The first time I heard the phrase Year of the Linux Desktop, I was probably at a Lanka Linux User Group (LKLUG) get-together in 2005 and we were probably talking about Ubuntu, the then-new desktop-focused distro that was taking the world by storm. Since then, it has been a mantra (and meme) of the Linux community every year:
Twenty years later, I think 2026 could be the year where it finally rings true. For real, this time!
an amd 4k gaming build from pcbuilders.lk
Recently, when looking to finally build my dream 4k gaming PC, I stumbled upon the fantastic PCBUILDERS.LK. Working with them solely over WhatsApp text chat, I was able to create the specific build I wanted, maximised for solid performance on Linux:
- AMD Ryzen 7600x
- Asus Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT
I reduced the TDP on the Ryzen 7600x to 65W and it runs at a maximum of 80°C during gaming. The RX 9070 XT runs remarkably cool even when pushing 120 FPS at 4K: usually it sits at around 50-60°C. The performance of this setup on Linux is excellent, but more on that below!
PCBUILDERS.LK obviously runs a tight ship. The salesperson Aravinda and the owner Sahan were very knowledgeable and were able to guide me on things like CPU vs CPU cooler requirements as we built it together on WhatsApp. I placed the order for the PC on Tuesday morning and received it safely via courier on Wednesday evening. Further, when the Thermaltake PSU we used came with a 15amp plug and I didn’t have a socket for it at my desk, a 13amp plug was delivered to me the very next morning.
Most impressively, the final price was about 20% – 30% less than what I saw at similar retailers.
This is not sponsored content (this blog is not popular enough for that). I just genuinely think that if you’re based in Sri Lanka, you can’t go wrong with ordering PC components or full builds from them.
4k 120 FPS gaming on cachyos linux
Prior to last week, I hadn’t even heard of CachyOS. I’ve used Debian-based Linux distros for 20+ years and in the past have dabbled in other distros like Gentoo. My Steam Deck OLED (now passed on to a friend) also obviously ran SteamOS, which in its current form, is Arch Linux-based. Valve has done a lot for Linux gaming and Proton now runs 95% of Windows games really, really well. In many cases the games even run faster on Linux.
This is work that Valve started more than 10 years ago, as seen in this video by Valve CEO Gabe Newell back in 2013:
Unfortunately, SteamOS is not generally available for non-Steamdeck hardware at the moment, so I began to look for other gaming-focused distros. Bazzite seemed like a popular choice, but after some research I chose CachyOS, mainly because:
- It runs highly up-to-date kernels, which would be important for drivers for my Radeon RX 9070 XT.
- CachyOS compiles packages specifically for Zen 4 meaning they would make maximum use of my Ryzen 7600x.
- It also does some other patching and optimisations for AMD CPUs, which was nice to have.
- Finally, given that CachyOS is Arch-based, it means that I’d have access to the Arch User Repository (AUR), which is a great way to get up to date packages of whatever software I wanted.
Using balenaEtcher, I created a bootable USB-based ISO of the CachyOS Nov 2025 release and booted into it. The live USB environment worked flawlessly. Graphics, networking, everything worked out of the box, and the installation was a breeze. It helped of course that I chose an AMD Radeon graphics card, as Radeon drivers have been in the Linux kernel for a while now.
NVIDIA Linux drivers are not nearly as stable atm, mostly due to the company’s historical resistance to open sourcing their Linux drivers or working with the Linux kernel developers, perhaps most famously summed up in this interview by Linus Torlvalds himself:
But I digress! During my CachyOS installation, I didn’t have to manually install any drivers, as everything I needed was built into the kernel version I am using atm (6.18.2, which was released only on Dec 18 btw and is already in CachyOS!). This was a very different experience from attempts at installing desktop Linux in the early 2000s, which always required quite a bit (and sometimes a lot!) of tweaking after the fact.
Booting into CachyOS, it made setting up everything for gaming super easy as well, via its Hello app, which loads on every login by default:
I clicked Install Gaming Packages and apart from the necessary gaming and graphics packages like Proton and Mesa 3D, it went ahead and and installed Steam for me too. Pretty soon I was downloading ARC Raiders:
And a few minutes later, I was playing it, at a buttery smooth 4k 120 FPS on FSR Balanced / High settings. I felt like I had finally arrived at the future we had been promised in 2005: the Year of the Linux Desktop, where I could just install the OS and download and play a game with the same or even higher FPS than Windows!
Caveat: the wifi
It’s always the WiFi, isn’t it? This was indeed the only detour in my CachyOS setup process.
At first I thought it could be Linux kernel driver issues with the Mediatek wireless chip in my MSI Gaming Wifi Plus B650 motherboard, but I could not confirm this. The WiFi connection would just drop and reconnect every minute or so.
After a lot of troubleshooting the only fix I could come up with is using a static IP for my PC as the disconnect seems to be somehow related to DHCP. I haven’t got around to debugging this fully yet and I don’t plan to spend a lot of time on it, as the static IP fix is working fine for now.
Windows 10 is dead. long live desktop linux!
While Linux has long dominated the server space, 2026 may be the year it begins to take the desktop in a meaningful way. Maybe not in terms of raw market share just yet, but in terms of mindshare. For example, in 2025:
1) PewDiePie, one of the first gaming content creators on youtube, switched to Linux as his main OS:
2) Gamers Nexus, one of the top PC hardware review channels on YouTube, just 3 weeks ago released their first Linux gaming benchmarks:
In 2026, with Windows 10 support now ended and Windows 11 harvesting your data to feed their AI slop machine, I predict we will see more and more former Windows users switch to Linux for their desktop OS and given how far Linux gaming has come with the Proton stack, I think a good portion of these users could be gamers.
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