The future of Linux
I'm not proposing anything here, I'm curious what you all think of the future.
What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?
I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.
A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it's now your desktop computer. That's one vision. ChromeOS has its "everything is in the cloud" vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it's free software.
If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?
An immutable OS that run all app whatever are their package distribution.
Later a full OS rewritten in Rust with goods tools that share folder's content accross all devices and mass storage device as syncthing do.
Let's imagine a button where you click on add devices, then you scan the QR code and chose which folder you want to share. :)
The sharing thing sounds like a security nightmare. And who the hell am I sharing files with anyway? No thanks.
My vision of the future is having an os that'll install itself on any device I own whether the manufacturers want me to or not. I want to own the things I own.
That's it. Everything else is fine.
Well, that depend a lot on how do you setup security.
On nextcloud, i can see which device are connected to it, who, when, where and i get alert mail. When you add a new devices, as it is in the settings you will need your password. You might want to extend this security to usb storage with an isolated environnement. So all you need is a dashboard.
The solution i suggest is also a security in case of hardware faillure. How many people do a backup and copy their important file regulary ? I think i'm just making their life easier by hardcoding it. For me it's as brushing my tooth, it's not mandatory, but it's better to make it mandatory.
Same but i differ. I don't want any kind of device to exist to reduce our footprint's carbon. Eg :
I would limit phones to 3 models and remove all brand. No ads needed, nor announcement. Something low tech. There would be lot benefit on the software side and repairability. It's easier to maitain and it leaves our hand free to improve the OS
Yeah it does depend on how you set up security but...
I never used to give a shit about being secure until I got I got a virus last year. This wasn't just any virus. I'm pretty sure there were people on the other end but it lived in my uefi, made it's way onto 3 android phones, a tablet, my laptop, and I caught one of my phone uploading custom firmware to my Samsung tv. Samsung claimed it was impossible but. It was in progress.
Some glitch allowed me to resize the window that was being used on my phone to see their remote desktop application. And holding a button meant they couldn't activate that button so I was able to get a peak under the hood so to speak..
Regardless I ended up needing a new motherboard and it took me ages to figure out how to get at the secret partitions on my pcs hard drives. I have to do a full NAND reinstall of the OS on my phones since. Surprise surprise. It lived in the eeprom (eeprom? Where the bootloader is) and factory resets don't touch that.
I've been paranoid ever since. The fucked up part was (I still used windows at the time).that it hooked into the kernel at boot so the vrisu itself was invisible, but I could see changes to the registry it would make in real time, the one drive files it would create, the permissions you'd gradually lose if you did anything that could be interpreted as fucking with it.
I'm not sure how long it was doing it's thing before I found it plenty of people I talked to didn't even believe any of this, and it was hard to prove because it was fucking invisible.
So when I hear about security functions like you describe that amount to "don't worry we'll show you it's secure trust is" unless I'm able to really get at EVERYTHIG in real time and have it backed up, locally or another online service, I just can't feel secure.
Even some of the most secure platforms have the NSA hooked into everything. Like. If it doesn't show me EVERYTHING I don't fucking trust it. Full stop.
That's just crazy...Given my IT knowledge, I would be a Bantha fodder...I'm not sure i would be able to see those registry being written in the system log as my main skill is doing a search several time until i undertand what were the correct words for this case and try few command. Let's see the first step would be disconnecting the wifi. And maybe use Kali ? Dunno.
Well that's very scary, i apologize. Thank for sharing your story :)
Network shares aren't exactly a new thing. They exist now for almost exactly half a century.
Yes and i didn't reinvent the whell. However, I still remind people to do backup accross those devices. It's not news but it's not well applied by lot people, so i would hardcode it into the OS.
Do you have a phone ?
Please scan qr code
Choose folders
Do you have a mass storage device ?
Connect it
Chose folders
Warning : you haven't setup any backup
Warning : your last backup was last week. please connect your mass storage device to save your backup.
So, for something new, i would like to improve those utilities/tools and expand their use.
Android, Windows, and Apple products offer out-of-the-box backup to different cloud services.
They are so deeply integrated, that many people don't even know that their data is backed up.
And most Linux users object to it for exactly that reason.
Syncthing hahaha. Would just need a very simple system tray / settings page UI with just the "show ID" "select folders" and more buttons
Ahah yeah but completely integrated in the OS so we do need to remind people to save their important data in 3 differents supports. I'm pretty sure people don't do thoses saves. Except techies and people who learned it the hard way.
And a better UI where you can setup the folder space as a disk manager. eg : don't save video on my phone. Limit the folder to 1gb on phone. And on external mass storage, share everything : 1tb
I think there is lot potential and that Syncthing should be integrated in the GNU/Linux's core.
Very true! Its a great, powerful and very easy to use software.
in my opinion, Linux has an edge on pretty much everything except for adoption. It's stable, secure, and updated very often. There are a ton of very great libraries for it that make building and running programs very easy. It's great on resource management, and the kernel makes great use of the hardware.
However, most pitfalls in Linux comes from it having less adoption than more popular OSes like Windows or Mac OS. Ultimately, this dampens the "friendliness" of Linux to the masses. If you buy a piece of hardware from the electronics store, there will often be no Linux support. The "mom and dad" folk might enjoy it, but won't know how to install or update things, simply because it's different. Vendors will often deliver shoddy binary blobs for common hardware like wireless cards.
With more adoption comes more pressure for support. We're seeing this with the Steam Deck already: if a game company wants to sell their games on the Deck, then they need to add Linux support, even if that means ensuring that it runs on Wine. I'd love to see this kind of thing for everyday use, i.e. a scanner including Linux software and instructions (and hopefully isn't a nasty "install.run" thing).
If it becomes more common, then friends will help other friends with their computer. "Mom and dad" can look up solutions to problems on the internet, and they'll be able to fix it themselves. Your aunt will buy an iPod and she'll be able to run iTunes in a first-party way. With enough adoption, it will even be weird to run operating systems other than Linux because hardly anyone runs Windows or Mac OS anymore.
I don't think Linux will ever be in the majority, but I see it climbing a bit in the next ten years. Lots of kinks have been worked out, and with the right software, it's even easy-to-use and pretty to look at. We need more devices like the Steam Deck to help pave the way for more adoption! Then after a while, people will use it cause that's what they know.
This is rapidly becoming irrelevant as the PC crowd is being reduced to professionals and hobbyists, who don't have a problem learning things. The less computer-literate users stick to phones nowadays and they're mostly content consumers on that platform so all they contribute is body count. They wouldn't bring any contribution to Linux even if they tried to use it.
But it is being dominant on every platform where it makes sense and/or there hasn't been a concerted effort to keep it out. The PC is basically the only major holdout thanks to Microsoft and even them have adopted it to some extent.
