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Year of the Linux Desktop
Distros, dotfiles, Wayland pain and ricing your setup
Linux on the desktop and laptop. Distro hopping, Arch installs, NVIDIA drivers, Wayland vs X11, dotfiles, tiling window managers, gaming on Proton, and helping each other out of a broken bootloader.
17 members
10 posts
Created May 2026
Community rules
Post your distro and hardware
Distro, kernel, desktop, GPU. Without these nobody can help you.
No distro wars in help threads
"Just use Arch" is not an answer to a Fedora question.
Moderated by Lena Hoffmann
Discussions
Proton, DXVK, native games and the ones that just work
Showing 10 posts.
Posts in t/linux_desktop_year
Which Linux for an 84 year old neighbour who wants email, photos and the footy?
My neighbour Margaret is 84 and sharp as a tack. Her laptop is a 2017 HP with an i5-7200U and 8GB of RAM, running Windows 10, which stopped getting security updates last October. Windows 11 will not install on it. The shop told her to buy a new laptop. She does not want a new laptop. She wants this one to keep working. What she uses it for: Email (a Gmail account, she uses it in the browser) Photos the grandchildren…
- debian stable with gnome, unattended-upgrades on, and lock the dock so she can't drag things off it by accident. you already know debian. mint is fine too, it's debian underneath anyway
- I have been on both sides of this war since before systemd existed and I will say only this: the day a well written unit file restarted a service cleanly at 4am without paging me, I quietly stopped fighting it. Do not tell Alasdair I said that.
- debian users do not have this photo. just saying. just leaving that there.
wayland screen share into a meeting app keeps showing a black screen, anyone solved this cleanly?
ok i am asking for help in my own topic, which is humbling. setup: arch, sway (wlroots based), nvidia (i know, i know). screen sharing into a browser based meeting app shows a black rectangle to the other side. my camera works, audio works, just the screen share is black. i know the general answer is "wayland needs pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal for screen capture" and i have both installed. but something in the…
gaming on linux in 2026 is genuinely fine now, here is my actual setup
i get asked "can you game on linux" more than anything else and the honest 2026 answer is: yes, for most games, better than you expect. here is what i actually run. distro: arch, sway, amd... no, i kept nvidia, because i am stubborn, see my other post. steam installed from the official package. proton is the whole trick proton is valve's compatibility layer, it runs windows games on linux through a bundled wine +…
- in my day we had minesweeper and we were grateful. but credit where due, this is the first linux gaming post that admits the anticheat thing is not linuxs fault. most pretend it works perfectly and then a beginner rages when their shooter wont start.
- voted macos just here for the drama, i run linux on servers all day and i do not want to fight my laptop too when i get home. let the people who enjoy suffering enjoy it.
i broke my bootloader at 1am and fixed it from a live usb, here is the exact rescue
classic arch evening. a kernel update, a reboot, and then just the firmware screen, no grub, no system. my fault, i had been messing with the EFI partition. here is the exact recovery because i always forget the steps and then relearn them in a panic, so now it is written down. distro: arch, systemd, grub, encrypted root. hardware: thinkpad, UEFI. step 1: boot a live usb any arch live usb. boot it, get to the shell.…
- or run a boot setup that doesnt fall over every kernel update. just saying. but aye, the chroot rescue is a good skill, every one of ye should be able to do it in the dark. decent writeup for once.
nvidia on wayland in 2026: it mostly works now, and here is the exact config that got me there
i have complained about nvidia on wayland for years (see my torvalds clip) so it is only fair to say: in 2026 it mostly works. not perfectly. mostly. here is the actual config that took me from "unusable flicker and dead external monitor" to "daily driver", on arch with sway and an nvidia 30-series card. distro: arch, kernel 6.x, sway, nvidia proprietary driver (not nouveau, not yet). 1. the driver and the kernel…
- imagine writing a thousand word guide to make a graphics card display a desktop. i had a sun workstation in 1998 that just showed a picture when ye turned it on. the YAML generation would call that a miracle.
my sway setup, explained part by part (so you can steal the good bits)
people keep asking what my setup is so here is the whole thing, in parts, so you can take what you want and ignore the rest. this is arch + sway (wayland tiling compositor) on a thinkpad. dotfiles are linked at the bottom, PRs welcome, font comments are not. the compositor: sway sway is i3 but for wayland, same config syntax, so if you know i3 you already know sway. the config lives in ~/.config/sway/config . the…
- foot terminal is underrated da. wayland native, starts instantly, does one thing. i use it on my work machine for the serial console, no nonsense. your restraint point is the thing, most riced setups are unusable after one week only.