I know that phrase is the most beaten dead horse around at this point but the year of the Linux desktop is going to be different depending on what your requirements are.

If you just need to browse the web, it's been there for over a decade. Same for most dev work.

For gaming, it's already there for most titles. Pretty much everything I try works now unless it has anticheat. It's been in a pretty good state for 2 or 3 years now at least.

For media creation and specialized software, it's not there yet. The big stuff like adobe will probably never get ported and the free alternatives vary wildly in quality. Blender is awesome. GIMP is not. There's also issues like lacking color management and iffy HDR support.

I do wonder about that, Gen Z and Alpha are less tech savvy than millennials, so there's non zero odds that it doesn't work out because Linux isn't easily accessible in the tablet/phone space yet.

And no android doesn't count

I think we need rock-solid Wayland before we can expect TYLD. So I'm feeling 2026 minimum, then add a couple for some padding; so 2028 realistically. Think of how far we've come in 5 years, then imagine 5 years more.

If Nvidia's consumer GPU market share dropped a bit too, that'd help.

But which distro though?

yes he did and if it doesn't happen we can shame him for all eternety, but i'm right with you there buddy: 2024 lets gooooooo!