r/linux • • 14h ago

Discussion What do you think was the biggest turning point in Linux desktop history?

Have you ever stopped to think about how far Linux has come as a desktop OS? What do you think was the biggest turning point in its evolution?

Was it Ubuntu making Linux more accessible to ordinary users? The introduction of KDE and GNOME? The shift to Wayland? Or perhaps Proton finally making Linux a serious option for gaming?

Over the years, it's become harder for me to pinpoint a real turning point. I've been using Linux for so long that it's second nature to me now. I can pick pretty much any distro, install it, and if something doesn't work, I just fix it and move on. It's all part of everyday life at this point.

And yet, things could have gone differently, and we might all be sitting here using that well-known, dominant OS instead.

I'm interested in your personal opinions and experiences, not just technical milestones. It could be something that made Linux easier to install, improved the overall desktop experience, brought more applications, or convinced you to switch from Windows.

For a quick refresher - a few moments in Linux history (spoilers)

  • 1993–1996: X11 and early graphical desktop environments
  • 1998: KDE 1.0 — an integrated, user-friendly desktop
  • 1999: GNOME — another major desktop environment
  • Late 1990s–early 2000s: Better installers and automatic hardware configuration, especially in distributions such as Mandrake and SUSE
  • 2004: Ubuntu — regular releases, Live CDs and a stronger focus on desktop usability
  • 2006–2008: Compiz and desktop compositing effects
  • 2006 onward: Linux Mint and its focus on a familiar, practical desktop experience
  • 2011: GNOME 3 and Unity — a major desktop paradigm shift that also encouraged alternatives such as Cinnamon and MATE
  • 2010s–2020s: The gradual transition from X11 to Wayland, alongside improvements in desktop audio with PulseAudio and PipeWire
  • 2018 onward: Proton and Steam Play, making Windows games increasingly playable on Linux
  • 2020s: Improvements in Wayland, fractional scaling, HDR, VRR and modern desktop environments such as KDE Plasma 6
74 Upvotes

112 comments sorted by

227

u/SPEZ_IS_A_JABRONI 14h ago

Valve's investment in Proton

36

u/enomad51 13h ago

Yeah, Linux had learned to walk pretty steadily by then, but once Proton came along, it started running. :)

6

u/wyn10 7h ago

When it comes to Proton I'd also mention the highly motivated programmer who wanted to play Nier on Linux.

3

u/JockstrapCummies 6h ago

That was DXVK wasn't it.

Guy was so frustrated with WineD3D performance that he went on to write Ending D[X]VK for NieR Automata himself.

66

u/AiwendilH 14h ago edited 14h ago

IBM's 1 billion investment announcement around 1999. Overnight linux became mainstream and not just some "underground" system for freaks only used by strange, unknown companies like google that had those strange ideas to index the whole net. Suddenly management went to IT departments to tell them they have to use linux only the learn that their print and file-servers were already running linux for some years by now...

Edit: And of course everything that followed from this...thinkpad support, sco lawsuits and ibm and novel defending linux, proper USB support if I remember correctly...a lot happened around that time still relevant for the desktop nowadays.

1

u/SOULFLY98 1h ago

IBM's 1 billion investment announcement around 1999

Not to mention Captain Benjamin Sisko himself advertising IBM's commitment to Linux.

1

u/AiwendilH 1h ago edited 1h ago

haha..I forgot that one, there was also the one with the stolen servers and the one with the kid.

Edit: Watching those spots nowadays kind of gets across how crazy the IBM investment announcement back then really was. You had IT specialists who had be aware an using linux for a few years already and the internet that was mostly build up with linux servers...but outside of those nobody even heard of linux or even just had a clue what a server was or what happened after you "dialed-in" with AOL. And suddenly you have news and TV reporting about the announcement of IBM to invest 1 billion dollar in something nobody ever heard of...

36

u/ProjectSnowman 14h ago

Ubuntu was when I really started using Linux in earnest. It was a (mostly) complete and stable operating system right off the CD.

6

u/BatemansChainsaw 6h ago

I remember the Slackware 96! release and putting that on my sister's computer when she asked for something that didn't crash all the time (Windows). She held onto that system for ages and it never gave her a hassle.

24

u/mtx0 14h ago

microsoft installing spyware on windows was a turning point for a lot of people myself included

26

u/mzalewski 12h ago

Ubuntu.

