What developments in the Linux world are you looking forward to the most?
Personally, I'm looking forward to native Wayland support for Wine and KDE's port to Qt 6.
Personally, I'm looking forward to native Wayland support for Wine and KDE's port to Qt 6.
Linux phones are getting closer and closer to usability every day. I don't care that they'll always be less polished than iOS or Android, I want a Linux phone.
I've been curious about Linux phones. Can you recommended any devices or operating systems to watch? Thanks.
Your best bet right now IMO would be flashing PostmarketOS onto a used OnePlus 6, which is cheap, has good specs and none of the battery issues plaguing the Pinephone Pro. That said, it's not 100% ready to be a phone yet- for now its best use case is as a mini-tablet / PDA kind of thing. Really feels like carrying a pocket laptop around, which is pretty fun as a starting point.
Cool, thank you!
Pinephone has a great active community, and the device itself is dirt cheap (also pretty low-specced). There's a pro version with a much better specs in theory, but development state is much rougher. Not that the basic model is anywhere near daily driver material yet, but the progress is very appreciable every time i check in.
Will we be able to use messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal on Linux phones?
Yes, since you can run Android apps on them. They will be slower and have some quirks though I'm sure.
Wine + Wayland for sure. It's time to let X11 rest, it's earned it.
Its all finished, the main developer is porting the source code by patches so its easier for the MR to get accepted by the Wine devs.
What do you mean? I play games with Lutris on Wayland without issues.
It goes through XWayland, whereas Wine on Wayland would do away with that later
Linux phones for me. Really impressed by how these things have come in the last 3-4 years, and now we're getting close to having at least one that's usable day-to-day (with plenty of rough edges, obviously). As soon as that happens I hope more people will decide to take the plunge and really start pushing things forward.
Oh yea, I'm very excited to give Plasma Mobile a go in earnest
Plasma's scalable applications paradigm has been around for coming up on 15 years. Gnome's isn't far behind.
I'm just disappointed in the direction of UX they're all taking. Ubuntu Touch was looking innovative and made me excited. Then that didn't happen and now we just have a bunch of Android look-alikes but worse and buggier. Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad to have GNU/Linux on a phone either way (especially NixOS Mobile), but I'm not excited to use one.
I don't know if it's just me getting older or if innovation in how we interface with technology has just sort of stagnated. In the past there was so much happening. New input methods (all kinds of pointer devices, joysticks, weird keyboards); graphical paradigms (floating windows vs tiling panes, tabs, stacking, grouping, virtual desktops); display technologies (vector graphics, convex screens, flat screens, projectors, VR headsets, e-ink); even machine architectures (eg Lisp machines) and how you interacted with your computer environment as a result.
As far as I can tell, VR systems are the latest innovation and they haven't changed significantly in close to a decade. E-ink displays are almost nowhere to be found, or only attached to shitty devices (thanks, patent laws) - although I'm excited for the PineNote to eventually happen.
How do we still not have radial menus?! Or visual graph-like pipelining for composing input-outputs between bespoke programs?! We've all settled on a very homogenous way of interacting with computers, and I don't believe for a second that it's the best way.
Just want to add that I don't think it's a technological plateau. I think it's capitalism producing shiny and "upgraded" versions of things that are easy to sell. Things that enable accessible and rapid consumption. High refresh rate, vertical high-resolution screens for endless scrolling in apps optimised for ads-scrolled-past-per-second. E-ink devices only good enough that you can clearly see the ads on them as you read your books. Things are just not made for humans. They're made for corporations to extract value out of humans.
Having used Ubuntu touch for a bit I'm way more excited about gnome mobile. I just think it's overall a better paradigm. Ubuntu had some neat ideas but overall it just didn't do it for me.
Yeah, the desktops are A++ for the last 10 years, it's the phones that I'm excited to get to a similar level. I have one and it's an expensive dust collector, I dust it off every few months and not much is changing
A WINE type app but for OSX (or really just iOS) apps would be awesome to have both desktops and phone. Call it CIDER or something similar. I reckon the way Apple does their app stores these days it would be hard to actually get most software working, but I don't think that alone is a showstopper.