I think this is a bad thing
I mean, they'd be consumers on any device they used. Streaming/social/email/browsing that's pretty much it.
It's definitely bad for kids who aren't exposed to PCs anymore.
I wouldn't bank on professionals being technical. The desktop has tons of use in the white collar space which is full of people all over the spectrum of technical literacy, but also specialty.
These are great points. Ironically, most phones run Linux, too 😁
Honestly Wayland vs xorg thing keeps me from switching to it
Steam Deck gets more popular.
Steam console released with improved multi user experience and VR.
PlayStation sales drop in growth.
Steam OS released, PCs can use it with generic kernels.
Gaming PC manufacturers offer steam OS as a preinstalled.
PC manufacturers start to offer popular distros preinstalled.
System 76 puts their in house laptops into Best Buy shelves.
Adobe and Office no longer stuck on Windows and are distributed as wasm applications.
I can see, in some rare-but-actually-possible conditions, all of those elements happen, but not the last one.
Why would Adobe and Microsoft release software for WebAssembly/Web environments, when Microsoft wants to keep you locked in their shitty environment?
What I could see is that the FOSS alternatives keep getting updated (some of them, like LibreOffice, are full alternatives to close-source software and they have been like that for years), the user population expands (expecially with Adobe and MS wanting to put subscriptions everywhere) and using FOSS software as alternatives for Office, Premiere, PhotoShop, ... becomes the norm.
I actually believe Adobe has already started to. Iirc that's what powers the web version of Photoshop.
MS with Office is purely speculation. But I believe wasm will be very disruptive once we have a stable abi and I'm sure MS will want to make their own superset of that stable abi to sell Azure integrations.
This could likely also be used to make a more fully featured online office suite. If the others did come true. There could be some pressure to make office available if it put enough of a dent into Wundows market share.
The azure speculation might be true, but Office? Naaahh...
I wish Oculus brought back support
I'd go a few levels deeper: the kernel development process seems to become more and more dysfunctional. Legacy code hindering innovation, bad people being bottlenecks and this absurdly ancient "send a patch via mail" process.
Currently, that's only sand in the gears, but if it gets worse, this could seriously threaten the future.
I'm 100% with this. It doesn't have to be on GitHub, but something like GitHub would really help. It's easy to create a fork, a PR, and get good reviews on relevant lines of code. With email, not so much. In my opinion, If email really was better, few folks would adopt a VCS like GitHub.
I mean, you could still have emails as the base layer, de facto it already is a well-defined protocol layer on top of SMTP, so why not slap a nice GUI on it and call it a day?
You mean something like https://patchwork.kernel.org?
Sounds like GitHub 😁
Except not proprietary and solely owned by a FAANG company.
What the heck even is the point of using email for this?
It's established and vendor/platform independent.
I get the idea, but come on, the inventor of git, a distributed VCS is unable to have an actually distributed development?
Linus wrote git before anything like github existed, and the best way to do it was email. They just haven't switched away from using email
Weird.
I don't see a problem with it. I don't know what tools you use, but the current process certainly isn't ancient. Even if I use GitHub or something else, I still highly depend on my e-mail to actually know somebody published a patch and if I am supposed to review it. I don't have to use a GUI coupled with shitty UI decisions. E-mails are very simple in their own way and I don't find it ancient or bad.
I want to be able to use all the software I want on Linux, officially supported by the manufacturer. No more unofficial version that's kinda working but not really. All the hardware in my new Laptop should come with official Linux drivers, so I can actually use all the things I payed for. I want to be able to contact the support if something doesn't work, and not get a "we don't support that" as an answer. And I want to be able to truly recommend a Linux OS to my non-techy friends and family, so they too can enjoy the freedom and privacy instead of having to sell it out to big corporations because they just can't use a terminal.
I don't think this "plug in your phone and use it as PC" will ever really work. Apps and games always get more fancy and demanding as computers become more powerful, and desktop PCs will always be much more powerful than phones. E.g. a couple of years ago I thought at some point I can buy a tablet and use it for heavy duty coding because it will have become powerful enough, but all the tooling just eats up the performance increase to help you be more productive.
I also don't believe in the "OS in the cloud" thing. Always connected programs and games are shitty already, just image that with your entire OS. There are physical limitations that will always make it inferiour to a good local setup imo, at least until we figure out how to connect network devices with wormholes instead of cables. What I do believe in is having a small always-on personal server in your home, that can replace most of the cloud services we rely on today.
The first paragraph tells me you don't understand linux?
Why is that?
I don't know what you mean by "unofficial versions". All the hardware being supported is simply not feasible because there is no financial interest for manufacturers to do so. You as a user have to make sure you are buying hardware with a good rep. How often did you call/write to a support in terms of computer hardware in the last 10 years? Fixing the problems yourself is a much faster way of solving issues. And this never will cease to be the case for any linux distro.
Your friends are not prioritizing freedom/privacy over comfort, so Linux will never "solve" their problem.
I'm not talking about how it is today, I'm talking about how I think it should be in the future. Of course there are reasons why the things are like they are today, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't or can't change.
Someone buying a Windows laptop or Android phone for example doesn't need to check if that OS is well supported on that hardware or whether they will get official support for it. The device comes with the OS and the manufacturer guarantees that it will work, that is what we should achieve for desktop Linux as well. E.g. those dev machines with Linux preinstalled and officially supported by the OEMs are a great step in the right direction, but we need that for the regular consumer across a wide range of devices!
Unofficial versions are versions created by the community because the manufacturer of a software doesn't officially support it on your platform. A simple example would be Flatpaks for Discord or Teams, or running games with Proton or regular programs with Wine. If it works it works, but the original devs won't invest any time to improve it, and they might even break things in new releases because it's just not on their radar.
And many of my friends and family do think about privacy a lot, but most of them just cannot fully migrate to Linux without extensive and continuous help from me or other techy friends/relatives. They cannot fix a broken boot or a game that won't launch unless you tweak the configs! They can use a preinstalled Windows or macOS however, and they can call/write the support of whatever they want to use if it doesn't work. There is no reason desktop Linux can't reach the same level of official consumer support, and it needs to in order to be a true alternative for regular people. They should not have to sacrifice comfort for privacy and freedom.
Again, you don't understand Linux. There never will be official consumer support for Linux. Also Linux is the wrong answer if you don't want to fix problems yourself.
You are free to think that, but I completely disagree! Desktop Linux is in this "you have to fix it yourself" niche by necessity right now, not because it's a good solution. And it actively prevents most people from enjoying its benefits.
