Does anyone even use desktops anymore?
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Do you mean as opposed to using phones/tablets, or do you mean like having a tower computer and peripherals? People still use laptops and stationary computers for work, like office work and computer related hobbies and anything like it. For doomscrolling and simple games, phones are more popular though.
Weβll, I mean as in desktop PCs. Iβm assuming the βYear of the Linux desktopβ thing is a joke that itβs been that long coming that people were still using desktops when people first started saying it.
Some people include laptops in "desktop" since it's the same paradigm of the interface, especially if you hook up an external mouse and have a regular screen and keyboard. Laptops are still widely used. Some people use the term workstation. If 90% of people used linux on laptops for browsing, writing, programming, editing media, spread sheets, etc, I'd say that was the year of Linux on the Desktop, even if they don't have a Compaq with a CRT screen sitting on their desk.
Who said Wayland was going to be the death? (Excluding canonical) Everyone knew X needed to be replaced and that the transition will be slow until its not.
And systemd is not that bad these days. I do think it's more complex than it needs to be and startup is a bit slow, but that's about it.
GNOME making the huge changes inspired the refugees to build Cinnamon and injected some sense into KDE development. Now even GNOME is getting more sensible.
I saw someone giving a talk either about Wayland and they said someone told them they "don't like Wayland because it violates the Unix philosophy." (Do one thing and do it well.) The speaker said they responded by asking "What one thing does X do well?"
systemd is not that bad these days
It never was bad, in fact it was better than the alternatives even in it's beta releases.
I sure as f don't miss x, but for the fing love of God can I get some access at the shell level to my input devices? The death of Autohotkey is killing me slowly.
It's probably countered by the "year of the Linux desktop" claims. Keeps it in a limbo.
It's the first time I hear systemd or wayland were spelling the death of the linux desktop (not even gonna mention gnome, it's a choice).
There are controversies around these two, some extremely valid, some a bit over the top, but both do work adequately for the vast majority of common use cases. I'd even argue that systemd (the init process) is better as far as being user friendly. And I say "user", not "poweruser" nor "sysadmin". And wayland is an opportunity to clear some long-lasting backward stuff, and even though it is possible to find issue today, for regular (and new) users, it has no bearing on the usability of their system.
As a sysadmin I'll say systemd is far better. No contest.
It's the first time I hear systemd [...] were spelling the death of [...] linux
Where've you been? We've been expressing concern about its badly-built badly-architected metastatic creep for a decade of dwindling choice and competition as it slowly forced out dissent and clued concern.
Now it's eaten autofs, DNS, cron, NTPd, and replaced them with shitty clones, and has carefully eroded our ability to recover from this mess.
First, I said "the init process". The systemd project reinventing the wheel at every occasion is half garbage half "yeah, it's not horrible, but we're going to iron it out again for the next decades" level of horror. You won't have to convince me of that. And don't get me started on "binary" logs that sometimes takes dozen of seconds to just show up when requested. But the management of services is an overall improvement over scripts stitched together.
I'm well aware of these discussions.
But systemd management, and overall presence, is not something most people would care about. From a user perspective, the system boots, and things works (mostly). To non admin user, running a systemd system or a sysvinit system or whatever is irrelevant.
Yes. But none of that is in the way of "the Linux desktop". A more unified system with less modules and components (you know, like systemd being a solution to everything) is actually beneficial for wide spread adoption.
People hate systemd for design and philosophy but not because it keeps new people from adopting Linux.
a lot of people actually welcome wayland, systemd is the one they refuse to touch and I've seen less backlash against the Gnome/Systemd coupling than I anticipated!
Yeah, wayland good, etc etc.
Now we're at the point where wayland is becoming the only option, while there are still some things that don't work well, like showing up a modal, opening a context menu in a window that wasn't in focus, copy/pasting from non foreground UI applications⦠All this under KDE, which is somewhat large in terms of good DE.