Having both that and Waydroid on a phone would be pretty great. You might want to check out Darling for running Mac apps on Linux in the meantime, since its goals are similar to Wine's (but it's still early in development in comparison)
I am looking forward to Wayland being a problem free experience. Well, rather, I don't care if it's X11 or Wayland, I don't want have to think about the underlying system.
Also, software becoming distributable in a uniform way. Though here, I strongly would advocate for flatpak.
Two things at completely opposite ends of the “Linux world”:
eBPF. It seems super promising for improving observability and security; especially performance of these concerns. It also strikes me as a risky architectural decision. Programmable privileged kernel code + JIT. What could go wrong… that validator sure is doing heavy lifting.
Valve flexing more muscle in developing Proton as it comes to terms with the fact Microsoft’s vertical integration (and monopolistic practices increasingly unfettered by government) will eventually be an existential risk to it. It is now ridiculously easy to install and run so many games on Linux, so long as you accept the devil you know and it’s DRMy platform. Definitely not perfect but it’s so vastly improved I’m comfortable calling it “night and day”
The Valve one has been the most exciting for me. AFAIK Valve has been thinking about the issues with Windows controlling PC gaming since Windows 8 first came out. The Steam Machines were a flop at the time but in recent years they've been able to maks big moves for Linux gaming and instead of giving up has been doubling down on the importance of it.
Ahh yes the Steam Machines. Definitely contemporaneous with windows 8.
I think it’s likely Valve have intensified efforts recently for a number of reasons but not least of which is the ongoing encroachment of Microsoft turning the Windows PC experience into more of a walled garden across more segments. It can’t have gone unnoticed that Microsoft are 1) selling games on the Microsoft Store and 2) are normalising the concept of hardware root of trust etc with the windows 11 TPM requirement.
EFI secure boot was one thing. Setting conditions up so every PC in the world has hardware support for verifying that user space programs are signed by Microsoft is another. I’m not saying overnight they’ll flick a switch and every windows installation in the world is on S mode. But it’s clearly trending that way. That would be good night for Steam if they so chose. And clearly Microsoft believe they can fob off regulators well enough
RiscV laptops and precompiled binaries in package managers.
My dream is to have a RISC-V phone running Linux
RISCV laptops, with battery that can handle 3 days of juice, doing work. And should be powered by linux, either Fedora or it's derivative (imho)
whats all of this for?
https://www.fierceelectronics.com/embedded/what-risc-v
A fully working Linux Phone with good battery life that supports a good matrix client with e2 encryption. GrapheneOS is good, but we need initiatives independent from Google.
Technically Android is Linux. I know what you mean though, and it would be great. Maybe some day...
Better tools for graphic design. Maybe a port of the Affinity suite or a big push towards GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus development. GIMP... I feel like people dreamed for more than a decade for essential photo editor functionalities like CMYK support and non-destructive editing. At least the first one is coming in the next version(partially).
I switched my design workflow to FLOSS tools exclusively. Krita is a perfectly competent photoshop replacement, Inkscape has been developed at a breakneck pace in the past year, the workflow is different, but it's every bit as good as illustrator, and Scribus is great once you get used to the workflow. If anything, Scribus' workflow helps you plan and structure your projects better. IMHO FLOSS tools are absolutely ready for professional work, but you cannot expect the workflow to match
existingproprietary tools.Would absolutely love for Serif Labs to create a port for Affinity Photo and Designer. Of the programs I've tried, those two have the closest UX to Photoshop and Illustrator without the software-as-a-service model.
Hell, I'd even take it if all they did was support it working under WINE. While I would prefer a seamless UI that fits in with both GTK and Qt, it's understandable that they might not consider it worth the effort.
If Affinity apps worked natively on Linux I'd ditch Windows for good.
Krita was developed for graphic design specifically. Gimp tackles other simpler use cases
HDR and wide color gamut! While the displays are still only really available in the mid to high end (I don't count HDR400), it's no longer just pro gear and I upgraded to a new display recently that I'd love to take advantage of it with. I've been using the new, still in testing Variable Refresh Rate on GNOME and this would be the final piece of the puzzle for making me ditch windows 100% when it comes to gaming, as Proton has basically solved every other issue for me - I'm primarily a singleplayer gamer.
I think KDE and Gamescope have experimental HDR working with Windows games.
