When it comes to open hardware, choices are not exactly abundant. Truly open source hardware – open down to the firmware level of individual components – that also has acceptable performance is rare, with one of the few options being the Talos II and Blackbird POWER9 workstations from Raptor Computing Systems (which I reviewed). Another option that can be fully open source with the right configuration are the laptops made by MNT, which use the ARM architecture (which I also reviewed).

Both of these are excellent options, but they do come with downsides; the Talos II/Blackbird are expensive and getting a bit long in the tooth (and a possible replacement is at least a year away), and the MNT Reform and Pocket Reform simply aren’t for everyone due to their unique and opinionated design. Using an architecture other than x86 also simply isn’t an option for a lot of people, ruling out POWER9 and ARM hardware entirely.

In the x86 world, it’s effectively impossible to avoid proprietary firmware blobs, but there are companies out there trying to build x86 laptops that try to at least minimise the reliance on such unwelcome blobs. One of these companies is NovaCustom, a Dutch laptop (and now desktop!) OEM that sells x86 computers that come with Dasharo open firmware (based on coreboot) and a strong focus on privacy, open source, customisability, and repairability.

NovaCustom sent over a fully configured NovaCustom V54 laptop¹, so let’s dive into what it’s like to configure and use an x86 laptop with Dasharo open firmware and a ton of unique customisation options.

Hardware configuration

I opted for the 14″ laptop model, the V54, since the 16″ V65 is just too large for my taste. NovaCustom offers a choice between a 1920×1200 60Hz and a 2880×1800 120Hz panel, and I unsurprisingly chose the latter. This higher-DPI panel strikes a perfect balance between having a 4K panel, which takes a lot more processing power to drive, and a basic 1080p panel, which I find unacceptable on anything larger than 9″ or so. The refresh rate of 120Hz is also a must on any modern display, as anything lower looks choppy to my eyes (I’m used to 1440p/280Hz on my gaming PC, and 4K/160Hz on my workstation – I’m spoiled). The display also gets plenty bright, but disappointingly, the V54 does not offer a touch option. I don’t miss it, but I know it’s a popular feature, so be advised.

While the V54 can be equipped with a dedicated mobile RTX 4060 or 4070 GPU, I have no need for such graphical power in a laptop, so I stuck with the integrated Intel Arc GPU. Note that if you do go for the dedicated GPU, you’ll lose the second M.2 slot, and the laptop will gain some weight and thickness. I did opt for the more powerful CPU option with the Intel Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which packs 6 performance cores (with hyperthreading), 8 efficiency cores, and 2 low-power cores, for a total of 16 cores and 22 threads maxing out at 4.8Ghz.

Unless you intend to do GPU-intensive work, this combination is stupid fast and ridiculously powerful. Throw in the 32GB of DDR5 5600MHz RAM in a dual-channel configuration (2×16, replaceable) and a speedy 7.400 MB/s (read)/6.500 MB/s (write) 1TB SSD, and I sometimes feel like this is the sort of opulence Marie Antoinette would indulge herself in² if she were alive today. It won’t surprise you to learn that with this configuration, you won’t be experiencing any slowdowns, stuttering, or other performance issues.

Ports-wise, the V54 has a USB-C port (3.2 Gen 2), a Thunderbolt 4 port (with Display Alt Mode supporting DP 2.1), a USB-A port (3.2 Gen 2) and a barrel power jack on the right side, a combo audio jack, USB-A port (3.2 Gen 1), microSD card slot, and a Kensington lock on the left, and an Ethernet and HDMI port on the back. Especially the Ethernet port is such a welcome affordance in this day and age, and we’ll get back to it since we need it for Dasharo.

The trackpad is large, smooth, and pleasant to use – for a diving board type trackpad, that is. More and more manufacturers are adopting the Apple-style haptic trackpads, which I greatly prefer, but I suspect there might be some patent and IP shenanigans going on that explain why uptake of those in the PC space hasn’t exactly been universal. If you’re coming from a diving board trackpad, you’ll love this one. If you’re coming from a haptic trackpad, it’s a bit of a step down.

