What are you most excited when it comes to linux in 2024?

SherlockHawk@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 278 points –

For me it must be kde plasma 6 and the wayland driver for wine.

Edit: I made the question gendered by using the word guys. I've fixed my mistake.

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It's the year of the Linux desktop! /s

But seriously, I think I'm going to buy a SteamDeck.

I already have the LCD, but the OLED has me seriously considering retiring it far earlier than I usually do with my electronics.

I've had a gaming laptop for years but I think I did more gaming on the deck in the first six months than I ever did on my laptop. The suspend mid-game, actually using it away from a power plug...

The Deck announcement made me try linux on my desktop again, too, just to see if Valve's claims about proton could be true... And I have yet to boot back into windows.

I swear the Deck's announcement was perfectly timed, at least for me. It was right as I was having major problems with windows and even then proton kinda just worked for me, and it's only gotten better sense!

I've been considering this too. I don't have much time at all to game but feel like maybe I'd do better with a portable than can stream to a TV.

I need to search up if they support all games or just those that have been ported. Surely it's more than what has been ported to Linux...

But my mouse and keyboard, hmm

https://www.protondb.com/

Protondb is a hugely useful site (okay, maybe not that huge but it's great)! There's WineHQ for Wine but it's kinda... a little creaky, if you know what I mean. Doesn't seem to get much attention.

Protondb, on the other paw, has lots of useful info from a quick-and-simple "how likely is it to work?" indicator to "Here's what I had to do to make it flawless" reports from users. VERY useful! wiggles emphatically! (also it splits reports between PC and Deck)

Oh, also GloriousEggroll's Proton fork is kinda great, for critters who like to faff about with stuff as I do: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom Dunno if that's of any use on Deck though.

That's what the "verified for deck" is for in steam. In my experience every game works that fulfills these criteria:

A. Is not one of a few competitive multiplayer games that have decided to not allow Linux players to play. Among these are Destiny 2 and PUBG for example.

B. Does not require mouse and keyboard (and even then the touchpads and steam input sometimes makes it work anyways)

C. Is not VR (for obvious reasons)

If you are unsure you can also check protondb which someone else linked.

I swear I'll too this 2024 hopefully a newer release doesn't appear all of sudden (like just the Retro is Pocket 4 and 4 Pro happened right now, at least for me).

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Nothing. Which is great: everything already works for me. Any improvements and extra market share is cool. But I'm vibing already.

It's amazing that Linux gaming is becoming a thing that's better sometimes than Windows gaming (minus the getting banned part in some games). I also like that AMD is making some big pushes on open source drivers, plus their ROCm open-source alternative to CUDA.

This is a great time for Linux users! :)

I just ROCm was built in to mesa. Because either you use the proprietary drivers that have some issues, or use mesa and fight with everything (amf, ROCm) to try and get it working.

More Wayland adoption, more protocols and desktop portals, color management and HDR getting closer, even better gaming

NVIDIA getting its shit together maybe?

NVIDIA getting its shit together maybe?

That truly would be the year of the linux desktop

I think the teams that are responsible for bringing proper HDR support are moving slow and waiting for HDR to get its shit together, as right now it's a poorly standardized dumpster fire of various protocols and definitions and implementations. It's still a bit of a pain in windows and macos despite the fact that official support exists already.

NVIDIA getting its shit together maybe?

Given the recent pace of NVK development we probably won't have to rely on that for much longer in 2024.

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Plasma 6, but just as excited for kernel 6.7 featuring:

  • bcachefs
  • AMD Seamless Boot (for flicker-free streamlined booting)
  • Scheduler improvements for better responsiveness/performance
  • IO_uring FUTEX support for better performance
  • More FUTEX2 work for potentially better gaming performance
  • Better write performance for eMMC chips (great for many IoT boards)
  • TCP network performance improvements
  • DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.1 support over Type-C

What about bcachefs excites you? Like, what does it offer that ext4, Btrfs and zfs don't?

Initial benchmarks show better performance than btrfs (at least for some workloads), but more importanty, I like that it offers tiered/cache storage - so you can use a fast and small drive (NVMe) to speed up a slow and bigger drive (HDD). You can do that with ZFS as well of course, but it doesn't have the massive RAM requirements. Also it's much more easier to set up and configure in comparison.

It's like btrfs, but faster, and less prone to data loss.

Btrfs is data loss prone? OpenSUSE Tumbleweed uses it as default, I assumed it was good enough.

BTRFS is honestly really great and has been for the last few years. Dont take the word of random people on the interwebs, check out some modern sources of info on the subject. Some people love to complain about RAID5/6 but if you use BTRFS the BTRFS way then it is solid.

With that said, if you dont need snapshots, drive mirroring, sub volumes, bit rot protection etc then EXT4 is hard to beat for reliability.