And iPhone. Well, not iPhone specifically, but what followed. Killing of Flash and Java plugins in browsers, and huge move of everything to cloud, primarily with web-based interface. Suddenly all OSes are basically a shell to run web browser, and for a large number of use-cases, Linux works just as well as Windows or whatever.

48

u/6gv5 14h ago

Shocking that it's not mentioned: WINE, the thing that started it all, in 1993 nonetheless. Took 15 years to reach v1.0. A masterpiece of skills and patience that paid.

This is what made migration possible: every Linux based gaming subsystem of today is based on it. When it happened, suddenly more and more Windows software could run on Linux natively at the same speed, professional software included.

https://www.winehq.org/

16

u/Tsuki4735 13h ago

I don't know if I'd call Wine the turning point tbh, running regular Windows apps via Wine is still not particularly common.

In my mind, Wine was a key building block/foundational piece for gaming, but not a "turning point".

The "turning point" big advancements that stand out in my mind are:

  • the advent of web apps, which made lots of "desktop" software multiplatform, such as GDocs, Figma, Slack, etc. As much as I dislike Electron, it is an important part of this too
  • The release of DXVK, VKD3D, other libraries that turned Linux gaming from a curiosity into an actual viable alternative

And most important:

  • Steam Deck, because Linux shipped in an actual mass-market consumer device that clearly proved that Linux was viable for everyday people.

1

u/NeverMindToday 2h ago

That's a good point I'd forgotten - yup Electron ushering a new wave of cross platform apps really helped.

60

u/DAS_AMAN 14h ago

Definitely advent of gaming on Linux

17

u/WasabiVegetable9445 14h ago

Ubuntu was the thing that finally made me stop dual booting back in '06 or so. Not because it was perfect, but it was the first time I didn't need to spend a weekend configuring Xorg just to get a usable screen resolution. That lowered bar mattered more than any DE or compositing eye candy. Proton's huge now but without that earlier accessibility push most people would have never stuck around long enough to see it.

2

u/DAS_AMAN 14h ago

I understand that but everyone "games" to some capacity at some point on their personal computer.. without proton a common hobby would be locked out

-6

u/cipherjones 14h ago

I'm not going to lie I've been reading about how much better gaming is in Linux. I've even had people say it's as good as Windows.

Then I did a full install of Fedora 44 KDE plasma.

I kind of wanted to reach through my monitor and shake those people. It's like I'm glad it's come such a long way, but it's just not even close to ready yet.

Hopefully the Advent of AI will bridge the gap.

7

u/Lisanicolas365 13h ago

i guess it depends on the game. for me, every game has worked immediately without exceptions

0

u/triplenested 12h ago edited 12h ago

It took a casual like me years to realize with AI's suggestion that on Steam an old version of Football Manager wasn't hanging on startup, it was fully running but the window compositor wasn't compatible and I had to manually set the resolution in advanced options. This was on Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora, so I assumed it was just not workable without getting into the weeds. The whole time I would boot Windows on a different drive to get around it.

4

u/Flashy_Worry7792 13h ago

What issues did you have? Only issue I’ve had so far is the dx12 performance drop due to nvidia drivers.

0

u/cipherjones 11h ago

As soon as I found a compatible game, it worked, but the textures didn't load on the characters or NPCs.

Once I found I needed proton for absolutely anything, I was quite discouraged.

1

u/Scientist_ShadySide 12h ago

Sorry you had the experience. I can play every Steam game on Kubuntu with an Nvidia card. Hope you get a chance to try again!

13

u/BertMacklenF8I 13h ago

Around 2000, when he was still working at Transmeta, he met Steve Jobs. Jobs invited him to Apple’s Cupertino campus and tried to hire him. “Unix for the biggest user base: that was the pitch,” says Torvalds. The condition: He’d have to drop Linux development. “He wanted me to work at Apple doing non-Linux things,” he said. That was a non-starter for Torvalds. Besides, he hated Mac OS’s Mach kernel.

“I said no,” Torvalds remembers.

12

u/NeverMindToday 13h ago

I'd vote for Ubuntu. Before Ubuntu the desktop felt like a stack of random things you put together - it was workable, but nothing felt very integrated. Even Mandrake still felt a bit like that. The first versions of Ubuntu started feeling like "the desktop" was a combined package, and the start of a new phase for Linux. It also caused other distos to start taking a similar integrated approach vs the early days where it was about freedom to compose your own desktop together - realistically only a subset of people want to do that.