A standout on the V54 is the keyboard. The keys are perfectly spaced, have excellent travel, a satisfying, silent click, and they are very stable. It’s an absolute joy to type on, and about as good as a laptop keyboard can be. On top of that, at least when you opt for the US-international keyboard layout like I do, you get a keyboard that actually properly lists the variety of special characters on its keys. This may look chaotic and messy to people who don’t need to use those special characters, but as someone who does, this is such a breath of fresh air compared to all those modern, minimalist keyboards where you end up randomly mashing key combinations to find that one special character you need. Considering my native Dutch uses diacritics, and my wife’s native Swedish uses the extra letters å, ä, and ö (they’re letters!), this is such a great touch.

The keyboard also has an additional layer for a numeric pad, as well as the usual set of function keys you need on a modern laptop, including a key that will max out the fan speed in case you need it (the little fan glyph on my keyboard seems double-printed, though, which is a small demerit). I especially like the angry moon glyph on the sleep key. He’s my grumpy friend and I love him. Of course, the keyboard has several intensities of illumination, too.

Finally, we come to the battery, which is a 73WH unit that can be charged through either the included charger with the barrel plug, or through the USB-C port with DC-in. I never quite know how to rate battery life, since everyone’s usage patterns are different, and I don’t review enough laptops to create an internally consistent comparison table. NovaCustom claims 7 hours of battery life “based on a mix of light tasks in Windows 11 such as web surfing and watching videos”, with identical numbers experienced on Linux. My own personal experience definitely seems to align with this claim, running Fedora KDE; when working on OSNews without any video playing, the laptop basically keeps going forever.

Build quality seems excellent, with little to no flexing on the keyboard deck or the display. The bottom cover and display lid are made out of metal, and the keyboard deck and bezel around the display are made out of some plastic variant that feels sturdy. The laptop weighs about 1.6kg, measuring 317×235×18 mm, which seems about on par with everyone else on the market.

Unique customisation and configuration options

Much of what makes NovaCustom’s laptops unique compared to the competition revolves around decisions you make during the purchasing process. NovaCustom – as the company’s name implies – offers a wide variety of customisation options most other laptop makers simply do not offer. All of this starts with one of the most unique aspects of NovaCustom’s computers: it uses Dasharo.

Dasharo is a coreboot distribution, which means it’s a fully open source replacement for the firmware, or BIOS, on the laptop. In theory, if you have the skills, nothing is stopping you from building your own version of coreboot with your own changes, and flash it onto the laptop. This is not something most other OEMs will allow you to do, and such insight into exactly what your BIOS is doing could be vital in some industries or professions.

On top of the usual benefits of being open source, Dasharo also offers other benefits that really should be standard by now on every BIOS, even proprietary ones, but often aren’t. First and foremost, Dasharo has seamless online updates, a feature which uses a wired Ethernet connection – I told you we would come back to the Ethernet later – to perform an iPXE boot to load an extremely minimal Linux environment to download and flash newer versions of the Dasharo firmware automatically. The norm in 2025 for BIOS updates still consists of downloading firmware blobs from the crappy websites of motherboard makers, copying them to a USB stick, booting your BIOS into flash mode, point it to the USB stick, and hoping for the best. It’s basically the stone age out there.

Dasharo on the V54 also offers fan and temperature controls and battery threshold settings (which is not common on laptops), the usual set of BIOS options every BIOS has, as well as a whole slew of security and privacy features to protect the firmware from tampering. During the configuration and purchase process, you can further choose to enable secure boot, disable the Intel management engine, or choose to use the Dasharo coreboot+Heads option. This option replaces the default TianoCore EDK II payload with the Heads payload.

Unlike EDK II, Heads firmware ensures the system’s firmware and boot integrity at all stages. It does this with measured boot technology. Measured boot provides cryptographic hashes for each boot component. This covers the main SPI (BIOS) firmware itself and all of the important boot files in the /boot directory, including the disk encryption setup files, the kernel, the initrd file and the GRUB configuration. The hashes are securely stored and attested in the independent TPM hardware.

↫ NovaCustom’s explainer on Dasharo coreboot+Heads

I did not opt for Dasharo coreboot+Heads, because NovaCustom warns that it is only for advanced users who require the utmost in security, preferably in combination with Qubes OS (you can always switch to Heads later if your needs change). The point is: Dasharo offers a lot of flexibility, from a reasonably secure baseline, up to extreme firmware and boot security for those that need it. I really wish more PC makers defaulted to coreboot or other possible open source BIOS replacements.

