it: there’s a lot going wrong in the world today. Understatement? Maybe. That being said, while I’m not going to take an optimistic stance on where the world is going in general, I wanted to share some good news about a topic that I am specially interested in. In it, things are going so well it seems impossible.

I’m speaking of Linux, specifically Linux on the desktop. It’s long been a running joke that this year is the year when Linux on the desktop takes off. In this post, I will explore my “serious” argument as to why I think this year will be different, and a confluence of various things are putting some serious wind on the wings of Linux.

Me, personally, I’ve been a Linux user for a long time. My first exposure was through my father, who would distro-hop compulsively, always trying new distributions as they came out on distrowatch.com. My first distribution was Puppy Linux, a distribution specializing in old PCs like the ones I had.

That being said, I’m not a zealot. Professionally, I’ve used Windows, paradoxically for security reasons, as the place I was working at deemed Windows to be more secure. I’m also used to playing multiplayer games weekly with my friends. Installing Linux has always come with a price: being that person who ruins everything by not being able to play.

Because of this, I couldn’t shift my best PCs over to Linux. Fast-forward to 2026, and the situation is completely different. Silicon Valley in general, but Microsoft in particular, for reasons that are far too obvious to write explicitly, don’t really seem to be all that interested in making an operating system at all. There’s a bug in the TPM code that allows for a BitLocker bypass, ads in the start menu, and it comes with OneDrive, almost mandatory at this stage, which deletes your files half the time. They themselves say that in the future, you won’t need an operating system, and can instead use an agentic OS.

Of course, this is stupid. The operating system is required for computers to interface with the hardware, and it is required for users to interface with the device. And this is where Linux comes in: steadily improving in the background at basically the same speed that Windows deteriorates at. Hell, the other day I plugged in a Bluetooth dongle to my desktop, and it got picked up immediately. Even more shocking was the fact that I was able to connect a Bluetooth controller and play a game on Steam.

Oh yes, games work on Linux now. Most of the time is fiddly, but compared to Windows, it’s heaven. Is it as good as Windows of the past? Not yet. Is it as good as Windows of today? Abso-fucking-lutely!

And so for me, it is the year of Linux of the desktop. I know Macs exist, and I don’t doubt people will migrate there too, but it suffers from the same fate as Windows in many ways. IDK, not for me.