I understand the argument that if we have to move, we have to start the move at some point. But I'm not sure we have to move. People keep telling X is a messy dangerous unmaintained eldritch horror sucking on your souls every seconds, but as a user, if moving back to X fixes all the tiny weird issues and shows no obvious downside, it's hard to justify the switch.
I like systemd
Systemdeez nuts
Most people do
There are places I wouldn't use it but for most systems it makes things simpler
OOL: whatβs the beef with systemd?
I'll just copy my comment from the other day.
Some people think it handles too many low-level systems. It's a valid concern because if systemd itself were to become compromised (like Xz Utils was) or a serious bug was introduced, all of the userland processes would be affected. People who are stuck in the 90s and think that the Unix philosophy is still relevant will also point out that it's a needlessly complex software suite and we should all go back to writing initscripts in bash. The truth is, it's complex because it needs to solve a complex problem.
Red Hat, the owner of systemd, has also had its fair share of controversies. It's a company that many distrust.
Ultimately, those whose opinion mattered the most decided that systemd's benefits outweigh the risks and drawbacks. Debian held a vote to determine the project's future regarding init systems. Arch Linux replaced initscripts because systemd was simply better, and replicating and maintaining its features (like starting services once their dependencies are running) with initscripts would've been unjustifiably complicated.
it does too many things, thus going against the unix philosopy of "do one thing and do it well"
Systemd does one thing, it manages services, and does so reliably, without messing around with spagettified shell scripts, with a fuckload of options, and all of that easily is configurable by dropping in files without editing stuff that arrived from the package manager. Seems pretti "do one (complex) thing and do it well"
If you add other things built around it, it can do more. For example, if you install systemd-nspawn it can start and stop containers like it starts and stops services.
Other things that you think of as systemd are entirely separate things (like systemd-networkd) that are just built around systemd. You don't have to use them if you don't like.
On the other hand, you know what does not follow the Unix philosophy? The Xserver, which manages screens, graphic acceleration, input devices, printers, remoting, etc. And it doesn't even do it well
I need systemd-run to start a process in my startup scripts (that are a systemd oneshot service) so that the process won't get killed when the startup scripts have run (subshells, nohup, ... still keep the same systemd cgroup so get killed with the tree).
I need journalctl to get output from services, so basically every system and user process I didn't explicitly start in a console. I don't even know how to get info from systemd stuff in any other way, as they don't have alternate logging facilities to my knowledge.
Systemd also ate my fstab at some point and translates mounts into services, but I haven't really looked into that.
I think there were a few more components packed into this systemd core. Without the init system/servixe manager, logging, ... you can't really use systemd stuff including parts of that core.
Past that, things like networkd, resolved, ... are very modular in my experience.
I can imagine running resolved under a different init system, and I have migrated both to and from resolved on systemd systems. They do still change old paradigms, resolved replaces a file not a service for example, but they do provide adequate translation layers and backwards compatibility in most cases (Though the mounts for example has lead to me getting 5 "run daemon-reload" info messages on every execution of mount before). An issue here might be when something only supports the new systemd interface not the old stuff, say a program directly calling resolved instead of looking at resolv.conf. But I haven't seen that, and most of those interfaces seem decent enough to implement into systemd-alternatives.
Maybe someome who actually tried cherrypicking some systemd stuff into their system can provide some more experience?
Fstabs gets converted into temporary unit files every time systems reloads config files (reboot or daemon-reload) so you can just keep using it like you always did. Actually it's the systemd suggested way to manage mountpoints unless you need something advanced that fstabs can't do.
My problem is 1) how do I revert to dedicated mount, and 2) mainly that I want to edit fstab, and mount without having to reload systemd. Dedicated mount doesn't need a reload, it simply pulls config from fstab at time of call.
I also don't see why you would ever want to reload service files due to editing fstab, it seems dumb in both directions. Those two systems should just be decoupled.
Fstab is still there untouched, it's the temporary units files that get replaced at reload.