I don't know if KDE got it working yet, but Gamescope's works pretty well out-of-the-box. Nobara and maybe Chimara OS already have this ready with a session for Steam Big Picture mode.
Kinda funny that Windows games seem to always get compatibility with these things first. I guess just adding support in Wine means more games get the functionality at once than developers adding it on a per-game basis.
Looking forward to seeing Cosmic get a alpha/beta release, I love what they've shown and since I can never get used to tiling window managers, it looks like a very nice middle ground between DE/WM. And seeing their Virgo laptop, I doubt I'll get one since EU shipping is a nightmare (Though they're supposed to open an EU warehouse soon-ish), but more repairable laptops, esp. one using GPLv3 for every bit, is amazing. Looking forward to seeing more about the FW16, not linux per se, but still cool.
Plasma 6, ofc. Way, way in the future (Probably) is seeing more DEs make their way to Wayland, like XFCE/Cinnamon/Budgie
bcachefs; I currently use zfs and am not a huge fan of btrfs. Having another filesystem mainlined will be fun.
eBPF, particularly if somebody picks up after the presumably abandoned bpfilter.
Improved/matured support for rust written drivers. I'm not so fussed about in-tree work, but future third party drivers being written in a safer language would be a nice benefit.
long term: the newly introduced accelerator section of the kernel might make SoCs with NPUs and the like have better software support.
very hyped for plasma 6, and Cosmic both. I've got a lot of confidence in KDE devs, and Cosmic previews look very nice.
NixOS has been a really cool distro for a while, but it also looks to have a solid build system from which interesting derivatives will show up.
I don't think that will happen and hope it won't because NixOS can handle the usual preferences people might have internally.
Don't like glibc? pkgsMusl is the entire package set but with musl instead of glibc.
Want static compilation? pkgsStatic.
Afraid of systemd? Well okay, we don't have that right now but I don't think anyone would be opposed to optional support for worse service managers. It'd just be an opt-in toggle that we could support with enough people interested in it.
Nah, people always want to put their own spin on things and I welcome the diversity.
Arch can bring in all the necessary packages yourself, but Garuda exists and people enjoy using it. Horses for courses.
Garuda only exists because the only way to distribute a set of default configuration in regular distros is to create a whole new distro/installer. We don't have that problem in NixOS because all configuration is declarative and composable.
In the NixOS world, Garuda would be a NixOS base config which users would import in their own config and extend with their own configuration. You'd still be using NixOS though.
If you're packaging enough changes that somebody would say it's a different experience, calling it the "X configuration" vs "X distribution" based on how it's packaged is just splitting hairs.
What's eBPF?
It's a technology that lets you run code through the kernel's JIT compiler. It's an extremely flexible way to run code in kernel space; the typical example is using it to build XDP programs for networking, which can deeply analyse network packets without having to incur the performance penalty for changing context to userspace.
Just to be sure, what's wrong with ARC and L2ARC?
My issue is not with the ARC, it's a few things:
kernel integration is iffy; I don't want to attach a module to my system every time I compile the kernel and prey that the difference in pace between the release schedules of openZFS and Linux hasn't caused issues, and because of the licencing issues my options of having a distro with zfs built in are very limited.
it's performance isn't excellent from a NVME standpoint. It's not terrible, but it could be better.
it has a massive code base, making introducing things like performance improvements and new features quite a challenge (Though the openZFS team are doing a bang-up job despite this).
Ultimately if I was still holding on to 40+TB of important data, I'd be using ZFS and be happy about it. I want snapshots on my workstation, without all the strange issues I've had with btrfs. I'm sure bcachefs will have its own issues but it's better to have options.
Sure, I understand the part about having to compile the ZFS module every time alongside the kernel. But that must be some heavy-lifting you're doing if you're regularly compiling your own kernel. I'd be interested in what you're running that requires such efforts.
I don't understand why you would need NVMe for ARC. Doesn't it run in RAM only? Isn't L2ARC what runs on storage devices?
Not really heavy lifting, I'm just running the Xanmod kernel, and need to turn on some features I need for eBPF development. I'm also keeping up to date with kernel releases, so every 6 weeks or so I need to rebuild.
The ARC runs in RAM, but is generally best when it's given:
Conditions great for a server but not so much for a workstation. I don't intend for my cache misses to go to spinning rust, so I have 2 2TB NVME drives. SSDs are cheap as chips currently.
