Linux @lemmy.ml

1y ago

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.

158 comments

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.
  
  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.
- Linux phones
  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...

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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 ~~existing~~ proprietary 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

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.

IPFS has a ton of potential behind it, as it makes publishing, accessing and retaining content drastically easier than HTTP. The content-addressing also means you can basically sidesteps the whole act of "downloading", no more need to download a file, extract a file, etc. You just access it directly in your file system by a unique name.
That said, I am also very pessimistic on it. IPFS suffer from "underspecification". The protocol is completely focused on just moving bytes around. It doesn't care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS. It's very much like Bittorrent in this regard, but worse as even Open Source licenses don't help here. IPFS, unlike Bittorrent, doesn't even guarantee that content will stay together, e.g. you can pin and reshare your favorite icon, without a hint of what license it is under or what icon theme you picked it from. For the time being everybody seems to just ignore the problem, but I think it will kill it if it gets popular before this problem is solved.
Another problem is that it's just buggy and slow, especially when it comes to the fuse daemon that provides the /ipfs and /ipns directories. Though that at least is fixable on the client side. The copyright problem might not without some fundamental changes to the protocol itself.
- It doesn't care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS.
  Sounds like a feature, not a shortcoming
  
  It means that using it properly is automatically illegal. I am not seeing how that's a "feature". It renders it completely unusable.
- I think that would go against the philosophy of ipfs. Sticking drm on top of it would crash with the intended self-archiving capabilities and censorship resistance, as well as with the whole point of a decentralized network since some entity or entities would have the power to block or delete content from it

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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?

Nix (OS, the package manager, and the language) having excellent and exhaustive documentation.
It being so easy to use that my grandmother could use it. Heck, a GUI to handle packages would be amazing!
- 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.
  
  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).

XFCE Wayland would be pretty sweet. Also native night mode whenever they add that.

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.

Proton and wine for sure

Personally, I’m looking forward to native Wayland support for Wine and KDE’s port to Qt 6.
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

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.

Easy fractional scaling on sway

Fusion 360 for Linux, because then I can dump Windows forever!
- Hallelujah!

Cosmic Desktop

At the least Nvidia hardware gets full support for Linux. Which in turn would help me run Wayland on daily bases.
Ease at implementing secure boot for Linux.
Torification/I2P being used as standard to use and adapt applications running on linux for internet access.
- 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. removed to them

Mesa 23.2 enabling ray tracing by default on all RDNA 2 and 3 cards using RADV

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.

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.

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