Snapshots changed my life. And I don't exactly demand ultra reliability for my home PC. Thanks for the feedback!

Thats why I'm still on trusty old ext4. Dunno if this is true but I dont want to risk data loss.

Its got a closer feature set to ZFS (tiered storage is going to be huge for me personally), but a much friendlier license. ZFS's licensing drama solidly convinced me not to touch it with a ten meter pole. BTRFS isn't bad as well, I currently use it, but tiered storage is excellent. Was the only reason I used to consider ZFS, but becachefs is getting to have my cake and eat it too.

Ps: isn't 'guys' gender nutral, similar to 'dude'?

The classical answer to a male is: do you sleep with guys?

I don't remember the grammatical names, but there's a difference between using "guys" in your phrase and the way it's used in the title. So it can be gender neutral depending on context.

The same as in "All men are equal", and "Do you like men or women?".

I guess having to explain this is a good enough reason to avoid this allegedly gender-neutral word in gender-neutral contexts

Only for people that did not made through elementary school.

Do you include in this group everyone with English as a foreign language like me?

English is my second language too, but my mother tongue has neutral genders the same. I don't know how it works in your primary language, but if it is not the same, I guess you have to learn more about how it works before trying to tell the native speakers to abandon context.

I’m happy that we can now at least forget about inferring the education levels of people.

What I do see though is the usage of the language by native speakers. I pretty much never see a woman addressing a group of women by the "gender-neutral" "guys". I often see males addressing a group of males by "guys". Even this mismatch tells me enough about how neutral this term is among the people I see.

I also see males addressing a mixed group by "guys". When called out, they say "oh, but I didn’t mean it like that, many other people do that, the word is now neutral". Which might be even true despite the evidence mentioned above, but it still carries an awful lot of resemblance to other excuses about non-neutral language and behavior. I guess you can see why some people see this as an excuse.

I come from a country which in the last century had probably the best women’s rights in the whole world. And it still struggles with appropriate usage of neutral-gendered and "female"-gendered forms of words, and the excuses are all the same.

Heh. "Guy" has some interesting history. It originally referred to Guy Fawkes, because that was his name. Then it came to mean any person, gender neutral, then it became any man, now gendered, but the neutral definition never went away, so we have both meanings floating around still, but the original meaning, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, died.

(I skipped a few steps in there because they're not relevant between guy Fawkes and any person)

sometimes they might

Sure, and this only strengthens the point of the counter question

I’d have to say I’m eager to see an official release of the rust cosmic desktop from system76. I know it’s going to be fairly bare bones and I know you can already download it and play around with it. I’m just excited for another option.

SDDM Wayland Greeter, to have 100% wayland on KDE

I'm currently using greetd-tui but I would instantly switch over to sddm if the Wayland session actually works. (I use hyprland as my window manager )

Fedora 39 KDE/Kinoite already has this

SDDM with Wayland greeter? AFAIK It's not even finished on the git master branch...

Plasma 6 is at the absolute peak of the mountain for me, however I am incredibly excited about the Wayland improvements within Wine, that are slowly coming in

What are you most excited for in Plasma 6?

Consistency. Both visual, and internal logic. Cleanup of dead code, and migrations to uniform new systems

Plasma 6 for sure. I'm a Gnome user waiting with bated breath to see if it actually delivers the goods.

Always hoping for Nvidia to stop being bullshit. Definitely not buying from them again.

You can test it today. The feature freeze has happened already, thus nothing will change until the release

I don’t really know how to install something like a beta version of KDE, especially without messing up things on my own computer.

With an immutable system you can't fuck things up. I guess you aren't on one. In that case, use boxes and install it in a vm :)

What Plasma 6 feature has you most excited?

None in particular. Just the totality of the changes. Many of them are small default changes or usability changes, but when taken together it sounds like a nice, somewhat overdue bundle.

Not OP, but I’m excited about the baked in tiling. Nervous about Wayland as I think I have some stuff that will break, but we’ll see.

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Probably true convergence between mobile and desktop, where your linux phone is powerful enough to be your only computing device. You would only need something like a lapdock (basically a laptop without the guts) and instead of a cable connecting the two, a slot maybe somewhere within the keyboard that your phone slips into. Maybe this exists already, I don't know.

Asus EEE Pad Transformer TF101

That whole line of products was before it's time, I really wanted one of the phone/tablet combos, but man were they expensive.

It's a cool idea and there are similar devices, but they never seem to catch on because most people would rather carry a laptop that's still useful if something happens to their phone

This is what I'm most excited about. I started using gnome mobile on my OnePlus 6. It's still not there yet but it feels better than phosh, Few more bugs tho. I'm so excited for it and what you mentioned is the future I dream about.

