*asterisk

This will be the year of the Linux desktop

This is a phrase that all of us that have used Linux for a while have read pretty much every year, one day I guess it will happen, but is it ready yet ?

So how is the Linux Desktop in 2022 and where is it heading ?

A more standard and less fragmented experience (mostly)

Probably the most common criticism regarding mass adoption of Linux on the desktop is fragmentation, why are so many distros to chose, Desktop enviornments ? Package Managers ? Do I want a rolling release, one that offers long time support, something in between ? Can't these people just decide on a standard already ?

Short ansewer is no, off course not, the beauty of Linux and open source in general is that anyone can pick up a project and change it according to their own view, this offcourse does not mean that having 1000000 distros is a good thing, especially when in some cases the only thing that changes is the default look.

For beginners and people that don't want massive headaches or are using Linux on a production machine, the number of distros really does not matter, the recommendation is the same, go with something that has a good community and team behind it, distros like, Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu are mostly safe and solid choices. A nice mix of adoption of new features without risking too much.

Looking at these distros we can see some trends however, the first is that package management is changing, Ubuntu is pushing snaps and all others are pushing or at least playing along well with flatpaks, and although there is a lot of criticism and there are definitely downsides compared to traditional package management, the upsides are too big to ignore, having a package including all it's needed dependencies that can be used in virtually any distro, running in a sandboxed environment, sort of, installable with one click and a massive software library available is something we used to dream about some years ago, there is room for improvement and obviously there will always be distros that will not follow this route, but I see them being the “default” in a few years.

Considering that flatpaks or snaps or appimages or something similar became the default one other trend will probably follow suit, and we can see that already in Fedora and OpenSUSE, for example, immutable distros, this is already standard in Android, and will probably will be much more common in the Linux Desktop, this will diminish greatly the probability of catastrophic failure and improve security.

So to sum things up I see most mainstream distros turning immutable and relying on flatpaks or snaps for most software management, but not all will go along with this and off course being Linux open source many will still use a more traditional approach, after all tinkerers are a big demographic in the Linux space