Happy new year of the Linux Desktop!

I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.
- This won't be the year of the Wayland desktop for me unless I can afford to replace my Nvidia card this year. I'll never buy one again, but I've still gotta suffer with the one I have a bit longer.
  
  I'd suggest you check out NVK.
  
  NVK is looking to be a viable replacement for general desktop computing in a few months, so long as you don't need NVENC and any of the other stuff.
  
  By the time you're ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They've already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don't know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.
  Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.
  I'm not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I've been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it's definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.
- As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it's not a great experience with legacy apps. You can't completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
  
  Which apps? I've discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.
  
  But isn't that still on par with xorg where you can't have any fractional scaling?
  
  *every application using xWayland looks like crap.
  Native Wayland apps work great with fractional scaling.
- As someone who dabbles in Linux but is ultimately a regular people, what’s the advantage of this?
  
  A unified, bug-free, performant and featureful display stack to ensure people can use things like Variable refresh rate, which, iirc, is an impossibility on X11.
- This is what wayland said every year lol.
  
  KDE 6 will have Wayland by default, on track to release Feb 2024.
  
  Source?
  We have been hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop” for 20 years I think and Linux has less than 5% share.
  In contrast, I do not remember hearing “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” until recently. I have been hearing “Wayland is the future” forever but it has been correct the whole time.
  By the time we enter 2025, I am not sure there will be a major desktop environment that does not support Wayland and many distros and DEs will be Wayland by default or even Wayland only. That is already happening. Valve may have ditched X by then and it feels like that is where most new Linux users are going to come from. It seems quite unlikely that Wayland market share on the Linux Desktop will be less than 75%.
  I am not saying this is “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” but I would feel foolish publicly betting against it.
  
  nobody would say that one year ago far as my memory goes, and it’s reasonable thing to say now. Personally I expected some break-throughs that have happened in 2023 to take much longer.
- I don't understand this fetish. Every day I read about problems people have with Wayland, while I've been using X for the past 15 years without any issues.
  
  Wayland is better at segmenting each app. On X any app could potentially see/record what happen on the entire screen while on Wayland that requires you do manually grant the rights. Similar to how macOS is requesting you to give each app the possibility to record your screen or not.
  
  I have been using X since 1992 with lots of issues. I do not understand the fetish with X11 and why people cling to it so tightly.

No no, this year for real! Because (highly technical reason that doesn't affect most users).
For real though, how Microsoft plays this year could be interesting considering the lukewarm reception to Win11 and the impending ewaste pile of Win10.
- Especially if Win12 is cloud-based, like the rumors say, I could see a potential influx of Linux users
- Not sure this is the year but my “highly technical reason” is that enough gamers switch.
  
  Why this year and not the last one or the one before that?
- Microsoft plays just like it has always played - with OEM contracts and being the default OS choice. Linux remains niche as long as Microsoft has this, unless they decide to roll out a mainstream distro themselves.
  
  Sure, but I'm getting the feeling there's a bit of dissent in Windows users, with many vowing never to use Windows 11. If MS keep making user hostile or even just user neutral decisions and Linux starts gaining a reputation of being easy to install, we could see people trying Linux rather than upgrading to Win 11.
  Of course, I doubt MS is going to let that happen. They're either going to walk back some of the egregious privacy violations or do a Google and prevent you from installing alternatives.

The Linux desktop is forever, one year cannot contain it.
- Indeed! I'm not planning to go back to Winblows unless I'm being paid for it.

Maybe we'll climb to 4% marketshare!

This is for real the Linux desktop year for me, went through the switch just before the new year. Had to reinstall a couple times but no big deal, and I get to learn as well.
Not sure if out-of-the-box distros are now that user friendly yet or not, but I remember getting Ubuntu running several years ago was frustrating (no sound, bad sound quality etc) and now running EOS was pretty smooth. Pretty sure something like Mint will be user friendly enough for the general population.

It will be a pleasure, like every other year of the Linux Desktop(TM) for more than 20 years now! :-)

Year of the chromeOS desktop maybe, may faith is low
- People still use ChromeOS? I just slap Linux on my chromebooks. Cheap new hardware.
  
  I actually really like Chrome OS myself. For the people around me who are less tech literate, Chrome OS is actually great. It's quite easy to support. It's fast, and it's got a really good ecosystem now thanks to all the integrations.
  
  Which distros do you like best on them?
- I have seen stats that both Linux and ChromeOS have around 3.5% market share.
  If ChromeOS continues to converge with proper desktop Linux, I consider it a distro which makes 10%+ possible this year.
  The wild card for me is Linux gaming. It may not grow fast but it totally could.
  Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?
  I don’t really expect us to hit it but, for the first time, I feel like it is possible.
  
  Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?
  Imo it's more of a list of things that need to happen, like some mainstream games, apps and devices getting 1st-party Linux support. I suspect this to start happening around the 20% mark, but ofc that's just a guess.

Here's to another year of the Linux Desktop! (been ~15 years for me) 🎉
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- What is the purpose of these copyright lines on comments?
  
  Think AI training. I might write a blurb somewhere that I can link to someday, but that's the gist of it.
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I just did an OS reinstall for the first time in about 4 years. Moving from Manjaro back to Arch. Happy New Year!

Have you guys fixed your graphics stack to keep up with current High-DPI and HDR displays yet? No? LOL happy new year of the eyesore desktop to you too
- What are you even going on about? Proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers updates are released at basically the same time as the windows version, and amd has always worked flawlessly. I have 2 2k 144hz monitors with HDR and both work and look just as good on Linux as on Windows.
  The only issues with high dpi monitors is that some apps don't both detecting the monitor dpi and need to be adjusted manually... but there are very few that that is still an issue for, and windows has the same problem because it's an app problem not an OS problem
  
  Some apps? "Very few" apps? Buddy, you either aren't running much software at all or are delusional. Entire Desktop Environments to this day have ass fractional scaling that can't render things correctly without eating up resources and making them look horribly blurry. Fonts look terrible and have bad kerning even with all anti-aliasing settings correctly set. Even colors are dull across the board by default. Not to mention there will always be random glitches and your graphics card fan will always be on full power unless you turn it off because of shit throttling even with official Nvidia drivers.
  Just try using browsers and file managers between Linux distros and Windows on default settings on medium-tier, 5-year-old machines side-by-side, the difference will be starkly visible - from responsiveness and animations to general look quality.