In Linux, things are often upside down
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In Linux, things are often upside down
Updated: July 8, 2026
For me, the last couple of months in the open-source software world have been rather wild. Well, I<br>guess, for everyone, too. Don't hate me for saying this, but have you seen the Netflix show Stranger<br>Things? Linux seems to be the underside reality, because quite often, when I seek hope and joy, I find<br>despondence instead. Why, you ask, I would assert such an asinine and defeatist claim? Nothing like a<br>good rant to justify myself, then.
In this article, I would like to bring up a few things, which I've mostly picked up from various<br>articles here and there recently, as I shall soon elaborate. The usual and not-so-usual comings and<br>goings in the Linux desktop space, with lots of missed opportunities. Having invested two decades plus<br>in this domain, I cannot just sit idly and watch wonderful technology get woefully wasted on fads, hype<br>and total misunderstanding of usability. Let me then share, and you feel free to send me angry emails.<br>Or ignore me. The usual deal.
Not as glamorous as the Red Arrows upside down.
Note: Image taken from
Wikimedia, licensed under<br>OGL 1.0, Photo:<br>Cpl Andy Benson RAF/MOD.
KDE work, the good and the bad
I will start by saying the following: Whatever you think of KDE, this community at least openly<br>shares its work, and frequently provides updates on their projects, for better or worse. This is a<br>brave thing to do, especially in the Linux space, as people will more than enthusiastically express<br>their disapproval of even the tiniest thing. KDE also tends to listen to their users and tries to<br>interpret the feedback (alas, often wrongly), it tries to make its tooling more useful to the wider<br>audience, and thanks to the Steam & KDE cooperation, there's a real chance of seeing something nice<br>come unto this cruel world.
But then, occasionally, I read a blog or two, usually by KDE's Nate, and me eyebrows get somewhat<br>squiggly with confusion. More recently, I came across two reports that simply made less sense to me.<br>One is the supposed<br>success of Wayland, with 95% of users running<br>it as default in the latest version of KDE. The second is the decision to include and remove certain<br>software in<br>KDE Linux, KDE's<br>take on atomic distros. Let us debate this, shall we. And before we move on, may I remind you that I<br>use Plasma as my desktop in all my Linux production systems, all Kubuntu to be more precise, and that<br>it is quite definitely the<br>best desktop around, and that I'm very happy with the rising<br>trajectory of KDE in the past couple of years. But never a fanboy, I am not blind to nor supportive of<br>potential pitfalls and problems in open source, and I dearly want to help the wider community avoid<br>them, if possible.
Wayland
Let's start with the Wayland "statistics", and why they are meaningless:
Originally, KDE planned to support X11 until Plasma 7.0. This was an arbitrary cutoff date, not<br>based on any achievements in the Wayland stack.
Then, this was arbitrarily changed to Plasma 6.8. Simultaneously, Kubuntu decided to drop X11<br>in the 26.04 LTS as the default option, and even remove the X11 desktop session, even though Ubuntu<br>does include the necessary packages in its repos (and will support them for 10 years), and despite<br>the fact Wayland still does not have functional parity with the "legacy" framework.
Wayland gets pushed more and more aggressively, even when it's not warranted. That said, the<br>framework is improving, and I have reported this, twice, both in my<br>Plasma 6.5 review and in my<br>Kubuntu 26.04 review. Yes, Wayland is getting better. Even<br>I say that. But it is still not good enough.
Now, we have "data" that shows Wayland supposedly being so nice the majority of people uses<br>it.
Okay, cool. So far so good. But what does this mean in practice?
Now, here's my take on the things. First, you can check my Linux section and read the articles from<br>the past year or two to get a better sense of my approach. In particular, you may want to read a<br>handful of longer, more philosophical pieces like the<br>Old problems new tools one, perhaps my<br>product philosophy rant, and then some. This will give you<br>a solid understanding of how I perceive software, and what I think needs to be done to gain meaningful<br>traction in the Linux desktop space.
Second, let's talk numbers. Ubuntu is the most popular Linux desktop distro, and it has more usage<br>than pretty much all other Linux desktop distros combined. Within the Ubuntu family, Ubuntu itself is<br>also an order of magnitude more popular than any other flavor. If you are wondering where my data comes<br>from, feel free to do your own search and data analyses independently, including but not limited to<br>website statistics, search trends, reports by distro teams where available, store statistics, forum<br>statistics, and then some....