The privacy options NovaCustom offers don’t stop at the firmware, though. You can also have NovaCustom install a privacy screen, tamper-evident screws and packaging, or a sliding camera cover. If you really want to take it to the next level, you can add a Buskill, or have the webcam and microphone array removed entirely. The only reason I didn’t opt for this removal is that I wanted to be able to tell you about the quality of the webcam.

It’s a laptop webcam. It works. You know what to expect.

NovaCustom also offers a few what I call vanity options: they can engrave your own custom logo on the lid and/or palmrest (or not have any logos at all), and you can opt for a custom logo during boot (or, again, not have any at all). NovaCustom engraved the “OS” of our logo on the lid, and I sent them the ASCII OSNews logo from our Gemini shirt to set as the boot logo. Both turned out absolutely great, and NovaCustom will have a back-and-forth with you as the customer to ensure everything will turn out looking as desired.

Yes, you can technically set the boot logo yourself, and even find a local shop that might be willing to laser etch a logo on your laptop’s lid or palmrest (unlikely and probably expensive), but having this as part of the configuration and ordering process is quite nice. This way, my laptop is not acting as a billboard for some faceless corporation like Apple or HP or whatever, but instead shows either no logo, or something that matters to me. The downside could be that it might make your laptop more difficult to sell in the future? I don’t know.

One other configuration option I’d like to highlight is the keyboard. NovaCustom is clearly a Europe-first company, because the list of keyboard layouts you can choose from is more extensive than anything I’ve ever seen before. There’s over 30 different layouts, as well as one that’s entirely blank, and the option to create your own custom layout (you’ll need to supply an Inkscape file for this one). Of course, you can also customise the Super key – the Windows logo, Tux, the Qubes OS logo, something custom, anything is possible. I opted for the the plain “Super”.

There’s a few more configuration options you can choose from, like a choice of operating system (or none at all), specific Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip (or none at all), and so on. You get the idea: NovaCustom allows you to really make your laptop yours, which is such a breath of fresh air in a world where so many brands try so hard to have their users’ laptops act as marketing billboards. Add in the truly extensive privacy options, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a similar combination of configuration options anywhere else.

NovaCustom is also fully on board with repairability and serviceability. They offer replacements for almost every part of the laptop, from the motherboard down to the screws used to keep it all together, and everything in between, for seven years after purchase. Of course, possible repairs and parts replacements can be performed for free under the three-year warranty. I honestly wouldn’t spend money on any laptop that doesn’t come with extensive parts availability like this.

My particular configuration, including the laser etching, cost €1986, with a starting price of €1420 for the base configuration without any additional customisations like the laser etching or boot logo. This is not a cheap laptop by any stretch of the imagination, but with these specifications it should be able to serve as a powerful, capable laptop for at least a decade, and probably more.

Missing options

As many configuration options as NovaCustom offers, I do miss a few things that I would love to see in a future follow-up. The obvious one is adding AMD processor and GPU options, especially as AMD GPUs are the more optimal choice for Wayland. Sadly, this is unlikely to happen, as coreboot simply doesn’t support Ryzen chips very well or at all.

I already mentioned the lack of touch support for the display, as well as the diving board trackpad which I’d love to see replaced by a haptic model, even as a more expensive option. Something like a Linux/BSD-friendly fingerprint reader would also be nice, especially if it can be easily configured to perform elevation requests (NovaCustom does offer optional Windows Hello support, so Windows users do have a biometric option to go for).

Lastly, while I don’t mind parts of the device being made of plastic, I do think having the entire shell made out of metals can improve the overall feel of the laptop. As I’m putting the final touches on this review, even Arctic Sweden is experiencing a heatwave, and the plastic keyboard deck does not feel as cool as the metal ones or the carbon fibre deck on my old XPS 13. The plastic can get a little sticky when the living room temperature hits 27°, and that’s just not pleasant.

Conclusion

Other than that, I have very little to complain about with the NovaCustom V54. It’s an extremely configurable, privacy-oriented laptop that takes Linux and open source seriously, with an extensive, seven-year parts availability promise. It has a no-nonsense design focused not necessarily on thinness or minimalism, but on getting things done and offering a good set of ports you actually need out in the real world, so you don’t have to mess around with dongles.

Operating system support is obviously excellent, and my distribution of choice, Fedora KDE, had zero issues with the hardware in this machine. In that sense, the NovaCustom V54 fits right in with a growing number of Linux-first laptops by a variety of smaller OEMs, with NovaCustom’s unique selling points being customisability, configurability, and a very strong focus on privacy in particular.