How is hardware support these days on OnePlus 6? I'm close to buying one for Linux but keep waiting thinking that a newer alternative might appear.

Not as good as I hoped. I'd wait. Wifi works, didn't try putting a SIM in yet but the gryo doesn't work so there's no auto rotate and scaling is off. It's either too big or too small. I don't think the GPS works either but I'll have to test it.

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2024 - The Year of The Linux Desktop!!!

Cosmic

Budgie 11 (idk if 2024)

VanillaOS 2

SteamOS 3 for desktop (idk when, they are probably waiting until the new open source nvidia driver is mature enough. Maybe they are waiting on wine running without xwayland too... idk

SteamOS 3 for desktop (idk when, they are probably waiting until the new open source nvidia driver is mature enough. Maybe they are waiting on wine running without xwayland too... idk

You don't have to wait for that, when we've got ChimeraOS and Bazzite that work very well, and are more up-to-date and flexible compared to SteamOS.

I'm running Bazzite on both my laptop and desktop and it's fantastic.

Bazzite looks interesting, I might check it out. But I would still rather use SteamOS when it comes out. I like stable more, than up to date. And bazzite has so much stuffed into it and I wouldn't use 90% of those features.

As a gamer, you should like up-to-date more, becuse that generally translates to better performance and better compatibility with games. Things like FUTEX2, IO_URING FUTEX support, HDR, Wayland stuff and so many things are a work-in-progress, that you'd want to be on the latest and greatest otherwise you'd be missing out.

Also, stability isn't really an issue with Bazzite since it's an immutable OS - your updates happen in the cloud for starters, so you won't get any "bad" updates. But on the ocassion that you do, you can in fact easily rollback to the previous image from GRUB. You can also pin a known "good" image so that it's always available.

I know where you are coming from but I don't think it's that important especially not for me, Iam gaming right now on Linux Mint without a problem. And wasn't steamdeck/steamos the first one who supported HDR?

Since features aren't important to you, and since you like stability more, then technically you should like Bazzite more, because it's more stable than Mint (at least on paper), being an immutable OS with atomic updates and built-in rollbacks

SteamOS indeed supports HDR but that's only in game mode (ie under a gamescope session), but not in deskrop mode (Wayland). HDR support is coming to KDE Wayland with Plasma 6 early next year, but if you're still on Mint, you'd have to wait a lot longer to get Plasma 6.

I mean, I will try it. First in a virtual machine and if I like it well enough on a laptop too. But I don't know, I used Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite before and my experience wasn't satisfactory.

I've been running Fedora 39 on my ASUS gaming laptop because it's the only OS that natively supports the utility to deal with the discreet graphics card. I was thinking about using bazzite for the next gaming desktop I build. What do you think about it? I've been using Nobara on my Surface Pro 4, but I can't update using dnf anymore because it would alter some protected drivers, and I don't want that issue with another distro.

I'm excited for convergence and Linux mobile.

Wayland becoming the default for every DE. X11 needs to go.

I'm hoping more market share will mean more applications come to Linux and better support for hardware. Cough cough Nvidia

Bcachefs also looks interesting but I need to look into it more.

And I'm also excited for all the things I don't know about and didn't even think about showing up

Not much. Plasma 6 and any wayland improvements I guess. Apart from that maybe FSR 3 frame generation, but that's not linux specific.

Linux will eventually make it seriously to the desktop in the next few years, possibly going as high as 15%-20% of the userbase (in my country Greece it's already at 9%). But only because MS is going to destroy its Windows base by making it subscription etc.

Work in Cinnamon on Wayland, Plasma 6, XFCE 4.20 for Wayland support, WINE on Wayland, The Fancy Hyprland-like effects coming to Qtile Wayland, basically everything Wayland.

Probably COSMIC. I'm also excited to maybe see HDR and improved tiling in GNOME.

Continued increase in Nix adoption. It seems like 2023 saw a real shift in favour of immutable solutions in general and Nix in particular.

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I want Proton to evolve to the point where my CAD/CAM software works flawlessly.

I'm trying to adapt to FreeCAD, but I have so much muscle memory invested in Rhino that it feels like being a beginner again.

Now that they're working on it, I'm interested in seeing how well Wayland in Cinnamon works. Hopefully it can fix some tearing and stuttering issues in my mixed refresh rate multimonitor setup.

Will also be interesting to see how the landscape with Windows goes, especially considering I'm picking up traces of discontent in their ranks. I think Valve's actions will probably cause them to sit up and pay attention.

Nvidia Opensource Drivers, NVK etc with Wayland support, and bcachefs.

Definitely COSMIC DE, can't wait to check out all the cool stuff they've been doing!

Finally, KDE is going back to having some nice bling after slowly removing it for years.

