Hehe, when I first glanced through and read "The Year of the Linux Desktop" my mind went back to the late nineties, that was a thing even back then! ;-)

One of the really great things about running QubesOS is that I get access to almost any distro that I like, although it defaults to Debian and Fedora most of the time. Windows work, but requires some maintenance.

I've had several instances fail recently outside of QubesOS, but I suspect that is more about the old Thinkpads I've been running rather than RockyLinux and Mint themselves. All of that UEFI shit is soooo toxic...

Linux can for sure be used as a desktop OS these days, but my experience is that there is always something happening, not with device management so much these days, but unfortunately lower level.

Do you have any thoughts on the BSD variants? I've been testing OpenBSD now and then, simply to get used to it so that I can migrate to that kernel if communists get to the Linux kernel for real...