I mean I upvoted because you can have your opinion anyway, even though I disagree. But I really don't get how people rely on support to fix there problems. I never contacted windows support or whatever, I always researched myself how to fix something. I feel this is like an illusionary argument.
I mean, do you do everything around you yourself? Do you fix all your appliances, do the plumbing in your home, do your own health check-up, complete car maintenance and repairs, all the details of your finances, and so on?! Probably some of it, but we all have things we cannot do ourselves, or where it just makes sense to let people with more knowledge and experience do it for us.
For many computing is exactly that, I guess because the abstract logic of computers just doesn't come natural to them, and it can be very complicated if we are being honest. There is extensive customer support in that field for a reason. I'd say the majority of people couldn't fix a broken package installation if their lives depended on it, not without substantial time investment, education and training.
You just can't expect most people to know how it all works and be able to fix everything themselves , but they should still be able to enjoy the benefits of free software imo. Just like I can keep my home warm in the winter without having intimate knowledge about how my heater works and being able to repair it myself. I can just call the landlord and get it fixed the next day.
First paragraph I fully agree. But I fail to see the point why that should'nt be true for Linux machines then. If you don't have friends/colleagues which can help you do stuff, you need to get your own hands dirty. Relying on "support" is nebulous. You cannot even call anybody from Microsoft "support".
And if you are in need of such support, there already exist solutions: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com https://system76.com/ Not sure what more you are looking for...there never will be Linux distro fixing all its problems by itself.
I'm not just talking about M$, most software and hardware should support Linux officially. And support also means making the usage with Linux easy and robust, having official instructions for Linux, being able to return it if it doesn't work with Linux, and so on.
Tuxedo and System76 are exactly what we need imo, but at a much bigger scale. I want Linux to be on almost every PC and laptop, and that would mean every major OEM supports it.
Okay but your wishes will never come true in this world. So maybe work on it from another perspective.
Linux is not aiming to achieve more market share anywhere. Nor does it want to hold your hands to solve all your problems without you having to put effort into it.
Maybe the problem is that there shouldn't be a financial interest in order to motivate or enable support.
And the money for that should come from where?
The problem I am alluding to is the way that "financial interests" means somebody reaping the value from others' labor. There is more than enough talent, interest and time available to develop robust solutions to hardware enablement if we stop feeding the machine what it consumes today. There is simply no reason that a manufacturer shouldn't be producing hardware with open specifications to a global market that consumes its product. Additionally there is more than enough revenue that goes to paying people that contribute less than they produce for the hardware purchased by consumers. We fix this by making it illegal to create walled gardens that make us beholden to vendors.
Are you aware of Intel scandal in regards to AMD? What do you think Microsoft was/is doing? Also if you criticism is aimed at hardware manufacturers, then this is the wrong topic for it? Linux cannot do anything about it, because it has no financial interest.
I was talking about how the corrupt corporations are literally the reason we can't have nice things. We are on the same side here. I'm just trying to express that "financial interest" is only of interest to capitalists so they can continue to profit from the efforts of common peoples. The point was to shift the discussion from trying to interest someone financially to fostering an environment in which social interest can actually cause movement and development.
One of the things I really dislike about Linux is how when setting up, there's a bunch of things you need to troubleshoot, look them up on the forums even though you haven't really done anything wrong, it's just how some software works or there's a bug or there's some weird setting that's incompatible with your system.
I wish there were better defaults for software in the future or just better compatibility/more bugfixes so these cases get rarer and rarer, making it comparable to initial windows experience.
Yup. Basically this. I'd love to not have to know anything about the system other than which programs I want to run.
Well okay, since it's up to me: Let's have free software. Fully free Linux on every phone, including all "firmware" which has gotten awfully soft lately. No more proprietary driver blobs for ethernet controllers or cellular modems. No more proprietary DRM modules. No more "smart" consumer goods that come without source code. The free software revolution has gone pretty well in some respects, but we need to finish the job and put an end to all that garbage.
Idk why people are so passionate about it, cause there is no "Linux" - there is a lot of "Linuxes".
I mean, what defines Linux? The kernel? The desktop environment? The flexibility?
Cause, dude, in a desktop level linux has many options, some very little smooth (like any window manager you have to configure everything by yourself) and some very smooth (like KDE and Gnome). I risk to say that Gnome and KDE are as smooth as MacOs/Windows.
Applications are kind the same. What applications are we talking about? There is a huge range of possibilities, which includes apps that run only in windows as well as apps that run only in Linux. Surely main stream apps are most designed for Windows, cause they have the majority of market share, however almost always there is an alternative good enough in Linux.
I wish the future of Linux would be our own people don't blame on projects trying to innovate, like Gnome and KDE does. People on Linux looks like loves to makes things hard or exclusive, but man, we need simple things as well. Simple things on Linux does not "rot" Linux, but make Linux more usable and, as consequence, makes development faster while big techs have to start paying attention to Linux.
By a strict definition, the kernel is what defines Linux.
We all know that nobody respect these definiotions and mostly when someone says linux, reffers to the full operate system
Define chair.
I think the future of Linux is brighter than Windows, which is one of the reasons I switched.
I know I'm in a growing niche that still prefer to do my computing at a stationary desktop with a standard keyboard and mouse, A lot of Linux DEs still feel mainly geared towards desktop use while Apple and Microsoft have been mainly focused on the tablet/laptop space for over a decade now.
Then we get into the whole push to "cloud computing". I don't think Microsoft will go cloud only with their next OS like some are saying, But I do believe cloud integration will become so embedded within Windows that disabling cloud features or going completely offline will no longer be possible in the foreseeable future. The average person doesn't give a shit about this move, hell some are welcoming it with open cheeks, But it will be a breaking point for a lot of enthusiast users.
I got a lot of other reasons for moving to Linux but I'm overall happy with the way things in the Linux world are going. And I got a few friends interested in moving to Linux sooner or later for similar reasons.
We have the basics down. But hopefully desktop-class RISC-V will be within our reach in a few years!
Less user error from borking the root fs. And also less apps relying on the root filesystem would be good. Likely something to be achieved with portals and other XDG work.
Wayland will soon have the ability for a lot of cool features that X11 doesn't have, such as storing session data to disk and relaunching into new desktop environments without relogging. This'll make hybrid graphics a lot easier to manage as changes to the active GPU can be done dynamically without logging out and back into your system.
Linux is obviously great in many ways because it lacks a single solution to a given problem, and that it's just a kernel, so most of your end-user system is totally configurable while still being a Linux system. However, we have a lot of overlapping work that makes said end-user systems hard to manage when standards collide. Hopefully Wayland will encourage developers to work through XDG portals and other common standards to make Linux user AND developer-friendly.
