Every year, people discuss how this year will totally definitely be the year of the Linux desktop, where Linux desktops become mainstream and topple Microsoft from the dominant market position.

The odds of this actually happening are as likely as Half Life 3 releasing; probably not but there's always a little hope! Personally, my bets are on late 2025/2026 as the actual year where things will change, what with Windows 10 becoming end-of-life that year. Of course, this assumes that people will actually be concerned about keeping their OS up to date (looking at you, Windows XP users!) and that they don't simply buy something new to bow to the Windows 11 TPM requirement that "obsoletes" plenty of perfectly fine hardware.

On an unrelated note, I suspect more e-waste cheap computer listings on eBay to pop up in the coming years, it'll be a great time to look for a laptop to tide me through college!

Anywho, here's a few little desktop toys for Linux (X11) systems we played with at our first meeting!

oneko

oneko, specifically the sakura edition, which comes with additional character sprites, has existed for eons in one form or another.

All of them are in essence little desktop toys where a sprite (usually a tiny kitty) runs around chasing your "mouse."

To install it, you can simply run

apt install oneko

or any equivalent on your Linux distro.

Running oneko will show your little friend running around, try oneko -help to see what other little friends you can get to show up!

I'm gonna go take a nap...

xsnow

Just kidding!

I'm only 2 months late to the winter holidays, but that doesn't mean you can't cozy up with a mug of hot chocolate at your desktop!

Just apt install xsnow, and xsnow will bring up a menu for you to customize your festive experience.

A (belated) happy holidays to all, wishing you all a wonderful year!

Appendix

Oh!

And don't forget to kill or otherwise terminate oneko when you log out!

I may or may not have accidentally hammered a core on the StuyCS servers by leaving a test instance of oneko running :P

Don't make my mistake! Check ps -A!