The L2ARC is a victim cache of the ARC, and while it is persistent it's still much more effective for me to just use a NVME drive for my pool.
Just went through Xanmod's page: the list of features provided seem exciting, although I don't really know much about some of them. Do you need these features for eBPF development?
Well, you're right: ARC is best used in a server. What problems did you have with BTRFS that prompted you to switch?
I use Xanmod for gaming (fsync & related tweaks), but need other flags for development on the same machine.
My issues with BTRFS were mainly in their userspace tooling; ZFS volume management is just glorious, it felt like a significant downgrade to use BTRFS.
AMD is planning to release OpenSIL in 2027, which should, in theory, accelerate the development of Coreboot and Libreboot and bring them to modern AMD motherboards
I'm curious, will that work with Motherboards released until then, or just new motherboards from that point onwards?
New motherboards. Unless AMD collaborates with board makers to push updates to their BIOS/UEFI to include OpenSIL compatibility, which is likely not going to be the case in my opinion
IIRC the next few Wayland updates this year will solve and improve a lot of problems.
Like what? Have you got any examples?
HDR and HDMI 2.1 support would be nice.
Some TVs don't have display ports eh.
And maybe we wanna enjoy 7.1 audio on our fancy ATMOS setups.
More/better atomic distros, like Silverblue, Kinoite, VanillaOS, etc. Silverblue is already excellent, easy to use and extremely solid, but there are still some odd rough edges that I think would make it less appealing to new users. When we can offer newbies a personally unbreakable Linux system that does basically everything they want and more, then I think it'll be easy to recommend. At this point it's hard to imagine going back to a traditionally updated distro.
The next steps for PipeWire, which has improved and streamlined audio (and sometimes video) handling and production immensely. I can imagine a future where we can easily send, audio, video, midi, and all kinds of other data streams between arbitrary programs on Linux, easily routing things with GUI frontends, having connections establish automatically, etc. I don't know how much this stuff is in the works, but I think PipeWire has a ton of potential left to be explored.
I'm a happy user of Fedora workstation. What makes Silverblue better? I've never tried it. I've done lots of changes but my system has been rock solid since Fedora 36.
I was on Fedora workstation before switching to Silverblue and they're both quite solid, to be fair. The big feature that differentiates Silverblue is immutability--you can't easily make changes to the base system.
Now, to some people I think that's going to sound awful, but it has its pros and cons. The biggest benefit being that your base system is solid (and not just solid as in unlikely to break, but literally unchanging over time). Updating your system is effectively replacing it with a different system entirely (delta compressed, so it's not too inefficient, if I understand correctly), and you can rollback/revert/swap between systems on the fly, in the unlikely event that an update makes something worse, though I haven't needed to. You can even rebase your Silverblue (Gnome) system into a Kinoite (KDE Plasma) system, pin both "commits" and swap between them. I haven't tried that though, since I'm pretty happy with the Gnome workflow. Long story short, immutable distros like Silverblue are basically as solid as solid can be.
There are two drawbacks that I can think of, and then a couple of minor nitpicks. The biggest being that you need to restart your system after making changes or installing packages. You don't need to restart between each package install or anything, but any system-level changes that you make won't take effect until you restart. The second drawback is that layering packages is not always ideal and working inside docker/podman containers (often via toolbx/distrobox) is the best way to do some tasks. For example, if you're a programmer and need to install a lot of dependencies to build some program, I find it's best to create a "pet container" to work in. That doesn't both me much though, in fact I kind of like that workflow.
So basically, it's probably not for everyone, especially people who really love to tinker and customizes everything. But if you want a basically unbreakable Linux machine, it's worth looking into.
Thanks much for the detailed reply. It's obviously not for me since I do a lot of tinkering and I'm used to the traditional system. But it definitely should be suitable for some scenarios. Scools and kiosks come to mind.
The base os is immutable, but you can still change configuration files, compile and install local software (but not in the immutable directories), install desktop environment extensions, add custom repositories, etc. You can also layer packages, but most graphical software is best installed as flatpaks (but not mandatory). So it depends on what tinkering means for you. If it means messing around with binaries in the default locations, like /usr/bin, then it’s not for you, but for many other things there is a way, it’s just a matter of getting used to the separation between the immutable base layer and the things that you build around and on top of it.
