What developments in the Linux world are you looking forward to the most?
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.
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.
Two things at completely opposite ends of the âLinux worldâ:
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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.
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Valve flexing more muscle in developing Proton as it comes to terms with the fact Microsoftâs 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 itâs DRMy platform. Definitely not perfect but itâs so vastly improved Iâm comfortable calling it ânight and dayâ
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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).
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.
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bcachefs; I currently use zfs and am not a huge fan of btrfs. Having another filesystem mainlined will be fun.
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eBPF, particularly if somebody picks up after the presumably abandoned bpfilter.
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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.
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long term: the newly introduced accelerator section of the kernel might make SoCs with NPUs and the like have better software support.
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very hyped for plasma 6, and Cosmic both. I've got a lot of confidence in KDE devs, and Cosmic previews look very nice.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Permanently Deleted
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 canât wait for HDR support so I can finally fully ditch windows. Iâve become so used to it that I canât go without it.
XFCE Wayland would be pretty sweet. Also native night mode whenever they add that.
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
Proton and wine for sure
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.
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 file picker which doesn't hurt my brains. I'm also looking to avoid tinkering as much as possible with CosmicOS + Virgo laptop.
A patch for Lenovo Legion sound.
x86box, Flashpoint Archive, Ruffle, and other tools to sustain the usefulness of the golden age of computing well into the future.