It’s a great time to be a Linux user in search of a laptop, and NovaCustom should definitely be on your shortlist. Out of all the options currently on the market, for me personally it’s the Dasharo coreboot firmware and extensive hardware customisation options that would make me choose NovaCustom over the competition. As I highlighted, there are definitely some areas where there’s room for improvement, but overall, this is an excellent offering.

1. NovaCustom is a previous sponsor, but they had zero editorial control over this review, and will be reading it the same time you are. ↩︎
2. For fairness’ sake, the perceived legacy of Marie Antoinette is disputed. The famous quote “let them eat brioche” was not said by her, either. ↩︎

Did you know KDE has a television-focused user interface? It’s been languishing for a while now, but a recent week-long effort by KDE developer Devin has brought a lot of new life into the project.

I have been a long time Plasma Mobile contributor, but I have always had a keen interest in having Linux on my TV! I have noticed that in the past few months, the Plasma Bigscreen project has had some interest from people wanting to contribute, but there have not been any active KDE developers working on the project. Since I have some time off school (having just graduated university), I decided to take a swing at improving the project for a week.

↫ Devin, KDE developer

It turned out to be one hell of a productive week, because the list of improvements achieved in that one week is kind of amazing. Lots of overhauls of the visual design, a new search view, complete redesign of the settings panels, and a lot more. The idea of running a KDE Plasma-based interface on my TVs sounds incredibly appealing, and I hope the project can make even more progress.

Late last year, Mishaal Rahman reported that Google was going to merge ChromeOS and Android, and it seems Google itself has now confirmed that’s exactly what’s happening.

“I asked because we’re going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they’re getting done,” Samat explained.

↫ Lance Ulanoff at TechRadar

I’m definitely interested to see what using Android across desktops, laptops, tablets, martphones, and smartwatches is going to be like. The same applications on all those form factors? So many have tried, and as many have failed. I just don’t think Google has what it takes.

The latest alpha of the upcoming Blender 5.0 release comes with High Dynamic Range (HDR) support for Linux on Wayland which will, if everything works out, make it into the final Blender 5.0 release on October 1, 2025. The post on the developer forum comes with instructions on how to enable the experimental support and how to test it.

If you are using Fedora Workstation 42, which ships GNOME version 48, everything is already included to run Blender with HDR. All that is required is an HDR compatible display and graphics driver, and turning on HDR in the Display Settings.

↫ Sebastian Wick

It’s interesting to note that Blender on Windows won’t be getting HDR support, and that’s because Windows’ HDR support is subpar compared to Wayland on Linux, and requires a ton more work which the Blender team isn’t going to do. It seems the Wayland developers made all the right choices when it comes to HDR support. Needless to say, X11 doesn’t have HDR support.

The design of the Wayland color-management protocol, and the resulting active color-management paradigm of Wayland compositors was a good choice, making it easy for developers to do the right thing, while also giving them more control if they so chose.

↫ Sebastian Wick

Weird. I was told Wayland was an unusable mess.

On Windows, there’s an option to show the seconds on the taskbar clock, but it comes with a warning that it might reduce battery life if you switch it on. LTT Labs decided to look into this to see just how much of a thing this really is, and they concluded that yes, it does actually affect battery life. They saw a drop of about 5%-15%, depending on configuration.

In percentage terms, the drops weren’t massive. For most people, it probably won’t make or break your day. But if you’re on a long flight, running low on battery, or trying to squeeze out every last bit of endurance, it’s not entirely nothing either.

↫ Woolly Door at LTT Labs

I mean, having the second tick away on the click would drive me up the wall when I’m trying to use my computer, but I’m sure quite a few among you do enable the seconds display on your own setups (Windows or otherwise). I’m curious to see if the same battery life reduction is measurable on KDE, GNOME, or macOS.

What if you want to use Wayland, but prefer Window Maker, which is restricted to legacy X11? Enter wlmaker, or Wayland Maker, a Wayland compositor that reproduces the look and feel of Window Maker. It’s lightweight, very configurable through human-readable configuration files, supports dockable applications, and more.

It’s actually packaged in FreeBSD and a number of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Debian (Fedora’s package is outdated), but of course, you can compile it yourself, too.