Functional fractional scaling on GNOME.
I moved to a 4k monitor and could never get an experience I was happy with, had to move back to Windows. I could use it at 150% scaling and get blurry apps, or 200% scaling and get no screen space.
Now, most programs did work fine or I could tolerate them (I don't care if Spotify is a bit blurry). But gaming was just bad, GNOME told the games a fake resolution and then rescaled them, so they looked awful. The best solution I found was using a Python script to disable scaling before launching a game, but it was clunky at best.
Now, the new fractional scaling extensions did add the ability to have the app handle scaling by itself, so I'm really just waiting for an option to disable scaling for X11 programs or for Gamescope to add a "tell the compositor I will handle scaling but then don't do anything" option so I can actually get full resolution for my games.
I'm also waiting for variable refresh rate, but I can live without that as GNOME Wayland doesn't really get tearing ever.
this!
Flatpaks seaminglessly supporting all apps plus cli applications and drivers would be the holy grail.
Unfortunatly i don't think thats gonna happen. Due to how flatpaks work things like drivers wouldn't work without some serius workorounds.
SteamOS is making huge strides for adoption, i look forward to more people being freed from corporate lock in.
*freed from Microsoft's monopoly. Valve is still a corporation.
They have a lot of work to do before they can publicly release it. They really messed up basing it on Arch, IMO. Whereas Fedora has their Silverblue and SUSE has their CoreOS, Valve is really treading new ground with an immutable Arch distro. As it is now, the immutability is a major barrier to doing even very simple things. If I want to install an external driver on Silverblue, I just navigate to it's folder and run
rpm-ostree install -driver-. SteamOS has no rpm-ostree equivalent, so you have to disable read-only which is more complicated and defeats the purpose of immutability anyway.Valve will have to develop a bunch of brand new tools or (more likely) contract the work out, which as far as I know hasn't happened yet even 1.5 years after official release.
I guess my point is they made an easily accessible experience that is not frustrating to use for the average user which will help dispell the belief that linux is hard to use or that gaming is only for windows. They provided a console like experience and made it hard for normies to break it. You're free to install silverblue on the thing. Personally i'll probably re-image with arch later but for my use so far I haven't really have to change anything. I haven't run into an issue that couldn't be solved with a flatpak yet.
As a gaming OS it works great, I'm just talking about what they need to do if they want it to be a successful desktop OS. Their plans are to release it as such so I hope they put in the necessary effort before that, because it's severely lacking right now.
The ever-improving ecosystem for NixOS as a desktop environment.
I switched over to Nix around a month ago, and in that time I've already seen several guides and sources of documentation improve themselves significantly. I could see NixOS documentation eventually becoming almost as impressive as the Arch Wiki, and it seems that process is in hyperdrive right now.
X12
I'm looking forward to XFCE/Wayland.
I started Linux 2 years ago, and learned a lot, but never bothered learning about X11 because I figured it would be a waste of time.
Me too. I love XFCE so much, but it's impossible to deny how large a step forwards Wayland is on a technical level (although there are still kinks to work out). When XFCE moves over, I'll be able to confidently do so as well.
pop os new de
If you're not familiar with Linux and distros, this reads like a foreign language lol
Pop_OS!, a popular Linux distribution, is writing a new desktop environment. A desktop environment is basically the functionality of the desktop, think the taskbar and window snapping, etc. on Windows and the dock and top bar on macOS. A desktop environment also comes with its own set of apps, like how Windows comes with Explorer and Task Manager.
Yea, Cosmo Desktop sounds really cool.
I can’t wait for HDR support so I can finally fully ditch windows. I’ve become so used to it that I can’t go without it.
I dont think thats really the goal here. NixOS is not designed to be used by your grandmother. Better Documentation would sometimes be nice though.
By the way, there already is https://github.com/vlinkz/nixos-conf-editor
Probably not the goal, but a NixOS-based begginer distro could be great, with one app to install all your package and one app to manage all your settings. (I personally really like the idea of having app settings in the "general" settings app). But probably the killer advantage of NixOS is that it's really hard to break and really easy to fix, which is important for a distro aimed at the general public.
P.S.: Also check out nix-software-center by the same guy.
