1996 was the year for Linux on the desktop. FVWM, then Windomaker, then Sawmill/Sawfish, now Xmonad. Never looked back. From working at a publisher to doing development work at several companies to freelancing as hacker for hire to giving my 80+ mother a safe desktop to do administration and finances on while I live some 1300 km to the north of her, Linux rules the roost.

Why? Because it works. No nasty surprises, no forced upgrades, no nonsense.

I've come to this conclusion too. 1996 was the year of the Linux desktop. But... there's more to the story. In 1996 Linux was a clone of Unix, because there were still Unixes out there (HP-UX, SCO, etc.) that were charging $xx,000/seat. Everything good about Linux was taken from Unix. This put Unix vendors out of business, which is unfortunate because after that, Linux had nothing left to copy from. There were no new ideas from industry. Instead, it became design-by-committee and first-come-first-serve. That's why it's taken so long for X11 to be replaced by Wayland. Many internet flame wars had to happen before Wayland was uncontroversial enough to be included.

Hm, yes, Wayland. It has not convinced me so I'm using X11 everywhere, that network transparency (through NX/X2go) is just too useful to let go. It is how my mother uses a Mate desktop running on the server-under-the-stairs here in Sweden from her laptop in the Netherlands to do her banking: Wireguard VPN + X2go. Would it work in Wayland? Probably, using VNC instead of X2go. Would it work without needing to futz with recalcitrant bits? Probably not. X2go "Just Works™" so... why bother?

As an old Slashdot reader, I came looking for a comment like this. Thanks for not disappointing.

NetCraft confirms, *BSD is still dead.

The year of the Linux Desktop was Android.

The year of Linux Desktop for me was 2006. For every linux user/fan out there: when was yours?

2005 if i recall correctly.

i downloaded a 200mb iso file over the course of a couple days: a [then] slackware-based distro called slax. i quickly came to understand that its packages were just tarballs overlaid on the filesystem (how simple!) and some of its GUI tools were just bash scripts calling a tool called zenity (amazing!).

i was hooked immediately. the biggest hurdle was my glorified sound card of a modem. booting into win2k to google about compiling a kernel driver, then booting into slax to try what i'd read, was a tedious but manageable task. i believe i sent away for a kubuntu cd soon after and never looked back.

1997, also the year when I got 10Mbit connection at home, which was unheard of at that time. Also, came from Amiga, skipped the msdos and windows almost completely.

A few years ago, 2019 I think was the last I had Windows installed.

2002 SuSE KDE 3