Ubuntu also flooded the world with CDs, and was the first time I noticed a completely new cohort of less technical people checking out Linux.

1

u/enomad51 5h ago

I remember the pre-Ubuntu days, when getting a Linux desktop working often meant putting all the pieces together yourself.

18

u/orev 13h ago

The biggest turning point was the web, specifically when it became viable as a way to build applications. Before that, most apps were only written for Windows, and I don't see anything significantly different on Linux today that would have made the difference. Maybe WINE would have gotten more attention and be much further along.

8

u/kenlubin 13h ago

Knoppix made it suddenly very easy to install Linux (for me at that time).

2

u/enomad51 13h ago

Oh yes, Knoppix really changed the way people thought about Linux. You no longer had to install it on your hard drive to run a full desktop system on your PC.

8

u/Cagliari77 11h ago

Improvements in hardware support.

I remember my first Linux install. It must have been late 90s. I couldn't get anything work on my 486 PC. My printer, my scanner, 33.6kbps dial-up modem, my video card and sound card... Drivers were simply not there or they were not working properly most of the time.

This continued many years, albeit with improvements. More things started to work as years passed by but there were still many hiccups here and there on the driver and hardware support front.

But I'm amazed how hardware support and drivers improved drastically in the last 10-15 years.

I thing this was a big turning point.

•

u/SpudUULike 11m ago

Setting Modeline by hand, and luckily, and speedily turning off if the monitor whistles. Glad those days are gone.

6

u/cyberd_e 14h ago

it's because of the Mr Robot series :))

1

u/enomad51 14h ago

Good point :)

1

u/KeesterFeester 12h ago

Man I love that series. Watched it 3 times lol.

7

u/Cautious_Boat_999 14h ago

I think a lot of us tried it early on. For me it was around 2003. And it pretty much sucked. I gave up, tolerated Windows a couple more years, and moved to Mac. But somewhere along the way, and I can’t put my finger on it now, I tried again and it was a totally different experience. Maybe 5 years ago? I think the difference was just the aggregate of all the improvements, especially the UI updates with KDE and Gnome.

6

u/shadedmagus 14h ago

I've been trying Linux since Mandrake Linux on a K6-III.

2023 was the year I started using it full-time. The triggers? Windows games running and audio stack stability.

These were my holdout use cases for over 20 years, but now I feel like I've found my forever home.

3

u/Cautious_Boat_999 13h ago

I’m not a big games person, but I need to go back and try my old stuff like Sim City 4 and Wolfenstein ET again. 

The apps for me have been the mainstreaming of LibreOffice and OnlyOffice as legit subs for Microslop.

The other thing that always bugged me in the early days was the butt-ugly UI. The fonts were just gag inducing. The desktop was not only barely functional but it was just grotesque looking. Now I know that’s subjective, but I lived through the vile UI that was OS/2. Windows was art in comparison.

1

u/wosmo 13h ago

I think that's a very narrow viewpoint. I ran linux as my desktop OS from 1996 to 2007 (hello intel macs), and never ever considered myself a windows user.

1

u/Cautious_Boat_999 11h ago

At the time I gave it a go, I was working for an IT company with around 200K employees, a number of whom were going through the same kind of exercise. And many of their experiences were very similar to mine, but of course some had a higher tolerance for pain than I did.  So at the time, the viewpoint was pretty widespread in my corner of the world.

7

u/RepulsiveRaisin7 13h ago

Been on Linux since 2007 and I think it's easily Steam. Without games, few people would take Linux on the Desktop seriously today. Props to the Wine developers as well, it's not just Value that made this happen, but they brought Linux gaming to the spotlight. I still remember the times when there were basically 10-20 commercial Linux games.

6

u/1369ic 13h ago

Whenever automatic setup of the xorg.conf (X.conf?) file got good. That was the bane of my existence when I started around 2003.

6

u/Mediocre-Pumpkin6522 8h ago

I don't know if Ubuntu was a turning point but getting a free DVD on request certainly helped. Mandrake had earlier been billed as the easiest to install but you had to buy (gasp!) a shrink wrapped box. Downloading chunks of Slackware on individual floppies over a dialup and taping them altogether didn't exactly attract users. SuSE also had nice shrink wrapped sets.

