I think there are 3 major points that made Linux much more viable option in the last 2-3 years.

1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me.

2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues that would take a whole afternoon of fighting are now just a couple back-and-forths with the LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini.

3) Valve and SteamOS. The large and mostly successful push by Valve to make Linux be the platform for gaming has cleared many Linux issues and hurdles on the way. I think this will have ripple effects in the industry. My prediction is that thanks to Valve and SteamOS we will see a viable, widely used Linux based phone in the next 3 years.

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reverius42 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> we will see a viable, widely used Linux based phone in the next 3 years

Isn't there already a viable, widely used Linux based phone OS called Android?

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gzread 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Linux the kernel, not Linux the desktop OS

	▲	dpark an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Right, but you’re presumably not going to run Linux the desktop OS on your phone. You’re going to run a mobile OS and the Linux kernel.
	▲	HaZeust 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		His comment stands?

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Woooah that's a long way from 'gaming works on linux' to 'this is now suitable as a general purpose mobile OS'

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hungryhobbit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Linux has been able to serve most non-gaming use cases for over a decade now (source: I've been running the OS longer than that). The one thing it used to not be able to do was play games ... and now it does that.

	▲	Arainach 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For non technical users it simply isn't true. The happy path has improved a lot. When Linux is working it's reasonably usable. But once something breaks it breaks HARD and recovery is still miserable. For reference I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.2 circa 2000. I cut my teeth debugging problems without internet access. I ran an LTSP lab at my high school. I remember the hell that was XF86Config (I was there, Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago). ....and like the previous commenter I run Windows on my personal machines because I want to spend my free time using them, not debugging them.

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nout 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are more details that make me believe that linux as mobile OS is more feasible in near future. Apart from the Valve&SteamOS push, the one notable phenomenon that I see happening is retrogaming. In retrogaming handhelds ecosystem there are now many devices with form factor close to phones (they often literally use screens from older iPhones, etc) that are running on Linux or in some cases provide option to easily switch between Android and Linux. For example on Anbernic RG35XX using Garlic OS there's a toggle in the UI to switch between Android and Linux. Similarly Retroid Pocket 5 allows switching in the bootloader menu.

As a separate point, it seems quite feasible to run Android apps in VM on Linux based phone and make the experience fairly seamless. Something like what Waydroid provides.

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dpark an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> As a separate point, it seems quite feasible to run Android apps in VM on Linux based phone and make the experience fairly seamless.

But why?

The premise of Waydroid seems to be to bring Android apps you want to your Linux desktop. But why would you want the phone in your pocket to run Desktop Linux so that you could then run Android apps on your Desktop Linux mobile phone instead of just running Android on your phone?

What desktop Linux features do you want on your phone that would justify this complexity?

	▲	nout 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I want to use pre existing apps from the Android ecosystem, but I want the system to let me install and change anything I want. It looks like android is going to heavily restrict installing apps that are not on play store and there are now ~5 apps that I use that don't exist on Play store, but only on Obtanium or Zapstore. My hope is that installation of the Android apps on Linux phone could be made seamless.

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keyringlight 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It looks like the combination of PostmarketOS (based on Alpine linux) and Waydroid would seem to fit that.

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bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Linux has all the pieces. Other commercial vendors like Jolla have put it together before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS

There are open UI shells from KDE and GNOME, multitouch gesture support, Android emulation... it's all there.