I’m hardly a “networking” or system admin expert. Even still, I’ve always been interested in the concept of building out my own home router with OpenBSD. It seemed so “hacky” and cool! The problem is that most of the tutorials I stumble across on the internet seem so daunting. I normally read through the guides (maybe even poke around the core man docs for a bit as well) but always end up returning to my default ISP setup.

But that all changes today! Best of all, you can come along for the ride!

↫ Bradley Taunt

Exactly what it says on the tin.

It’s become almost impossible to avoid the “AI” evangelists spreading the gospel of how “AI” tools are helping them work faster and get more stuff done in less time, but do any of those claims have any basis in reality? Should we really be firing countless people and replace them with “AI” tools? Should we spend god knows how much money on “AI” tools and force employees to use them?

Well…

When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

↫ Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Beth Barnes, and David Rein

We’re very much in the early days of proper research into the actual effectiveness and real-world benefits of “AI” tools for all kinds of professions, so a study like this definitely isn’t a smoking gun, but it does fly in the face of the tech companies and their evangelists shoving “AI” down our collective throat. With how much these tools get even the most basic stuff wrong, with how often they lie and make stuff up, I just can’t imagine them speeding up as many tasks as people claim they do.

At the same time, “AI” tools do definitely have a place for very specific tasks, and I think that studies like these will look different for every single profession and even every single task within a profession. It’s going to be incredibly hard or even impossible to come to a “theory of everything” on the effectiveness and usefulness of “AI” tools. It won’t be until this idiotic hype dies down before we can have a grounded, honest, fact-based discussion about which “AI” tools make sense where.

There’s quite a few ways to mess around with home automation, with the most popular communication methods being things like ZigBee, plain Wi-Fi, and so on. One of the more promising new technologies is Thread, and Dennis Schubert decided to try and use it for a new homebrew project he was working on. After diving into the legalese of the matter, though, he discovered that Thread is a complete non-starter due to excessive mandatory membership fees without any exceptions for non-commercial use.

To summarize: if you’re a hobbyist without access to some serious throwaway money to join the Thread Group, there is no way to use Thread legally – the license does not include an exception for non-commercial uses. If you’re like me and want to write a series of blog posts about how Thread works, there’s also no legal way.

A commercial membership program for technology stacks like Thread isn’t new; it’s somewhat common in that space. Same with requiring certifications for your commercial products if you want to use a logo like the “Works with Thread” banner. And that’s fine with me. If you’re selling a commercial electronics product, you have to go through many certification processes anyway, so that seems fair. But having a blanket ban on implementations, even for non-commercial projects, is absolutely bonkers. This means that no hobbyist should ever get close to it, and that means that the next generation of electrical engineers and decision-makers don’t get to play around with the tech before they enter the industry. But of course, that doesn’t really matter to the Thread Group: their members list includes companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Nordic, NXP, and Qualcomm – they can just force Thread into being successful by making sure it’s shipped in the most popular “home hubs”. So it’s just us that get screwed over.

Anyway, if you planned to look at Thread… well, don’t. You’re not allowed to use it.

↫ Dennis Schubert

So you can buy Thread dev kits to create your own devices at home, but even such non-commercial use is not allowed. The situation would be even more complex for anyone trying to sell a small batch of fun devices using Thread, because they’d first have to fork over the exorbitant yearly membership fee. What this means is that Thread is a complete non-starter for anyone but an established name, which is probably exactly why the big names are pushing it so hard.

They want to control our home automation just as much as everything else, and it seems like Thread is their foot in the door. Be advised.

To better support you and provide earlier, more consistent access to in-development features, we are announcing a significant evolution in our pre-release program. Moving forward, the Android platform will have a Canary release channel, which will replace the previous developer preview program. This Canary release channel will function alongside the existing beta program.

This change is designed to provide a more streamlined and continuous opportunity for you to try out new platform capabilities and provide feedback throughout the entire year, not just in the early months of a new release cycle.

↫ Dan Galpin on the Android Developers Blog

This new Canary channel is intended for developers, and you can expect a ton of bugs and breaking changes. Updates are basically streamed continuously over the air, but not all changes will make it to a final release of Android (as in, they can be pulled definitively). You can join the new channel with any supported Pixel device, but going back to a beta or final release will require a full wipe.

In Chrome, Skia is used to render paint commands from Blink and the browser UI into pixels on your screen, a process called rasterization. Skia has powered Chrome Graphics since the very beginning. Skia eventually ran into performance issues as the web evolved and became more complex, which led Chrome and Skia to invest in a GPU accelerated rasterization backend called Ganesh.