KDE preceeded GNOME; GNOME was developed because TrollTech (Qt) licensed a commercial version and offended the purists. Both were available prior to 2000. Red Hat Linux favored GNOME, SuSE KDE.

I'm not sure many of the new users would know Wayland from x11 if it bit them on the butt. Ditto systemd vs. sysVinit. It boots and it works, good enough.

Windows 10 reaching EOL with hardware that can't upgrade? Better exposure on the internet? Increased abilty to run games? Got me.

4

u/friskfrugt 5h ago

Wine, DXVK, pipewire, wayland and investment from companies like steam

1

u/enomad51 2h ago

Agreed. This attracted more users, and more users mean higher demands on the software and its quality, as well as more activity in projects.

4

u/certified_midwit 13h ago

It's easy to forget about this now that flash is gone, but Linux getting a flash plugin that actually works was probably the biggest turning point for me. Prior to that, you couldn't even use many of the most popular websites on Linux, so I feel like that was the point when Linux became an actually fully-functional desktop.

5

u/kuplet 13h ago

Valve, when they started working on Proton, and SteamOS.

3

u/jcornuz 8h ago

Compiz. One day, you could do all these weird (and some useful) effects on your desktop.

Yes, I am that old :/

2

u/Cherry-PEZ 8h ago

Wiggle windows that explode when you close them! I was obsessed with Compiz lol. I got it running on my eee pc in highschool and thought I was cool as shit for it.

1

u/ItzYeho 4h ago

The EEEEEEEEEEEE PC

2

u/Correct-Commission 3h ago

Compiz was such a thing. Remember the cube?

1

u/JockstrapCummies 6h ago

SPINNAN CUBEZ

1

u/Brisprip 6h ago

Wow this brings back a lot of memory. I got it running on a old intel iGPU when I was a kid. Damn we're old.

1

u/enomad51 5h ago

I still remember Windows users who denied that it was a real desktop, claiming it was just a cleverly made video :)

6

u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 13h ago

systemd was a huge step

1

u/Leliana403 11h ago

🍿🍿

One for you, one for me. 😏

7

u/friendlyreminder_ 12h ago edited 12h ago

X11 was obviously the most important one for desktop Linux as without it there wasn't a desktop at all.

One huge milestone you didn't bring up was pulseaudio. Before pulseaudio sound was completely broken on most machines.

It was the first seriously functional sound server, which allowed playing sound from more than one application at a time on sound cards without that feature in hardware.

Other sound servers existed before pulseaudio but they were quite bad.

Having a GUI at all is the most important but not hard to argue having functional sound is also very high up there.

1

u/DigitalDenizen1 10h ago

I never had a problem getting ALSA or w/e to work with a simple stereo or 2.1 setup and my first distribution was fedora core 3

2

u/friendlyreminder_ 9h ago

If you had a dedicated soundcard the sound server was unnecessary, but any integrated sound card was not capable of multiple sound outputs simultaneously.

These became more and more common over time and a lot of people had sound problems. I kept my dedicated sound card for years just to avoid this issue. On laptops this was most of the time not possible, so Linux audio on laptops especially was not a good experience.

1

u/Kevin_Kofler 5h ago

Even the dedicated Creative SoundBlaster cards eventually stopped doing mixing in hardware. They faked it in their Windows drivers, along with MIDI synthesis. On GNU/Linux, you were stuck with the same software solutions as the integrated sound chips.

Only the old SoundBlaster cards (like the legendary SoundBlaster 16) had hardware mixing (but only a very small number of channels) and MIDI FM synthesis.

0

u/shroddy 9h ago

Imho because of X11 and how complicated it was to configure during that time, Linux lost its chance against the notoriously unstable Windows 95. Meanwhile if you had the right graphics card, in games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake, you could set even a high resolution no problem.

3

u/cipherjones 14h ago

It's come so far since the first time I heard of it in the late 90s.

Back then it was a niche edgelord operating system that had a very small percentage of the market.

Now in 2026 it's a niche edgelord operating system that has a very small percentage of the market, and steam deck to boost its stats.

3

u/Striking_Slice_3605 12h ago

This is one of those, I was there things. I would have to say either KDE1 or Ubuntu. Moving from CDE to KDE was a huge upgrade.

