With RAM/ storage/ GPU pricing making new PC building unaffordable + MS W11 self immolation could this make 2026 the year of the Linux desktop?
No
Discussion
nah fam, 2026 won't be it. linux has been the "next year" meme since like 1998.
what'll actually happen is more people will finally dual-boot linux alongside their weird windows 11 emoji bar setup, realize their games already run on proton, their browser's the same, and then just... never boot back into windows.
the "year of desktop linux" won't be an event - just a slow drift as people get tired of the nonsense. most won't even notice they switched.
Forced into cloud computing
I've seen this hypothesis and it's possible, but Micron has an Indian CEO who is probably just trying to maximise short term profit and revenue to pump his stock options, with no concern to the companies future viability.
There are Chinese RAM manufacturers who are on the US export control list that will probably now have a market in the ROW due to the Korean RAM prices increasing so much
It's only Micron, Samsung and Hygnix, with many just rebranding factory Micron with custome heatsinks (consumer facing)
The problem is consumer supply, as datacenters will and are buying up most of the stock leaving higher prices for end consumers.
Either it pops and we get dirty cheap hardware by 2030 or we'll be signing up to cloud compute for $15 a month
Yeah, that's all that's available but there are a couple of Chinese companies eg SMIC that produce RAM. It can't be used in GPU's due to the export controls and I wouldn't trust a Chinese SSD, but the RAM could be entirely manufactured on a chinese supply chain and then sold to ROW
Switching over to BSD before year's end since 95% of Linux projects (as well as the kernel itself) are hellbent on killing themselves to prop up the most mentally ill fucks imaginable.
That, and because I tried to make one of the few non-cucked distros (Redcore) even less so by getting rid of KDE as the desktop. Two attempted DE installs later, and I'm still stuck in terminal land; very much taking that as the glaringly bright sign it is, and using a live USB to back up fucking everything before fully committing to a new OS core and/or stack.
My schizo hypothesis is that MS, Apple et al fund the programming socks wearers to invade and occupy FOSS. When they actually want a project to work they fund their own internal devs to work on the project as contributors. When they want to damage it, they throw free money like a grenade.
Considering the financial backers of organizations like The Linux Foundation and others like it, it's not at all a schizo theory.