A contentious issue, but I think the future of Nvidia drivers will be open source. The proprietary drivers have been a blocker in many ways as they're 'good enough' and better than Nouveau, so no one is going to bother backing the FOSS project when the prop. project is better. However, lots of very smart devs are working on bridging the gap and leverage the newly open-sourced portions of NV's drivers, which will hopefully manifest as the end of AMD/NV driver quality discrepancies.
Every few years we get a new "Photoshop WORKING on LINUX???" tutorial that has some cryptic setup instructions or github repo that eventually falls to the wayside. WINE is getting a lot more support thanks to Valve and I imagine starting to take on Windows apps for first class support will be a gamechanger for the creative industries that rely on certain Windows-only apps!
Yup, the best saved til last. My boldest claim is that Flatpak is going to kill off the necessity for RPMs, Debs, APKs, etc. for most end-users. The flatpak size disadvantage is negligible in the age of terabytes, but it allows devs to ensure a consistent build environment for their apps on all platforms (something that has caused a lot of flame wars between Fedora and app devs in the past).
For people who DO need apps from reproducible, stable-based pipelines (eg. docker, sysadmins, IT professionals) we'll see Nix becoming dominant. In fact, it's already beginning to eat into docker/container build systems thanks to its powerful reproducibility and infra-as-code paradigms. It's having a real boost after a relatively quiet first decade of life, likely thanks to features like Flakes that can spin up developer environments in seconds.
No it isn't, until you can build a Linux system on top of only Flatpak. And guess what you have then? Yet another distro using a different packaging system with its own opinions, just like the rest of them. And there will still be other packaging systems because not everyone will agree with how it does things. Especially once developers start including questionable code in their Flatpak packages, because nobody is there to stop them, which distro maintainers are going to strip out in distro packages because it's harmful to users.
I doubt thats really the case? Most distro maintainers mostly want to make sure a package works with their provides libs etc. If a package is malicious, it just will not become a distro package. At the same times this esoteric part about what distro maintainers actually do is so nebulous and at the same time "overrated" (debian).
that's the beauty of distros, those that want traditional package structure can still use a distro that does.
Even the current flatpak first distros like OSTree spins of Fedora (Silverblue, Kinoite et al) provide mutable containers for using any package format you like.
Flatpak is still not able to fully replace native apps in certain situations, sure, but that wont be the case forever. If Ubuntu believes they can replace debs with Snaps I believe someone can do the same for flatpaks given enough time.
Flatpak lets people host their own repositories, which is where I think we'll see distros becoming distinct if they DO choose to diverge from Flathub's selection, such as choosing to block non-free software. Over time, though, people generally all just add flathub if it isn't already available.
And, again, if you need something more finegrained than flathub, there's no reason why distro maintainers can't move to a nix-based infrastructure-as-code and you'll be free to host a repo with all of your distro's software packaged as code.
The power maintainers want over users is simply too much effort to justify as more apps begin to complain about packaging issues downstream, and apps become more complex to build. Users will inevitably bypass them. Devs will inevitably become hostile to downstream repacking.
the issue is overstated as most flatpaks use the flatpak platform runtimes and share their own libraries in a similar manner to the host, yes its separate libraries, but its not dozens of disparate copies like some detractors of flatpak seem to state
Yup this too. We're basically seeing a more standardized and healthy way of managing shared dependencies in Flatpak that doesn't sacrifice the developer or end-user for sake of a few megabytes.
Best post so far here.
Can you elaborate why a sysadmin/IT prof. should use Nix? Or are you referring to, those people deploying Nix systems for the "masses"?
I'm no sysadmin or IT prof. myself, but here's my take.
With Nix, you can build out an entire Linux operating system from the ground up with a few files. You can specify the exact versions of software and even dependencies of software so that every single installation of your OS is going to be identical. You can upgrade specific software and roll it back if it has problems. Dependencies are managed through Nix in a way that allows them to be shared where necessary (saving space) but diverging when necessary to prevent dependency hell.
The best part, imo, is that all software is from source. You don't have to rely on package maintainers at RHEL or Debian to keep apps up to date and working - Your system will download binary blobs from the cache server or build apps from source when theyre not available. You get to have bleeding-edge apps (if you want them) without the pain of waiting 6+ months for them to come in from your distro updates.
It's quite immature when it comes to tools that make it easier to pick up and learn, so there's drawbacks in that regard since many IT pros will stick to tools that enterprise systems offer that make managing their infra MUCH easier.
However, Nix is imo the future of non-flatpak applications because it's simply smarter, faster, and more declarative than RPM, Deb, Apk could ever be.
Thanks for the write up, for me as a sysadmin it just doesn't hold enough attraction on why I should make a switch. We are not going to change our infrastructure to NixOS. And for workstation use, I don't see the benefit.
Whatever it is I hope we don't end up "selling out" for a higher market share. KDE is proof that you can have stability while also having infinite configuration options. Gnome seems to be openly hostile to any other way of doing things that isn't the gnome way.
I don't mind gnome existing but it isn't for me and I hope I don't get forced into using something that I can't modify to meet my workflow wishes. I'm seeing a lot more programs being written without prioritizing being desktop agnostic. I think we can forge our own path making a desktop that is both as stable as Mac OS and as approachably configurable as Linux should be.
Part of the great Linux experience is the ability to have competing projects with differing philosophies. Part of infinite configuration choices includes the choice of installing GNOME instead of KDE (or one of the dozens of other DEs and WMs).
Personally I much prefer the GNOME design ethos over KDE; I am not one of life's desktop tweakers, and my Linux experience would be much diminished if that's all there was. But I'm glad KDE exists for those users who like that sort of thing.
There are some very crazy looking Gnome customizations in the unixporn community. At a glance they look like a custom window manager setups, not sure how well it performs though.
Well my point is that Gnome can be customizable just not as straightforward as KDE.
I think it's already a great system, its philosophical foundation of being built around user freedom is fantastic. It just has a few things that are definitely still problems for desktop users. Namely,
Sensible defaults
Proprietary driver management
Distros needing to distribute software in their repos instead of authors doing it themselves
Too many competing application formats, each with glaring issues
Inconsistent theming with GTK vs QT (mostly app developers' faults tho)
Both popular display servers have huge issues
Lack of manufacturer support for hardware (this will come with time if Linux continues to become more popular)
Incompatibility with existing standards, especially Microsoft products
Lacking proper professional applications for things like video editing that actually work consistently
Gaming anti-cheat compatibility
Generally being easy to break the whole system on accident
Power consumption on mobile devices
I guess that's a lot, but it's still a great system ha.
-1 downvotes?
That is like a double upvote!
For Linux desktop to grow past the single digit market share it is at today. It needs to be led by tech visionaries not by code evangelists . The average user doesn't care about if it's running Wayland or x11 or whatever shit you name it they only care about their OS having all the features they need and support all the latest hardware they buy.