Gnome 1 and 2 were amazing too. Gnome 3 effectively killed Gnome for me. Never touching Gnome ever again. Unity was a bad move and caused a ton of problems.

I remember the Ubuntu launch party when it was first released. As a (back then) Debian guy, that was impressive. I think I might still got the gift bag with the first Ubuntu version on CD somewhere in the attic but it would take me weeks to find it.

3

u/lord_phantom_pl 1h ago

LiveCD, because without this, I probably wouldn’t be here.

2

u/ProblyAThrowawayAcct 13h ago

2008 - 1.0 release of WINE

2015 - AMD's open driver joins the kernel (I think? AMD version names are weird)

2016 - 1.0 release of Vulkan

2018 - Initial launch of Valve's Proton.

2

u/ipsirc 12h ago

Autodetecting USB mouse.

2

u/triplenested 12h ago

Slightly different than the question asked, but according to the latest "Ubuntu Bible" foreword a critical turning point between Linux and BSD was that the BSD licensing got tied up for a year or two by either litigation or the threat of it right at the worst time of desktop computing becoming widespread. Apparently IBM (or maybe AT&T, don't remember exactly) had some kind of legal standing in the early 90s to at least get lawyers billing hours towards the idea that BSD distributions can technically make money off of what they were doing, which is a problem because it was based off of those corporations work. It was resolved, but lagged BSD systems just a couple years behind Linux in adoption and by then it was PC first, Linux second, everyone else last. I suppose Mac was somewhere in there, but you get the idea.

2

u/c64cruzer 11h ago

For me, the turning point was using KDE at work in 2003. I remember thinking "This works surprisingly well. I would definitely consider using it at home if only I could figure out how to install it."

2

u/SoggyWalrus7893 11h ago

Turning point was UC Berkeley getting uppity about UNIX. Sent me to Linux.

2

u/NoFirefighter2064 11h ago

Ubuntu was huge for those who were around for it. Bootable CDs sent right to you in the mail, for free. Pop it in and boot. My mind was blown. Anyone remember installing windows 98 and XP? Floppy disks, key codes, defrag, format, it took forever. Live CDs changed that. It opened Linux up to a much wider audience.

2

u/contoxicated 10h ago

As a Linux user since around 2004, I’m surprised by all the proton and wine comments. I’ve read a bunch of interesting callouts in time and capability in this thread, and I’d chip in with Ubuntu, as well, but I have to ask if this is based on age. Are people saying that gaming held them back from ever trying Linux? What percentage of desktop users game?

2

u/thatwombat 9h ago

Moving from OSS to ALSA was a big one. Kernel 2.2 to 2.4 was huge for me.

2

u/remiohart 8h ago

For me it was Krita, Proton Drive coming to Linux next year, and being able to run all my work apps in it or find a replacement.

i tried Krita and other painting apps before, but they really didn't compare to paid versions. Now it's really easy for me to make the switch, Blender and Godot also helps. In General it's a compounding effort from multiple FOSS developers. Their fight was worth it and it's starting to show. Let's hope hardware wise things don't go extremely to s***

•

u/mattdm_fedora Fedora Project 42m ago

One of: Netscape open sourcing Mozilla; AMD committing to open source drivers; Valve deciding that Linux was worth the investment even with negligible market share.

A lot of other really cool stuff, but it's hard to imagine the basically seamless it-just-works systems we have today. 

2

u/UAP44 14h ago

good list!

I'm missing btrfs and integrated bootable snapshots within seconds so you can ctrl+z your entire OS

also, the cherry on the cake, nix, is missing from this list

it solved the state bloat/creep for me

1

u/Nerrawnam 13h ago

SteamOS

1

u/Due_Dragonfly_5328 13h ago

omg noway bro used spoiler warnings like its a manga.

id probbaly say 2018 with valve using proton and linux.

1

u/nPrevail 13h ago

For me, it was definitely Pipewire. It made audio routing more intuitive.

It was able to do something so seamless that was so limited by industry DJ software. With the inclusion of audio plugins, obs, and other software, it made routing so much easier.

1

u/DizzyCardiologist213 13h ago

I saw what may have been redhat or something like that on a friend's PC in 1998. He showed me the desktop and it looked good for the time, and then mentioned that he still used windows for gaming, and I forgot about it.