Martin Wimpress is working on it https://github.com/wimpysworld/nix-config
It isn't not the goal, either. Nix is very popular with devs for many obvious reasons, so most of the developments naturally has to do with making that an even better experience. That doesn't mean accessibility is a non-goal; there just isn't a great deal of motivation to work on making the operating system easy for non-devs to use.
It has so many interesting possible applications. Declarative and reproducible wine configurations for games and software; universal (cross-distro) packaging (without emulated runtime environments like flatpak); reproducible user environments managed easily with a GUI with trivial version control (both for config and software versions); pre-configuring a system before even setting it up (such as configuring a raspberry pi before you've even bought one so that once you have, you just install and configure everything in one go).
Android app support, MacOS-grade font rendering, Graphical systemd manager A quick way to scroll to top (on iPhone you can double tap the status bar to jump to top in ANY app)
Have you seen Waydroid?
Waydroid is awesome!
MacOS font rendering is dreadful on non-Retina/HiDPI displays. If you want similar rendering on Linux, turn font hinting off, and set antialiasing to greyscale only, no subpixel rendering. It will look very similar, if not identical, to modern MacOS.
For non-Retina displays I vastly prefer FreeType's subpixel antialiasing and "slight" hinting to what MacOS does.
Thanks, will give this a try. Any recommendations on which font to use?
The UI font in MacOS is called SF Pro. If you have access to a Mac you can simply copy the .otf font files over to Linux (they are in /System/Library/Fonts on MacOS) and install and use them there.
If you don't have access to a Mac, Google Roboto Sans is a very similar design (it was the default Android UI font for several years) and if it's not already installed by your Linux distro, it's freely downloadable.
KDE Plasma 6 for the resolution of so many issues; COSMIC DE as a brand new choice in the future; Guix System to have KDE and more packages shipped because it's literally the best designed distro as of now.
For now i just want color management on Wayland KDE.
SAME. I'm so keen to switch, but I can't without this final piece.
Fusion 360 for Linux, because then I can dump Windows forever!
Hallelujah!
Well, I think a lot of us are in the same boat.
Also, the flatpak development (Im not included in this but a lot of ppl is)
There is more big improvement development for flatpaks?
For me the console API is just horrible. Also idk if it is a packaging problem but a lot of things I tried in the past were a lot bugier than my distro package
XFCE Wayland would be pretty sweet. Also native night mode whenever they add that.
Easy fractional scaling on sway
I2P by default would be a hilarious F U to surveillance
I get you on the NVIDIA side of things, but as another commenter mentioned, it's an NVIDIA problem, not a Linux one, and I really don't see it being solved. I finally gave in and replaced a perfectly functional 3070Ti with a 7900XT and damn, wish I'd done this a long time ago! Just works straight out of the box with wayland.
its Nvidias fault not Linux. Bitch to them
Cosmic Desktop
Proton and wine for sure
Looking forward to greater support for "driverless printing" in more Linux distributions, especially via IPP-over-USB. This would allow most consumer-level printers to be used directly from Linux without needing proprietary drivers and/or explicit Linux support from the printer vendor. This solves one of the common pain points when using desktop Linux at home.
Mesa 23.2 enabling ray tracing by default on all RDNA 2 and 3 cards using RADV
Being able to easily run a NixOS Wayland graphical environment on a Raspberry Pi 4. Petty and small thing I know but I've sunk quite a few hours setting this up and haven't got very far with it 😮💨
DRM should work on the RPI GPU. What happens when you run i.e. sway from the CLI?
hot plug for PCIe/eGPU/USB-C/TB4 devices
I like the kind of revival of nice TUIs that is going on right now. I just wish it continues !
I'm excited watching the maturity of Pipewire/Wayland. I do a lot of audio and video work with Linux and these tools are so close to being perfect.
A patch for Lenovo Legion sound.
A file picker which doesn't hurt my brains. I'm also looking to avoid tinkering as much as possible with CosmicOS + Virgo laptop.
x86box, Flashpoint Archive, Ruffle, and other tools to sustain the usefulness of the golden age of computing well into the future.
Red Hat dying
Just because they're fucking up RHEL doesn't mean they're not the biggest contributer to Linux there is.
That'd be an insane blow and would take years if not decades to recover from.