The mount program works as normally, if you edit fstab and then mount -a it will work as expected, it will just warn you that systemd is not aware of the change. It will reload it anyway at the next boot.
daemon-reload is not daemon-restart, it just makes systemd re-read the configuration to make it aware of the changes, but the services don't get restarted. Some services (e.g. nginx) can re-read their confuration without restarting, those services are also made aware of the changes when reloading and can be reloaded individually.
You can edit any systemd units using systemctl edit so you don't need to reload (fstab is not a systemd unit)
You probably mean daemon-reexec, which also does not restart services (it better not, would be really problematic if it did).
I do mean reload, which has uses, otherwise it wouldn't even exist and services would simply always reload: You may not want to reload yet, but keep a working state of service definitions in systemd while editing things, similar to typing away in a code file in production without saving yet.
I don't see why I would need to "save" all my service definitions to get a usable (non-spammy) mount back, especially when my mount isn't even part of systemd. How does the message even get sent by mount when mount is not aware of systemd?
PS: systemd can replace my text editor over my cold dead body
It doesn't replace the editor, it creates a stream and opens it in your default text editor. When you write out, it saves the stream to an appropriate drop in file
See also: the Linux Kernel
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I don't quite get why massive Gnome changes would imply a death of Desktop Linux. There are so many great alternatives to it. It's been many years that Gnome has been considered bad by many, and that many have used alternatives. I just think it's positive that Gnome continue to get worse, because like that more distros may default to better alternatives to begin with.
I even liked Unity (so long as the icons weren't on the side).
I remember the reaction at the time and so many people hated it. I didn't dislike it, I was getting a bit into it.
Hot take: the more Gnome shoots itself in the foot, the better for Linux.
I never understood it either. I was a user of Gnome until Gnome 3 showed up and I decided to nope out of there. It was a simple process of trying few different DE's and I have settled on KDE and Cinnamon for when I want that old timey Gnome feeling.
It wasn't hard to switch at all.
Tried KDE in the early days, it was all over the place. Switched to gnome when it was baked. I had been gnome for years. Every update broke and replaced plugins to make it work like I wanted. I've had Windows layout since'95, I have to go back and forth a lot, so muscle memory is key.
After fucking with gnome for the 90th time. I tried KDE again, it was just layed out like I wanted. No plugins, no fucking with it. The worst thing I have to do is set dolphin not to open on single click.
I see people here going well if you don't take it as it comes you're going to have a bad time. That's pretty much the least Linux comment I've ever read. That's OSX in a nutshell.
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I hated Gnome 3 when it came out, but it got better over the years. If you want to use it as a traditional KDE-style DE, you're going to fight it and have a bad time. If you use it as intended, and that works for you, it's good.
Interesting. I think they might have been my problem, I was just trying to use it tradicionally. I wonder how it's different nowadays.
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Gnome is awesome
It was somewhat of a special situation back when Gnome 3 dropped. Ubuntu & flavours of it was still regarded as the go-to distro by many and KDE still had a somewhat damaged reputation due to KDE 3 (even though 4 was already available, however that also had some issues). Many environments we know today didn't exist yet, so lots of people were rather distraught when Gnome broke with a lot of concepts and dropped what arguably was a horrendous DE.
Many of our current DEs are Gnome 2 or 3 forks (MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and back then also Unity), made exactly because of this whole debacle.
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All is better than the shit MS is pulling, from mass surveilance on their "business" apps to making an OS with ads included that you have to spent hours to make it useful.
While Linux has many flavors that just works for 80% of the people that dont have super specific use cases.
It's impressive how much hatred linux gets, by people who generally try to say it's insignificant and unnoticeable.
But eh, better them say that it's going to die, than with Windows where everyone agreed to say that it was dead after 7 and stopped having any expectations.
It's even more impressive how much hate Linux gets from people that love it
We call that "Star Wars Syndrome."
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