Add to that any average Joe would freeze at the prospect of having to enter a command line to maintain their computer or use their firewall. In short for Linux to grow it needs to copy windows or macOS otherwise it will keep being used by nerds and sys admins
In a very real sense I do think that the command line is ever so slightly too maligned as a beginner friendly tool. I definitely agree that it’s intimidating for people and that it’s easy to mistype a command or whatever… but good god is it ever nice to be able to tell somebody to “just copy and run this command” instead of guiding them through a GUI. Of course that has its own problems (ideally you don’t run commands you don’t understand), but it can be a really nice way to quickly help somebody. Macs strike a good balance with this in my opinion. There are GUI options for more or less everything (that seem to be front ends for command line tools), but also command line versions available, giving you the best of both worlds.
The problem with the command line line. Is that people don't understand what they are typing . what command means what. And don't really care to memorize them. I've seen tech illiterate people navigate their way through leading how a mobile OS works because of how user centric they are designed. If you give them a Linux distro with a bunch of command lines to type. They would rather call someone more knowledgeable to do it or give up on it entirely. Unfortunately this is something Linux Devs don't understand
Linux dev’s do understand this, and there have been huge UI strides in the last 10 years that make Linux a lot more beginner friendly than it used to be. With the use and improve philosophy of Linux, you end up with the largest number of changes being targeted towards a similar demographic of the people making the changes—power users and nerds. As the audience for Linux has widened, we’ve seen a bigger variety of ideas integrated to make Linux approachable, as a direct reflection of the diversity of the people making the improvements.
Basically, Linux is a direct reflection of the people contributing to it.
For sure! The command line definitely lacks discoverability and just isn’t the mode of interacting with a computer that the average person is used to. That said there are situations where it is very much the right tool for the job and there’s plenty of times where it’s the easy way to set something up, even for a beginner.
If I’m being perfectly honest I do find that a lot of the complaints about the command line come across as a bit… silly, sometimes? I can absolutely acknowledge that it has its problems and seems intimidating, and I’m not expecting the average technology illiterate person to deal with it… But there really is not that much to it, and I think people are far more afraid of it than they need to be. Plus I think the amount of command line knowledge required for somebody to start using a mainstream distro is greatly exaggerated. You may eventually want to learn it (and shouldn’t be scared to!) and you may rarely run into something where the best way to solve a problem involves the command line… but you’ll be fine :).
Sometimes I think what we would do differently if we could rebuild the terminal from scratch. Do away with all the recursive acronym naming bullshit and the "You had to be a member of the compsci faculty at Stanford in 1975 to get it" references, use words that mean things to modern computer users.
Thats the reason I hate pacman. pacman -Syu...ok.
APT had (and kinda still has) the opposite problem. "apt-get install" is redundant. And true to Linux fashion, there have been a few implmentations of an "apt install" syntax, which were different enough to be a problem.
Also my OSMC box bitches at me when I run "apt upgrade" because it wants me to type "apt full-upgrade..."
There are some things I'd like to ask the Flatpak developers while holding them 6 inches off the ground by their shirt collar. Like why is it such a bitch to run flatpak update over ssh? It wants you to key in your password 96 times if you do that. It's also really fun to deal with org.whatthefuck.WhatTheFuck too.
I don't think apt is as bad as pacman, I use nala on my debian machine. The best syntax in my book has zypper, but I am biased. Simply running a flatpak from cli is a hassle. :P
Yeah I'll go with that; convention is you run software by evoking its name as a command. apt install vim, then you can run vim by typing "vim." Not with Flatpak, you evoke "flatpak run .org.bullshit.Vim". It's not merely designed to be used through a GUI, it's designed to be not used through a CLI.
Clicking buttons doesn't mean you understand what they do. And often time they don't do what you would think they do. CLI on the other hand is actually much more direct, because the entered command does the same thing on almost any machine and you can read about what it does with "man command".
GUI have context and user feedback
Command line has :0: error: Undefined temporary symbol :0: error: Undefined temporary symbol
What? Is this sarcasm? CLI offers much more debug potential than GUIs.
For someone who knows what they're doing maybe, but this is about those who don't, which is 99% of people.
So what are you doing when a GUI tells you "error"? You give up and do something else?
A GUI tells you a lot more about the current status and what you can do, in an intuitive way, than the cli ever can
This is no argument, this is simple opinion without any base. How does a "next/proceed/ok" button tell you anything? Also windows is hilariously known for its horrendous error messages. Stop trolling please.
Linux is not the answer you seek.
My favorite idea is Linux or Android-derived, or a completely new, Rust-based AGPL-licensed OS, running on 100% open RISC-V hardware. Same for its phone equivalent. All chips must be open, no secret code in them.
There are a couple factors that play into future-planning. The first, and most important factor is that most people neither care what OS their hardware uses or actually need more than the barest baseline. They want to spend time with their friends doing the things their friends are doing.
This is what has allowed Android to gain such massive prominence in the mobile space. It's all that's needed to play crap web games, listen to music, watch videos, and commune on social media. Expect more and more consumer hardware to be ARM-based devices running Android for the next few years.
The next big factor is that Linux has become a sort of driver dumping ground for reputable hardware manufacturers. Want to sell a piece of hardware? Better make damn sure it's got Linux driver support so that it can be part of an Android device. This means that more manufacturers are contributing drivers and code to the rest of Linux. It doesn't necessarily mean that code that works with Linux is going to be open source or play well with others. nvidia has proven to be an absolute bastard in this regard.
I don't think that means the future for Linux is going to be dim. I do think we need to expect and plan for more corporate presence. Some of that presence will be good. It doesn't take much to be a good member of the community. However, we do need to keep our collective eyes out for nvidia-like presences that will only serve to anchor everyone else down.
Where I'd personally LIKE to see Linux going is to provide more power to older hardware. We have a wealth of hardware that's in the 10-20 year-old range that can be doing useful work. The problem there is maintainership. It's harder to get volunteers to work with older hardware. If you can get people to work on supporting that hardware, it means fewer PCBs in landfills and more doing hobbyist or scientific work.
In the 'modern' Desktop Linux space, I'd like to see a renewed focus on privacy. I'd like to see privacy features baked into the kernel alongside security features. In a lot of cases those are the same feature.
I'd like to see some phone distros to use as a daily driver.
Other than that I like where gnome and KDE are going.
I've been using my htpc mostly with a mini keyboard and touch pad. A TV mode would be cool to see. Like what big screen is doing I guess.
