I recently listened to DHH on the Lex Fridman podcast, and one of the arguments he made during the conversation was that it’s (finally) the Year of the Linux Desktop. Regardless of whether you like DHH or not (disclaimer: I like DHH the developer; I could do without the politics, but I can separate the two), it’s a worthwhile listen.

DHH’s argument for why we’re about the enter the golden era of the Linux desktop is essentially that Linux systems are in general way more customizable than Windows/Mac, that Linux is very well documented (see e.g. the famous Arch wiki), and that frontier AI models are good enough now that they can slurp up all of that documentation and allow even non-programmers to customize and manage a Linux computer all through interactions with an agent, never even having to open up a config file or even a terminal.

I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this. I’ve been running Omarchy as my daily-driver OS on my personal computer for about 10 months, and it’s awesome I’ve used my local Gemma 4 model to create a Virginia Tech Omarchy theme. I’ve tweaked some other configurations, both manually and with help from Gemma and/or Claude. And now that Omarchy Quattro offers even more built-in support for agents, I’m excited to further customize my machine without having to devote hundreds of hours to the pursuit. Unless something catastrophic happens, I can’t see myself ever going back to Windows or Mac.

All of that said – DHH seems to be vastly overestimating the number of people who want to do this. I don’t know him personally, but my impression is that the majority of his interactions are with tech (or tech-adjacent) people. Which makes sense. He works in tech. He’s a CTO. He’s building a Linux distro. But it certainly colors his view.

I work as a data scientist for a large school division. The vast, vast majority of the people I interact with on a daily basis are non-technical people. We have Windows laptops and we use Google Workspace. In any given meeting, anywhere from a third to half of the attendees will have the blue-flowery Georgia O’Keefe-esque default Windows wallpaper. If I dropped the term “Linux” in casual conversation, most would absently smile and nod but have no idea if I’m talking about an operating system or cookware. Most recoil from the mere thought of intentionally doing anything to their computer that “could mess it up.”

My wife doesn’t even own a personal computer!

I say all of this not to scoff or sneer at any of these people, but rather to illustrate the point that the vast majority of people care very little about having a better computer. They need some baseline functionality that the out-of-the-box Windows/Google Workspace combo fulfills, and they don’t care about anything beyond that.

And this is fine. I happen to care about computer stuff, and DHH obviously does as well, but not everyone does. There are lots of people who care deeply about their cars. I’m more of a “I want something that gets me and my kids from Point A to Point B” guy. Some people care deeply about their gardens, or the interior design of their homes, or bird watching, or knitting, or cuisine. All of this is fine. But each of these communities, in the grand scheme of things, is probably pretty small.

So, although it may be the dawn of a new Linux desktop era for people who care about computers, I just don’t see it for anyone outside of that group.