The Linux Challenge Is Back at LTT — And This Year It Hits Different
Every year or so, someone at Linus Tech Tips bets that Linux is finally ready for normal people. This time, it's not just one person. On the February 27, 2026 WAN Show, both Linus Sebastian and Riley Paddock are deep into the company's latest Linux challenge, running their work machines entirely on Linux for an extended period [1]. What makes this year's experiment different isn't the hardware. It's the honesty. Linus is running Arch with Cinnamon. Riley picked Cosmic, the 1.0 desktop from System76 that only recently hit its first stable release. That context matters: Cosmic 1.0 is, as Riley put it on the show, "an infant baby." In her words: "To me, 1.0 means new and pre-1.0 means not even new yet." That she's doing the challenge on it anyway says something about how far the ecosystem has come — and also about the culture of Linux users who kept telling her to try it.
The day-to-day verdict from both of them is surprisingly positive — with one glaring exception. Discord? Works immediately, flawlessly, with QR code login [1]. Slack? Same. Steam? Packaged fine in most distros, though Riley was briefly confused when it wasn't in the AUR out of the box. Chrome isn't available either, but Chromium is, which is close enough for most workflows. Riley even mentioned that Firefox for personal use and Chromium for work — her normal two-browser setup — "worked out fine." For a developer or power user who lives in the terminal and browser tabs, Linux in 2026 is genuinely excellent. Then there's Microsoft Teams. "Teams is the reason Luke will go postal," Linus said, and he wasn't joking. Microsoft killed its official Linux Teams client years ago, and while third-party wrappers exist, Riley's experience was exactly what you'd expect from unofficial software: calls that only partially connected, a meeting link system that wouldn't hand off to the app, and enough friction that she ended up rerouting calls manually. "The biggest problem I've had so far is just Teams," she confirmed. "Which is kind of funny, because Discord worked flawlessly." This is the real story of Linux in the enterprise in 2026. It's not that Linux is bad. It's that Microsoft built a moat around its productivity tools — and until Google Workspace or Slack fully displaces Teams in corporate environments, Linux users will keep climbing that wall.