Better documentation for any distribution not called Arch. Better bugtrackers for all major projects? (KDE, Thunderbird etc)
We need documentation standards on the level of OpenBSD
I'm surprised how great BSDs documentation is despite having a smaller userbase than even linux. Probably a result of less fragmentation.
Less fragmentation is part of the reason. The other part is that BSDs mandate documentation for their component software. Documentation by developers is obviously better than those created by regular users (like the arch wiki). Arch wiki is actually phenomenal considering that it's by the user community.
Accessible for everyone.
If the desktop UX has very good screen readers, keyboard navigation, voice to text etc., I believe its benefits would automatically spill over to all.
Also it would retain the UI / UX experts who become forced to abandon Linux for macOS which maintains a niche in this.
To be more mainstream granted it isn't because of a shitty locked down distro incompatible with the others.
What I love most abou Linux is its freedom. It doesn't try screwing me over for their own benefit, gives me full control of the system and is broken down into components. Having the underlying system foss for many is great to provide and make it easier to adopt more ethical software for computing.
I was always in and out with Linux.
My problem was always that something was always a bit off with the apps or environment than I got used to, and most of thr times I just couldn't adapt. Things like my laptop touchpad worked differently, the mouse moved differently, apps had functions differently or lacking onebthing, others other things.
Also, most DEs was lacking functions (like dbl click on window icon to close), or were buggy. Then KDE4 came out and it was a trainwreck after 3.5 and I lost all my hope for a while.
And, on my mission to kinda solve these resulted always me bricking the system.
Now, to be fair, this was 10 years ago.
But, I know I won't use Windows 11 for a while now and I kinda bored with Windows 10 so few weeks ago installed Debian on my PC with KDE Plasma. Tho I have nothing against Windows, it served me well in the past... 25 years. But now I'm more focused on dev work and productivity, and Windows 10 became slowly awkward for the different works I had. Most of the times I used WSL so why not just hsve the realdeal at the first place? Also, lots of Pis and some servers I have are also running Linux, so why not have it on my main machine?
It's nice. Still have some minor annoyance or inconvenience with it, but I don't care. Honestly, seeing what Linux became in these 10 years made me go 'wow'.
So, I have hope in Linux in the future. Especially since OS and architectural boulders are rapidly disappearing.
I remember Wine being no more than a POC you can run Notepad or Solitaire on Linux. Now you can almost run any fucking game on a Linux system. This is awesome.
So, I'm testrunning Linux again before I invest a motherload of money into a new PC (I'm using a 2009 era server machine as my desktop atm) and if it's good, I will continue to use Linux and probably Debian on my new machine and will format my drives and set up a partition table that is Linux-y, and not just mount all my NTFS drives and use them like they are native to the system.
@kuneho @pmk
I totally get it! Although I'm a few months a head of you. No more Windows for me. I used to run both using dual boot but after a while I got more and more into linux and learned to use it correctly. Then I realized there is much to control by yourself in a system rather than let windows to do it.
Just don't give up on Linux and try lot's of distros to find the best you need. I recommend Arch Or Debian 11. Debian 12 is still not a debian-standard distro in my experience.
I was thinking about going the Arch route, I really wanted to build up my system from scratch...
but then I was like "I'm too old for this sh*t", and I'm not even sure what I really want from my machine, so I was looking through distros... openSUSE was my other candidate, but I used Debian based systems and APT in the past 10 years... and I like the philosophy behind Debian, so installed Bookworm.
maybe, after a while when I know what I need, what I use and how I use them, will build my own Arch installation.
I’m a big fan of retired systems for every day use. A 14 year old server has more function as a space heater and whitenoise generator than a desktop, though.
7th-8th gen Intel retired corporate desktops and laptops from Dell/Lenovo/HP are a dime a dozen on eBay man. Lenovos tend to run Linux very well out of the box. And Linus himself sent his daughter to college with a Dell XPS.
yeah, most of my machines are around 3rd or 4th gen Intel, some of those are recent buys - one for libreELEC under my TV, one for remote work, one for my mother... unbelievably cheap machines, and with an SSD and 16GB of RAM, they run happily forever. (even with Windows 10)
recommend setting up a next cloud server with the old computer, byeto google drive photos etc
thanks for the tip, but I'm not that cloud storage guy. I have a homelab running, if I need to share files, I just put them there.
Maybe OneDrive is what I used more before, but I can totally live without it.
Honestly my biggest hope is some generally accepted way to install software that is consistent among distros. I'm leaning toward liking flatpak for this currently, but I also like how appimage works too.
It is really close now, close enough I've dropped windows entirely at home, but occasionally there's still something I'll stumble across that officially only has Deb or rpm download options and if I try from my distro package manager it fails for one reason or another and I give up, just skip it, and be disappointed for a bit.
Oh and support from devs of games at least as far to get anti-cheat stuff to work via proton, but I avoid a vast majority of those games even on windows because their anti-cheat can be so system invasive...
Packaging software for linux is an insane problem. All distributions are so similar yet so different, all of these nuisances prevent you from making much assumptions about the host OS which for instance forced flatpak to be basically a generic distro you run apps on. For obvious reasons it's not an ideal situation, memory consumption is bad, performance in various ways is impacted. I believe that the true packaging format will have to cut some corners and be specific by design to smaller set of distributions. Pretty much how snaps are built around Ubuntu, which imo. is a necessary compromise to have something reasonably fast and lightweight.
For Linux in general? If I could decide? Here goes:
I love Flatpaks and have embraced them totally on my desktop. They just make sense for sandboxing applications with Flatseal. Distro maintainers also ship software with bad defaults. I want to be able to easily control that.
Sandboxing is nice, but is not exclusive to Flatpak. I'm talking about the software distribution model.
So you trade distro packages which you can usually customize pretty well if you need to (e.g. modified Arch packages on the AUR) for Flatpaks where you have no chance at all to do that because the package build script isn't available? And the problem still isn't solved because now the people who can set bad defaults still exist, they're just different people.
Aside from all the things Flatpaks get right, a sandbox framework built right into the design is a major win and in my case, it's one of the big reasons I went with it.
You can also modify the build script for any flatpak's manifest and create packages with
flatpak-builder. May not be as easy as PKGBUILDs but it's certainly possible.The problem of bad software defaults is easily solved with Flatseal. My point is that, it takes a few clicks to deny permissions to Flatpak applications as opposed to sandboxing a traditional app yourself.
Writing sandbox profiles for apparmor or something similar is usually a complex elaborate affair. And even when you do finally manage to get a working profile, it still requires maintenance to keep the sandbox functional as the target software updates. You won't face any of these problems with Flatpak's bubblewrap.
I think immutable distributions will be more attractive to hardware vendors. I think hardware vendors feel that current Linux is too much like the wild West. Much like Chrome OS, the immutable OS can be a lockdown for work environment or school environments.