If now they can make kwin stable, I'd be so happy

I'm still pretty new to Linux so I'm finding new stuff all the time, I've been very happy with EndeavourOS but I am planning to switch to vanilla Arch when Plasma 6 fully drops. There are other distros that have caught my attention, they're just abit beyond my skill level currently.

Only thing I'm really hoping for is improvements to Nvidia (Yes I will buy AMD next time I get the chance, I built this PC before I had any intention of using Linux)

If Fedora would stop requiring reboots for daily updates that would be great. I might as well use windows for this kind of BS

You can just turn it off. It is the 'offline updates' setting in the updater settings.

What's exciting about Plasma 6?

I'm a Plasma user, and I can't think of anything I want them to change.

Okay, it would be cool if there were more plasmoids. That's about it.

It’s not a revolution, but theres a ton of small features and quality of life improvements, but the big improvement is much more mature Wayland session with improved DPI scaling (fractional scaling), kwin crash recovery (robustness), improved latency in games, smoother cursor, UX improvements (I’m really happy they simplified some of historical UI clusterfucks), floating panel with intelihide and a whole lot more.

Plasma 5 has a loooot of bugs. I admire people that never find them. I reported like 60 already, and currently the fixes are only there in Plasma6.

That's what I'm wondering. I keep seeing all this excitement for it but I'm running the beta and it just seems like a buggy version of Plasma 5. There aren't any major new features and there are even less plasmoids due to an API change. Any time I ask someone what feature they're waiting for they never give a clear answer. I think most are expecting something bigger because it's a major version number.

More stability, better Wayland support, better UI without crazy inconsistent padding everywhere.

Plasma 6 might be what makes me give it another chance. The lack of visual consistency and the bugs were what was keeping me away, but they're fixing a lot of that.

I'm hoping for COSMIC to come out. It looks so promising and the fact that they implemented the panels using wlr-layer-shell is so great. I think more desktop environments should do this for interoperability

As a GNOME user:

A lot of development is ongoing in GNOME thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I’m curious what that will bring.

Also hoping that the proposed tiling functionality will be implemented.

Also excited for this. I tried KDE before but I didn't find it easy to configure (too manually for a declarative guy like me). I like more the simplicity of Gnome.

I am waiting for Plasma 6 too. Maybe it will ship with Fedora 40 🤔

I hope so

And I am looking forward to Ubuntu server 24.04

What Plasma 6 feature are you waiting for?

For me:

  • Ability for a panel to stay visible but dodge windows, for a dock-like behavior.
  • Better/customisable touchpad gestures (rumored)
  • HDR support on Wayland
  • Simultaneous password and fingerprint authentication
  • Decoupling of icons from the Plasma theme (so ALL icons are changed when you apply a systemwide icon theme)

I hope Valve will make the Index VR work again after breaking it with the 2.x updates in October :')

Bcachefs, love COW files. I wish all file systems had it even if it naively copied the whole file on first write. Sort of a write safe hard link.

Getting my Pinephone Pro up and running, and getting away from Google forever, finally. Also I'm gonna make the jump from Arch to either Gentoo and/or Guix, I think.

Mee too. Already switched to Gentoo. I also plan on setting up my own NAS.

Nothing much really. MGLRU was finally added this year to fix long-standing kernel OOM issues. Maybe some TPM stuff in systemd from Lennart. Maybe the pace of immutables will increase but who knows. Despite the occasional regressions am pretty happy with Linux.

Hope Wayland gets more support and Fractional Scaling will finally work well.

Moving beyond linux mint to other distros so I can learn more and have a more customizable linux experience.

I got fed up with windows 10, and then windows 11 pushed me away from ever wanting to use windows again.
Linux mint has been fun but its a bit too barebones when it comes to customization ( though that's one of its strengths since its so easy and straightforward for a longtime windows user to move over to linux)

Also I've had a bunch of trouble with Nvidia drivers and playing new games in 2023, so I'll probably buy/build a new linux desktop in late 2024 on AMD CPU/GPU.

still a sucker for solus a little so i wanna see if they do the merge with serpent next year, if not, solus 4.5 would also be nice to see

Apparently theres a "better wayland" already as is -- forgot its name now. I'd love to see it overcoming both wayland and Xorg.

What's so special about plasma 6? Currently on plasma 5 and like it. Don't really know too much it can improve on besides reliability and the desktop being more usable and easy to use.

Personally I'm excited to see Flatpak become more widespread and usable, fixing some "rough around the edges" aspects of it. I've been using it quite a bit this past few months and I think it presents a really coherent, simple vision for how to do package distribution that solves a lot of pain points. The sandboxing functionality is critical and easy to use, I don't need every app to have access to everything in my home directory.

Just using it like I've always been with as little change as possible.