Linux

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.

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.

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.

Kinda with ya on that one - Wayland maturing and becoming standardized across all features and platforms to replace X11.

RiscV laptops and precompiled binaries in package managers.

X12

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.

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

Cosmic Desktop

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”

Wine + Wayland for sure. It's time to let X11 rest, it's earned it.

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.

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.

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.

pop os new de

hot plug for PCIe/eGPU/USB-C/TB4 devices

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.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

• 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!

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.

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)

SteamOS is making huge strides for adoption, i look forward to more people being freed from corporate lock in.

• 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.

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 😮‍💨

Flatpaks seaminglessly supporting all apps plus cli applications and drivers would be the holy grail.

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