A spectre is haunting the home desktop. The spectre of the Linux desktop. Words to these effect have been thrown around for at least a decade now, and each time Linux not made its way into the drives of Western home PCs. I, like most people, have dismissed “the year of the linux desktop” as a meme, and for good reasons. However, I think the meme is about to become reality (either that or reality is about to become a meme).

This is not because of some great change made in the GNU/Linux world. Although, there have been countless incremental changes over the last few years that mean I no longer have to cross my fingers when using linux for something time-sensitive or involving collaboration with non-linux colleagues and friends (i.e., everyone I know). These improvements are, what I would call, in my day job, “necessary conditions” for a linux take over, but not “sufficient conditions”. They need to be there, but they won’t take us over the edge.

No, the reason is that Windows has finally become so resource intensive that it can’t run on affordable hardware for ordinary people. The cost of everything is going up. And, in my role as informal tech-broker for my friends and family, I find it increasingly hard to recommend a Windows laptop under £600 that can be trusted to do what most of them want: word processing, web browsing, emails and spreadsheets.

This problem cropped up on my radar around the release of Windows 10, when laptops were released with 4GB of RAM, when the minimum requirements for x64 Windows 10 was… 4GB of RAM. These machines barely met the spec., and given the resource intensive nature of modern web browsers, they would barely function because the OS required so much memory to give you the basics.

Attempts to strip down Windows (10S and 10X) reduced the included price of the OS, arguably leading to better value, but not performance, failing to address the rising tide of Chromebooks. I no longer recommend any Windows laptops under £600, and even then, the prospect is not great. And, despite the common belief in “apple tax”, those 2020 M1 Macbook Airs look extremely good value these days at around £800.

But still, when your friend who has a Windows 7 laptop they bought for £350 in 2012, that coped with the upgrade to windows 10 because it was sold with 8GB of DDR3 ram, asks you for a laptop recommendation, they’re unlikely to be happy with the suggestion that they need a Macbook Air, if they want a mature commercial OS. Instead, the best bet is to support them with the transition to a Chromebook, whose support for GNU/Linux apps is surprisingly simple to set up and stable. That’s pretty close to the year of the linux desktop to me. Okay, it’s not full-fat GNU/Linux, and its not a gaming platform., but it is a Linux desktop OS.

Microsoft seem to have realised this problem themselves with their controversial decision to refuse to officially support 7th-gen intel and 1st gen Ryzen or older. Windows is incapable of running well on older and budget hardware these days, and the experience is going to deteriorate. I think they’re betting hard on powerful budget processors in the coming generations that will catch up to the bloated mess that Windows has become.

This comes at a cost. The vibrant second-hand market of refurbished old computers for example, which are perfectly capable, even with Windows 10, to perform most everyday computing tasks, will lose support. This will, when Win10 reaches end of life, screw over at least one of my actually-existing friends with a 2015 ThinkPad that works fine for him. Unless he drops it, it shows no sign of ceasing to function in 2025, and yet it will suddenly become a security threat just because Microsoft have arbitrarily drawn a line in the sand. He’ll have a choice: spend a fortune on a new Mac or PC, buy a Chromebook, or install GNU/Linux. I’m sure you can guess which one I’ll be encouraging him to try first. Unfortunately, while I think I can get him to like LibreOffice, I think he’ll struggle without iTunes.

This goes to the heart of the strength of free and open source software: if the creator doesn’t want to support some piece of hardware, the community can take it over. If iTunes and the iPod drivers were open source, that friend could use his iPod classic forever, and its precious metals would never end up in a landfill. Thankfully, an alternative exists for his sturdy tank of a laptop, so it should hang on for a few more years.

In short, the year of the linux desktop is coming, not because of Valve and the Steamdeck, not because of Nvidia open-sourcing its drivers, but because the choice between spending £600 to replace equipment, during a cost of living crisis, that is working perfectly and learning to use new software is no choice at all, no more than the choice between spending £600 to use Microsoft Office rather than £200 to buy a Chromebook and use the Google office suite. The only thing that can happen to stop it, is for Microsoft to make a U-turn. Which they probably will, to be fair.