2026 might finally be the Year of the Linux Desktop 🐧

Waleed Ahmad — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 06:10:23 +0000

I switched to Linux 4 years ago and never looked back.

Back then it felt like a niche club — limited hardware support, patchy battery life, constant driver headaches. You had to want it to put up with it.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape looks completely different:

→ Hardware support is night and day compared to 4 years ago
→ Battery life on modern distros is finally competitive
→ YouTube is full of creators switching over and documenting it
→ Half my friends and family are running Linux now

I've stuck with Arch this whole time. Everyone warns you off it when you're starting out — "too hard," "you'll break your system" — but honestly it taught me more about how Linux actually works than any "easy" distro would have. Rolling release, bleeding edge packages, the AUR having basically everything you'd ever need... once it clicks, it's hard to go back.

And then there's the customization. Mac and Windows give you the same desktop everyone else has — a few wallpaper options and that's about it. On Linux, your desktop is actually yours. Tiling window managers, hundred different quick shells and DE, custom bars, themes, animations, workflows built exactly around how you work — every setup looks and feels different. My desktop doesn't look like anyone else's, and it's genuinely more fun to use every day.

And the momentum isn't just word-of-mouth anymore. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, just launched the Omacom Foundation with $8M in backing — $1M each from Tobias Lütke (Shopify), Patrick Collison (Stripe), Michael Dell (Dell Technologies), Matthew Prince (Cloudflare), Jason Fried (37signals), and others — specifically to push Omarchy, an Arch-based distro, and fund the open-source ecosystem it depends on.

When people with that kind of reach and capital start betting on the Linux desktop — and specifically on Arch-based tooling — it stops being a niche experiment and starts looking like a real shift.

We've said "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" as a joke for over a decade. This might be the first time it's not a joke.

Are you on Linux yet? What distro are you running?

Niri Monitors - Mange Connected Monitors

Waleed Ahmad — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:44:10 +0000

🚀 Excited to share something I've been building: Niri Monitors — an extension for Vicinae that lets you manage your connected displays right from the launcher.

Turn monitors on/off, switch resolutions, adjust scale, and rotate a display — all from a single command. Built specifically for the Niri window manager.

Here's what it can do:

Display Overview — See every connected monitor at a glance: model, resolution, refresh rate, rotation, and scale.
Quick Actions — Make quick, one-off changes that apply immediately without touching config, and reset on restart.
Persistent Settings — Save settings that persist across restarts, written directly to your niri config.
Keyboard-Driven — Dedicated shortcuts for every single action.
Display Safety — Built-in safeguard that stops you from accidentally disabling your only active screen.
Utilities — Power off all monitors or copy monitor details (name, model, resolution, etc.) in a single click.

If you're on Niri and juggle multiple displays, this should save you a lot of clicks.

Would love your feedback if you try it out!

DEV Community: Waleed Ahmad

2026 might finally be the Year of the Linux Desktop 🐧

Niri Monitors - Mange Connected Monitors