The Year of the Linux Desktop 🐧

Every year is "the year of the Linux desktop." And every year... isn't.
Until maybe now. For me, Windows 11 finally crossed the patience threshold.

My very boring, desktop use case:
- Gaming with friends:
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Elden Ring
- No Man's Sky
- No Rest for the Wicked
- PDF, Docs and Excel for tasks.
- Light coding.
Nothing exotic. Just... a stable computer.

Enter: Windows 11 🪟
Some recurring pain points:
- Ads in the OS - on my desktop.
- Copilot + cloud account pressure when all I want is... a local machine.
- Random and sometimes hidden updates that "just happen."
Annoying, but all tolerable. Until...

The actual 😠 💢 point 🔥
I live in an old apartment, router in another room.
I use:
- A motherboard with Wi-Fi.
- A Netgear Nighthawk A8000 (Wi-Fi 6) adapter.
For two months, Windows 11 casually disconnected me from Wi-Fi.
Randomly. Repeatedly.

Sometimes the adapter's LED wouldn't even turn on.
And, no — disabling/enabling the adapter, restarting services, or rebooting wasn't
the issue. The hardware was fine. Windows would just... decided not to initialise
it. Router was fine, and other devices were fine.

Then one day: No internet. At all. Windows networking services wouldn't even
start. 😤

So there I am: 💢
1. In the Windows Registry.
2. Debugging DLL dependencies.
3. Staring at BFE (Base Filtering Engine) refusing to start.
4. Error code I don't even want to relive.

At that moment I realised something funny:
"I should not be deep diving into the OS to make Wi-Fi work. This what people
are always saying about Linux 🤣"

That said — and this matters — I admittedly have far more experience on Linux,
and I'm much more comfortable debugging problems there than deep-diving into the
Windows Registry and opaque service dependencies.

At that point I did the responsible thing:
I reset Windows 11.
Fresh system.
Logged in.
Authenticated.
Valid Windows license.

And yet...
"Activate Windows"
That watermark stared at me like it was my fault. Problems for later...
Did it fix my issue? Seemed like it for an hour. And... NO!

So I did the thing 🐧
I wiped Windows and installed Bazzite OS.
As a software engineer, I am comfortable trying to making the jump.

Installation → ~30 minutes.
First thing I checked:
- Is my adapter actually working? Yes.
- Is networking stable and reliable? Hell, yes.

Here's the funny part:
🤣 On Linux, the adapter's LED doesn't turn on either. This is because the
driver is not implemented to turn on the LED 🤣 But the connection is stable.
Reliable. Trustworthy. 🤗

• Is Linux perfect?
  No.
• Is it finally good enough for my desktop?
  Abso-frickin-lutely.

Will Linux suddenly take over desktops? With ~5% market share, probably not
overnight - but slowly growing over the years.

Either way, for me, it's finally stable.
That's all I want from a desktop. 😅

I'm not going back. ☺️