I can see a market for that.
Those of us who know how to unlock it, will have a large selection a very powerful Linux hardware.
TLDR: The future are linux hardware vendors, governments deciding to use linux, and RISC-V+ARM.
There are already a few linux hardware vendors out there and my favorites are Tuxedo Computers as well as Starlabs and Slimbook (the guys who make the KDE laptop. Not to be outdone by linux phone vendors like Pine64, Purism, and Volla. We need more of them.
Hopefully they will have the funds to start marketing and ad campaigns to change the image of linux from "just for geeks" or "only if you have spare time" to something like "better for privacy", "the only option for true freedom", "cheap but classy", "subscribe to nothing", etc.
Linux has no problem providing a fluid experience with RISC-V and ARM, while windows struggles - especially due to the amount of proprietary and legacy software that exists on it. Windows might be able to prepare for it and provide a translation layer or VM for those things, but probably not with a good experience.
Finally, governments. I thank Trump a lot for this: getting China to start accelerate ditching Microsoft. The EU is also wary of Trump winning again to start a tradewar + there is an EU level decision to use opensource. Countries are slow to implement this decree, but I only see it accelerating and countries wising up to international collaboration to create either their own distro (e.g EULinux or something), or paying emergent opensource vendors to write solutions for them.
I don't believe this will be done before 2030, probably 2035 we might see ~50% of government desktops and laptops on linux, but the future is very difficult to predict.
I’m still a proponent of phone as workstation. They’re fast enough. I’ll still run a server at home but being able to plug a cable into my phone and it turns into a work station is still a dream of mine.
Is it a dream because you think it's not possible? If so, I have good news for you:
I hope to see Linux brought to the Web 2.0 era with proper use of Git forges. As it is, most people won't bother to go through the existing processes unless they're paid to do it. Raising the barrier to entry in order to discourage low quality submissions is a poor excuse. The existing system makes it difficult to get any changes approved or reviewed with a serious eye, regardless of their quality.
For me it would be open-ness and through that privacy. The dream device would be some mobile convertible with the repairibility of framework, that is completely free and open source hardware and software. Like powered by risc-v, with some future open gpu, and every (storage-/keyboard-/touchpad-/touchscreen-/battery-/network-/wifi-/ etc) controller on it being risc-v and running open firmware as well. Just such that for every byte being processed in this device you could pin down the piece of circuit and line of code that makes it so. In terms of linux some future version of gnome on a immutable distro with flatpaks that have very tied down permissions would be a nice future to me.
And I think overall many aspects of this are moving in that direction. The biggest roadblock is probably a truly open gpu, and then highly integrated controllers like for storage.
There's this project called darling which is like wine for Mac OS I hope that takes off and we can pirate them damn Adobe apps everyone needs for work.
a small thing is that hardware will be linux focusef, such as removing the windows icon kn the super key
I just want a system that doesn't require a software engineering degree to operate. That's all I need.
Linux Mint is what you are looking for.
The RedHat and Canonical oligarchs are well underway in achieving their windows-like linux desktop through systemd and flatpaks and what not, so we may see a small but highly deployed number of immutable distros becoming the forced de-facto standard.
Microsoft continues their new approach at EEEing linux through WSL Azure, and everyone's happy about it.
Torvalds will eventually die, as will Stallman, so all that'll be left are the communities, which unfortunately don't have that much strength/voice.
I think other figureheads will rise up and take charge, I don't think Linux is going to just blow away like a pile of leaves in the wind when stallman and torvolds are gone.
I hope so too.
We are the future already :)
I wish distro's would combine efforts much more so we have a better desktop experience. Do we really need 15 window managers when we could have 2 or 3 much better ones.
Unify to a single package manager, they are all functionally the same.
Standardize on flatpacks and abandon snaps and appimage
I like the option to pick different package managers but it would behoove the community to actually settle on a package format. Making a deb or rpm are very different processes and while containers are nice for server side stuff I wish there was something easier for desktop
The fact that the processes are so different, is part of the problem. Developers need to spend the same effort 3 or 4 times.
Nix might be what you want. Haven't tried out the package manager on a non-nixos distro but it can be done
Massive package library, everything installs the same way and I believe it'll run on any distro
I hear the aur is very good as well but I believe that's arch only
What is it when almost all window managers have moved or are moving to wlroots? KWin and Mutter are exceptions because they predate wlroots.
Hyper convergence between phones, desktops, storage and networking. I think there has just been awesome progress in all of those fronts to the point that have a home server(s) that serves out the home wifi, shared storage, desktops (for gaming, school, and personal use) to the sharef human interfaces of choice. Even more so treat them as one giant multiuser machine, instead of a dozen separate devices.
I want it to be accessible enough that people can realistically use it as a transition from mobile to PC
I just want it to become more popular and easy to use while remaining free (like to buy, hot take I know) and libre.
I want it to be something I can endorse to all my friends, even the friends that almost never use computers and barely know what a filesystem is
my hope is that after this point of it being popular and accessable, FOSS principles will start to gain more traction in spaces like mobile phones and car head units. there will always be proprietary OS's and software, but in my ideal world FOSS is at least an equal competitor, not just a a niche thing that only super involved computer people get into
FWIW I'm still very much an advocate of the Mark Shuttleworth Convergence vision. It's the Holy Grail that makes sense to me.
I couldn’t find a single gui resource monitor on xcfe that I wouldn’t have to build from source.
I'd be happy with the destruction of copyright and patent laws.
Better at gaming than now.
Linux isn't inherently bad at gaming, it's more like games are bad at Linux
The good future includes the total and final death of Trusted Computing, which means the end of capitalism.
Mobile apps are shit for that. Sure, my phone is powerful enough to browse internet, play video and music but on desktop with mouse/kb it's just weird and funky. And I'm not even talking about any productivity software which is straight impossible.
I'd settle for Microsoft 365 offline apps + trouble free miracast
Honestly Linux should keep going in it's direction (standardization) and hopefully software support will get better over time.
FEX-emu / box86 / qemu-user let ARM machines run x86 binaries with minimal hassle.
I want a future where platforms matter about as much as image formats. Some will be better. Some will be worse. Some will be closer to what your setup expects. But the idea your system won't open it, at all, is absurd.
If the platform doesn't support transparency, I'm not using it!
I just want ubiquitous Libreboot support along with more FOSS drivers
I hope selfhosting becomes even more convenient. It already is for tech savy people, but I mean 'buy a Pi and press a button'-easy. It would take away the power of so many big companies.