I think the biggest thing for linux historically, though, is that increasing bloat and demands for less control of the OS by the user, more and more down your throat kind of updates that change where things are in an OS, etc, when you're used to them, and so on...

Culminating with Windows 11. If I knew linux was ready when Windows 8 was rolled out, I'd have switched then, but I don't run in circles where that would've been known.

Last year, I tried mint, and then ubuntu and have moved 7 PCs to mint or ubuntu, including my 80 year old dad's PC (auto updating mint for him - no issues now in three or four months - none at all).

As much as I don't need AI in everything, it's a boon on the web when you're setting up a PC on linux after wiping windows off.

1

u/TrickMotor4014 13h ago

The day I installed Debian Woody on the used PC gifted by my uncle. This was around 2004 or 2005 making them my personal years of the Linux desktop. I never cared and never will care what years it is for anybody else

1

u/KeesterFeester 12h ago edited 12h ago

This is just my opinion but I think Valve's Proton is the biggest leap for Linux ever. Proton, with the help of Micro$lop constantly shitting their own bed, grew the user base of desktop Linux by almost 4% in total market share in only around a year. That dwarfs previous years.

It has done so much for software compatibility and showing people that there is hope for desktop Linux as a first choice desktop OS. There's still a load of work to be done but, it has sparked a sort of movement for desktop Linux adoption and development. I've never been more hopeful for the success of desktop Linux as much as I have these past 2 years.

Again this is just my perspective. I've only been serious about Linux for about 4 years so my opinion probably doesn't mean much.

that said the KDE DE was a pretty huge deal too. Just took a while for it really mature.

1

u/Gabochuky 12h ago

Wine and more importantly the creation of DXVK.

For everyone who doesn't know DXVK is the translation layer included in Wine (and Proton) that turns DX11 calls into Vulkan code. DXVK was created by a dude who wanted desperately to play Nier Automata on his Linux machine. So as you can probably figure out by now it's thanks to 2Bs ass that Proton is what it is today.

Gooners ftw.

1

u/Regular-Employ-5308 12h ago

For me it was Redhat kicking the table over and going all in on Bluecurve

1

u/tomteriffi 12h ago

When I started using it.

1

u/gportail 12h ago

Le jour ou Microsoft a sortie windows11

1

u/MatchingTurret 11h ago

X386 getting ported.

1

u/suicideking72 11h ago

The stand out for me is that you used to have install, then your wifi or ethernet card didn't work. You had to enter a command line to enable it (whitelist?). The last 10 years or so, you no longer have to do that, it just works from the start.

Hardware has been getting enabled/installed/working automatically. So this lowers the learning curve and doesn't turn off new users because they're hardware is working.

1

u/unluckyexperiment 10h ago
  1. Ubuntu

  2. Wine (Proton)

1

u/tetlee 10h ago

I think the biggest factor in Linux desktop is how successful Linux was on servers. Without the massive acceptance on to server the desktop would never really have taken off.

1

u/NoImprovement863 10h ago

Cloud computing and containerization.

I know its only Linux servers not desktop, but it did really showcase how superior, flexible and robust the Linux OS is compared to the trash that is Windows.

Having their servers dominate the cloud computing environment has made some people take notice what a great OS it is.

1

u/supersmola 10h ago

The "Get Windows 10" nag dialog.

1

u/Delicious-Income-870 9h ago

The two biggest for me was ubuntu coming on the scene with a super easy to install and use distro, then steam making games compatible because that is what has held many users back

1

u/darkhorz 7h ago

Windows 10

1

u/IAmSnort 7h ago

The comming systemd-desktopd!

1

u/worldarkplace 6h ago

Will be the AI. But until this date Steam with proton.

1

u/An0mymou5 6h ago

Windows 11. Specifically, Microsoft killing off Windows 10 unceremoniously and proceeding to restrict Windows 11 to newer hardware, which resulted in a bunch of people switching to Linux when Win10 hit EoL last year.

And then this year, it was the onslaught of Copilot and AI in general, encouraging even more folks to switch to Linux.

1

u/BreathSpecial9394 2h ago

Fixing printing and scanning was super important as well.

1

u/BreathSpecial9394 2h ago

What about the Java Virtual Machine? Java made possible cross-platform applications.

1

u/Ghaz013 2h ago

For me, Windows telemetry made me switch and not look back. I also agree with other’s sentiments about Valve throwing their supper in for Linux.