Over the years, Ganesh matured into a solid highly performant rasterization backend and GPU rasterization launched on all platforms in Chrome on top of GL (via ANGLE on Windows D3D9/11). However, Ganesh always had a GL-centric design with too many specialized code paths and the team was hitting a wall when trying to implement optimizations that took advantage of modern graphics APIs in a principled manner.

This set the stage for the team to rethink GPU rasterization from the ground up in the form of a new rasterization backend, Graphite. Graphite was developed from the start to be principled by having fewer and more comprehensible code paths. This forward looking design helps take advantage of modern graphics APIs like Metal, Vulkan and D3D12 and paradigms like compute based path rasterization, and is multithreaded by default.

↫ Michael Ludwig and Sunny Sachanandani at the Chromium Blog

The level of complexity in browsers and their rendering engines blows my mind every time I read about it. When I first got access to the internet, it consisted of static pages with text and still images, but now browser engines are almost as complex as entire operating systems. Not all of that progress has been good – boy has a lot of it not been good – but we’re stuck with it now, and thus people making browsers have to deal with stuff like this.

If you ever wonder why there really only are two browser engines in the world – Google’s Blink and Apple’s WebKit – this is your answer. Who in their right mind wants to develop something like this from scratch and compete with Google and Apple?

GlobalFoundries today announced a definitive agreement to acquire MIPS, a leading supplier of AI and processor IP. This strategic acquisition will expand GF’s portfolio of customizable IP offerings, allowing it to further differentiate its process technologies with IP and software capabilities.

↫ Press release about the acquisition

MIPS has a long and storied history, most recently as it abandoned its namesake instruction set architecture in favour of RISC-V. MIPS processors are still found in a ton of devices though, but usually not in high-profile devices like smartphones or whatever. Their new RISC-V cores haven’t yet seen a lot of uptake, but that’s a problem all across the RISC-V ecosystem.

Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill only started working on Wayback a few weeks ago, but in a blog post today they dive into a few more details about how much progress has already been achieved. To refresh your memory, Wayback allows you to run a legacy X11-based desktop environment on top of Wayland by running a stub Wayland compositor in front of Xwayland, capable of serving as a full X server. This way, the transition to Wayland and the removal of X.org from popular distributions won’t mean you can’t run X11-based desktop environments anymore.

Within just a few weeks, the project has made serious progress.

There’s a lot still left to do before we can confidently say that Wayback is ready for distributions to switch to. This work is across the stack: Wayback still needs to expose surfaces that Xwayland can use, Xwayland needs to implement a few new features such as cursor warping and some X extensions inside Xwayland itself need to be properly plumbed (such as Xinerama being able to make use of the Wayland output layout data).

Longer term goals aside, we are at most a few weeks away from the first alpha-quality release of Wayback. The main focus of this release is to get to a point where enough is working that users with basic setups and requirements can be reasonably served by Wayback in place of the X.org server, to allow for further testing. It’s already to a point where I am daily driving it.

↫ Ariadne Conill

Of course, there’s still tons of bugs to figure out and missing functionality to implement, but the fact that they’re just weeks away from a first alpha release is honestly impressive. I really hope Wayback picks up even more and gets adopted by other distributions as well, since it’s such an elegant and future-proof solution to a very real problem. It’s important that desktop environments that will not or cannot transition to Wayland remain available to Linux users regardless of their choice of Wayland or X11.

When facing the slow sunsetting of a windowing system, some people go off on deranged neofascist conspiracy rants against the woke illuminati, while others sit down and develop real forward-looking solutions. I’m glad virtually every Linux distribution that matters trusts the latter over the former.

As of today, Stat Counter reports that Windows 11 now has 50.88% of the Windows market, with Windows 10 dropping to 46.2%, giving it a comfortable lead over its predecessor. Windows 11 has been on the market since 2021 but had only amassed less than 10% of the market by 2022.

It’s been a slow but steady climb since then, growing from 18% to 28% in 2023, with similar growth to 36% in 2024. It’s this year where Windows 11 really started taking off, likely aided by the fact that Microsoft is now pushing Windows 10’s end of support hard.

↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central

Up to 50% of all Windows users, mere months before Windows 10 is no longer supported, and it took them 4 years to get here. Windows users really don’t like Windows 11, do they?