El futuro de los pcs sera importante para Linux solo si los fabricantes de hardware apuestan por Linux o las leyes oblligan a publicar sus drivers como software libre. Mientras esto no suceda, veo dificil el futuro de Linux, al comprobar como la gente renuncia tan facilmente a su privacidad a cambio de la experiencia de usar windows, google,...
I think stability is a huge factor. Just yesterday, my laptop shit off without any forewarning. There is still too much random issues that seemingly have no reason.
An immutable distro with working gpu passthrough for vms (or whatvere that's called). That's the dream
I don't like the migration to wayland when it is so woefully not ready to replace x11, terrible a11y, window embedding is still non existent, the window positioning seems like we might be getting is a watered down version that still wont be compatible with many apps.
Im not saying x11 is good, I am more then familiar with the multitude of x11 issues that are honestly a meme at this point. pretending like migrating to wayland will be this massive step forward is wrong however, it's a step to the side, just as broken, but different issues we can pick from.
x11 is broken by design, and wayland is designed to be broken
Don't think that is up to Wayland, but UI toolkits. What specifically do you mean?
They have documentation on how to do this. If there's no libraries for this yet, it's not up to Wayland, but maybe lack of interest.
Wait and see. What I've seen discussed seems pretty good. Also, they have to take into account that not every compositor is a floating window manager.
a11y requires a large range of features, because of wayland most OSKs are now platform specific, we can't have overlays (we might be able to when the layers protocol lands, but thats a privleged protocol which is kind of up in the air how it's handled) etc. a11y requires an entire ecosystem, you cant just lay it on the tool kits, compositors handle a lot too.
I've tried this a while ago, it's a bloody joke, not only is it much harder to actually just do it, worse performance, and now I need to manage a bunch of additional crap. the fact that this is actually the reccomended process is a bloody joke, if you want window embedding, just use xwayland.
we shall see
I have absolutely no idea why people keep saying this. weston doesn't support some xdg protocols, and gnome some ext protocols, so why the does this matter? clearly neither xdg nor ext protocols are mandatory, so it has nothing to do with compositors not wanting to implement it.
if it's because tiling managers can't do it, then simply combine both protocols into one, or use both protocols.
Ah, that makes sense. Tbf I'm not too familiar with it and mainly thought about screen readers and such, where only the toolkit knows what text is displayed since everything afterwards just gets a frame buffer. It would be great to get a portable way to do overlays and feedback like "user has focused a text input control", yeah. How does this work on X11?
As far as I know xdg protocols are supposed to be mandatory, ext ones aren't. Weston devs just don't care I suppose. (Though I can't actually verify this so correct me if I'm wrong. I just know that getting a protocol included into xdg is a lot harder.)
I think that if Linux improves and the economy/companies go the way they're going right now, FOSS has an opportunity to grow and bring more users, if not to Linux, to the decentralized and libre software communities. But i hope it goes hand to hand, as Linux would require better hardware support as its demand increases. Btw, I also think that accessibility would improve, which is good for everyone.
Aside from Linux, the people will, at some point, understand that a free product will worsen over time, and it's better to invest some money or time into the services/apps they like so they don't get enshittified. As FOSS communities grow and alternatives improve (like Godot, Blender and Mastodon), it'll attract the curiosity of the people.
@pmk Future linux should take example from Tromjaro.
I hope the joy and knowledge and freedom our for-bearers had is what we will continue to reap in the future. there will be challenges, but we will prevail.
The future of PCs in general is tied to professionals and gamers, there is no need for a pc anymore in an household who is not anything of the above
Which means that the average PC user will become more and more tech savy, this is the only thing that could raise the Linux market share
On the other hand I don't see a single chance of linux becoming relevant in personal computing unless a big corporation decides to offer an experience that is/has:
I like that it's kind of the wild west, there's no single way to do anything and you're sort of on your own with it, which also means you're free to do whatever you want with it.
Choose what software you do or don't want, delete important system files if you really want to, break stuff and be allowed to fix it yourself rather than a company telling you what you can and can't do with your own computer
As long as it stays like that it's good how it is
More of the few games remaining that don't run on Linux via proton making the slightest effort to support it would be nice though
I don't think theres anything else that might happen with Linux -- it's already "The free Windows" as is.
Not where I'd like to see it, but where I see it going:
Much like the three major publishers - Mac, MS, Google. Google and Apple are already using Linux/bsd. MS, on desktop is the only player left. They happen to be the most prominent player. It's an odd thing though, as others have pointed out. That more and more people, outside of work simply don't have a PC anymore. Phones have taken over for what a lot of people would have used a PC for to begin with.
With that, MS may replace their NT kernel with a *nix (probably built themselves or heavily modified from something like Gentoo - like ChromeOS) and then what. We'll still have these mega corps still pushing closed sourced systems.
Idk, I guess the question of "do we actually want Linux on everything?" remains. The enthusiast PC market differs from pre built OEMs for a reason.
Would I like to see wider adoption, yes. But I think it's better suited still for enthusiast and repurposing older machines to save them from e-waste.
I expect to see distros that use Flatpak as its exclusive package manager, even for the bare-metal, in the near future. Also, Linux as a remote desktop on the cloud will probably be attempted at a larger scale, given that Windows 12 is rumored to try that route.
Flatpak are still not designed to run clis so that's a long way to go at least
(would love to be proven wring because I'd love to not have to ship deb and rpm for the OSS projects I take care of)
I really don't want Linux to be a remote desktop on the cloud. That's already possible easily with Linux. But OS as a service is another attempt by companies like MS to pry the control of the system and data away from their customers. Worst of all, we have to pay a monthly subscription even after we buy hardware. To put it simply, it's rent seeking. Linux on the other hand, is good at making the best of even mediocre or low-end hardware.
Linux is way to fragmented and without a great dominating distro it will never. Waymand, Ubuntu, Mint, Gnome, KDE, WTF, Users don't fucking care about that jargon. Most Window users don't even know the name of the browser they are using or that "the internet app" is even called "browser".
A few weeks ago I updated Ubuntu from 22 to 23 on my home media center. First tried the Updates App because why not just press a single fucking button like on windows or mac. No - no major updates there. Open a console, apt update and upgrade the hell out of everything, update the package sources with some shady regex command I copy pasted from some random forum, update upgrade again dist-upgrade WTF. After everything was done the layout of the info area (network, wifi, etc) was fucked up. Read some only shit about gnome shell extensions, themens, nothing made sense, force reinstalled the gome shell - worked again.
And somebody expects that "typical" users to do that don't even know what Windows Version they are running - sure.
linux has to start a new OS from the ground up. Go back to command line and PC-DOC days. Everything must be controllable at a basic level. Shove MS and Apple out the door. Nobody wants their adware and virus bloated shit any longer.
How basic are we talking? You can already tear out the desktop environment if that's important to you