1

u/Zemerald 1h ago

The release of Windows 8 and the Microsoft Store. It turned Valve from another video game company into a competitor for PC OS marketshare and one of the largest contributors to open-source software used by normal people.

1

u/bichwank69 9h ago

When Valve started getting involved in Linux

1

u/DisgruntleFairy 8h ago

Yeah Proton is the big change.

0

u/KnowZeroX 13h ago

The real turning point was when super computers, crypto and AI stuff needed linux drivers. At that point, the gpu companies started to take linux gpu drivers seriously, before long intel and amd were pretty much just works and nvidia while had its issues became more practical and serious. Vulkan also helped a lot as it simplified a lot of things.

The other turning point was ironically windows 8. No, not all the crap in it that made people switch, but MS was overburdened with including so many drivers in their stuff and demanded standardization of drivers for many accessories like adoption of HID (also internally many hardware is treated as usb accessory too). This led to many things just working on linux because you didn't need to install a new driver for every new device you got for at least basic stuff to work.

0

u/that_one_wierd_guy 13h ago

the big turning point came with the introduction of what many claim will be the death of linux. systemd, the standardization and unification of all those configs that somehow fell through the cracks and had to be individually managed

0

u/Subject-Leather-7399 13h ago

it didn't unify shit though.

0

u/Human_no_4815162342 13h ago edited 1h ago

Android's move to become a desktop OS too might be very relevant if it succeeds. I don't know if a successful AOSP/Linux will be positive for GNU/Linux though.

On the opposite way WSL has increased significantly Linux usage on the desktop, again I am not sure if it's positive for actual adoption.

SteamOS is still a niche and the console aspect is only useful to smooth out gaming related issues and remove an attrition point for people coming from Windows but if desktop devices running steamOS will become more common people will use it more for personal computing which has not really happened with handhelds like the SteamDeck (not in meaningful numbers).

We'll see how the actual end of support of Windows 10 and the increased minimum system requirements of Windows 11 will affect Linux adoption. It has been a long time coming. I suspect that a lot of people will just keep using a vulnerable OS but some may switch to keep using their hardware.

I'll add the advent of containerized package managers like flatpak (and even the corporate Snap) which has significantly reduced the difficulty of distributing software on Linux. And in a similar way it's early to tell if they'll become mainstream but immutable distributions are promising.

P.S. I realize that most of this are not directly related to Linux, I just think they are significant influential steps

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u/Smart_Advice_1420 13h ago edited 13h ago

Proton.

I main linux for 25 years but proton changed everything. A lot more users flocked to linux and developement ran into overdrive. More users, more demand for modern stuff, more motivated contributors.

I'm feeling like almost all quirks i had to push trough all those years are gone and we finally have an (almost) flawless experience.

Additionaly: After many many years on playstation, i finally could enjoy pc gaming.

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u/Junior_Common_9644 11h ago

Slackware 1.0!

-4

u/megayippie 14h ago

It's been a decline since middle of unity.

-3

u/partev 13h ago

Omarchy

-4

u/siodhe 12h ago

First, only 3 bullets on OP's list are historic, and only two are significant.

  • Wayland is insignificant, hurts some power users and those who need to keep using X capabilities that Wayland, by policy, will never support
    • It's possible that some compositor will do something striking, but if you have to run it to run apps that work with it, Wayland will enter balkanization, where you have to use a specific compositor for specific apps. Hopefully I'm wrong about it
    • Most users will never care, understand, or be interested in the X versus Wayland issue. Wayland fixes small things while breaking larger X things, from the perspective of most users, if they notice at all
    • Wayland itself is a sibling of X, not a successor
  • None of the "Desktop Environments" are worth mentioning. Most of them are stripped down variants of real, better Window Managers with some default apps bundled in
    • Of those window managers, compiz is amazing especially in its full-featured form. I'd still be using it if it hadn't kept wiping out my keybindings. However, while amazing, its only known to relatively few Linux users, and saying it is a key historic milestone is going too far. Most modern uses of it are extensively crippled
  • Valve bringing large-scale gaming to Linux - one of the most significant tide in Linux's history, providing a direct migration path for gamers
  • Governments switching to Linux - it's always charming to see a government realize that M$'s non-standards work against what governments need to do, not to mention the costs