Part 2: https://www.lttlabs.com/blog/2025/06/30/is-2025-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-part-ii
LTT Fourm discussion as well https://linustechtips.com/topic/1616595-lttlabs-article-is-2025-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-part-i-ii/
They approached this from a noob perspective and the benchmarks seemed pretty rough. The blog has an overall positive tone on linux which is nice even though it got murdered in performance.
I’d like to see a follow up with optimizations, get some of the linux community involved to help setup an optimized linux test bench to go toe to toe with their “golden image” windows 11 benchmark setup.
They benchmarked a few distros against each other and it was very samey which I expected, the real difference is between the drivers/kernel and desktop environment since most distros come very light in terms of installed software.
Go away, LTT is infamous for sloppy testing.
And dropping things, expensive things. And selling items that are on loan to them, after misusing said item on loan. And not knowing basic server maintenance like file scrubbing. And letting the staff trash talk other creators, and then doubling down when called out for it. And…
E: and ignoring terminal warnings, and…
Ubuntu 24.04? If you were to try to pick the worst, still supported distro for gaming that might be it. Maybe RHEL could be worse? If they chose it for stability like they claim they did they should have also used an LTSC version of Windows and the Pro drivers to compare to.
I just saw the part 2 has a distro comparison at the end. Thry claim different distros don’t matter, which is not what I’ve read in other publications. Anyone have an idea what might be going on here?
Also, where are the 1% lows?
The writing of this article was not the quality I would have preferred. The infotainment angle really makes it feel like their data can’t be trusted. With that being said,
“as long as you have a distro with an up to date kernel and the latest Mesa drivers your out of box experience won’t vary much at all.”
This is actually a greater challenge for the average user than they think it is. Its also why the universal Blue project exists. Using the OCI container model for the OS, they can easily upgrade and customize the kernel, drivers, and even upgrade to entire new versions of Fedora without batting an eye. This is the main reason I’ve switched over to Bazzite. The pain of updating is gone. Also, most images have the “-nvidia” version which alleviates the headaches of maintaining your Nvidia drivers.
Rant: If anything, this article shows that the nuances of the FOSS ecosystem is lost on them because they’re afraid of strange elitists imaginary neck beard criticizing them? I understand this is for comedic effect but it feels sophomoric and hacky; like they’ve missed the point. I would ask them to follow Jorge Castro a bit and understand the work he’s doing is specifically to make Linux for everyone else.
TBH they will be the last publication to come around to it. As Microsoft leaves us all no real choice in the matter, the future of the PC hobbyist is Linux, weather they like it or not so they need to stop complaining and start contributing.
::insert “money please” meme::
