As we start the new year what are you hoping for in the Linux ecosystem?
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Please for all that is good in the world, let the Linux foundation invest the majority of their funds in the Linux kernel first. Then please have a marketing budget bigger than what’s left… A paltry 2% of their funding going to kernel stuff is an absolute joke.
The kernel also badly needs to be rewritten in rust. Not all at once but piecemeal. The rust tooling is lightyears ahead of whatever is being used now, getting into a rust project is also so much easier. There’s another project, the name of which I can remember, doing a rewrite and building it is a simple as
cargo build. Seriously, that’s the level of simplicity I want, not whatever bullshit I have to do now and follow a guide, take my own notes on how to make it work on my specific distro, fail a few times, and stare at unreadable GCC errors.Also please please please stop using a mailing list (or at least make it optional). Holy moly are you losing a bunch of next gen devs through that. Regardless of how controversial the CoC was, it finally changed the tone a little, which is nice, but mailing lists are seriously archaic. The absolute minority uses them. It’s another big thing hampering kernel development (at least to me). They are a terrible experience through and through that make it difficult to follow discussions, diffs difficult to read and interact with (leave comments on lines and respond to them), and spams the inbox.
Please let kernel development move into this century.
Rainbow six siege support, GOG Linux program, SteamOS publicly released and 7% marketshare.
The Windows version of GOG works in Linux under proton
Gog galaxy is awful. Heroic launcher is great though!
No particular order to these.
- A full XFCE release with wayland support
- HDR on DEs other than Plasma
- More support for Snapdragon X laptops and ARM64 platforms
- NVK support for Maxwell GPUs
Updates to SteamVR to fix their Linux-specific bugs, like broken room view, lighthouse power management/firmware update, inconsistent performance and reprojection issues
OpenComposite to have a longer list of working games through it
More polished Wine/Proton Wayland driver
Implementation of Windows Spatial Audio in Wine
Better handling of audio sample rates/allowing adjustment of sample rate per device
Hardware video acceleration in Electron, ex. when screen-sharing on Discord
This would be amazing! I’m currently testing the waters on Manjaro having only ever used Ubuntu years ago in college, and currently the abysmal VR support is preventing me from switching over full time.
Would you happen to know if there is a different Linux distro I should be using for better VR support or are they all equally screwed right now?
The lack of asynchronous reprojection is nausea central for me. I read you can use a super old version of steam VR, which has an older worse form of reprojection that works, but I haven’t looked into it further.
Creative software to just announce they they’ll think about Linux.
In no particular order:
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PikaOS 5. I want to see this project flourish, and I think they bring some much-need UX innovations to certain GUI tools (their system update interface is the best I’ve seen so far). I also love that they’ve dumped Ubuntu in order to do the CachyOS optimization thing upon a Debian base while still keeping everything bleeding edge.
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Improved default keyring services in KDE.
kwalletis kinda messy, and some people have pointed out that their use of blowfish is behind current best practices. On the flipside, using PGP means entering your password twice to unlock your keyring, so the experience is just not great out of the box.- I’m aware you can use third party tools like KeePass, but a user should not have to use something else to get a good experience.
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Total Linux desktop share at 3%.
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More/Frequent upstream gaming improvements from the Valve x Arch joint effort.
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Nvidia integration parity with AMD
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Open source Nvidia driver (as long as we’re wishing)
Total Linux desktop share at 3%.
The marketshare has already reached 5% and 4.55% in some surveys.
I’ve seen some of those, and from what I understand, the actual market share is 2.4% (the way average people like me would understand it, anyway).
Either way, my wish is for increased growth in the next year, however you measure it.
It’s 1.5% according to StatCounter which is the least biased source I know of.
For all the operating systems in the world including mobile.
Fair point - 4.1% for desktop, which is more than I would have guessed.
Nvidia released open source drivers in 2024.
Which are barely more than a first step as they are just the bare minimum with everything else being proprietary and pushed to userspace.
They did not. Only the firmware is open source, the driver is closed
I suggest you actually read the documentation about the things you link. As explained, the “open” Nvidia drivers are actually a tiny open component around a proprietary closed blob that actually drives the GPU.
No doubt, but where does the documentation explain that? It’s not totally surprising that the firmware would remain closed source for now.
Regardless of the fact that firmware and userspace components are still closed source, this is still an improvement for the Nvidia + Linux relationship.
I think you have that backwards…
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HDR support and better maintainers are the things I can remember now.
Maintainers are hard to come by especially for a lot of the older projects.
Yea that’s a big problem.
Doesn’t KDE have HDR support in Wayland?
Afaik the HDR support is experimental and not universal yet. I think it would be nice to have it finished for those rich folks.
Last time I tried it around 3-4 months ago I still had to use Gamescope as a layer between Proton and Plasma in order to get the colours/brightness right
Pretty much impossible at the moment, but I wish Linux had smarter VRAM management. At the moment its the most naive approach possible, which works, but doesn’t handle VRAM pressure nearly as smoothly as Windows.
This is (partially) the reason most of these “Windows vs Linux 14 games tested!” videos show a small difference in average FPS but a large deficit in 1% lows.
I’d like to see herbstluftwm ported to Wayland, so I can do an apples-to-apples comparison, and be ready to switch should I ever need to. It’d also be nice if, when I did try Wayland, there wasn’t something completely borked about it that causes me to switch back within a day.
While I’m wishing for impossible things, for Linus to admit he was wrong, and that there next major release will be a proper microkernel, where module crashes don’t force reboots and zombie processes can be cleaned out.
Working rootkit anti-cheat, so I can dump Windows.
I can’t tell if this is serious
I think more progress around stuff like confidential compute, zero knowledge proofs, or homeographic encryption may provide a better avenue where we can see ways for software manipulation to be caught but without giving total ownership over to some random game.
Nah that’s a bad idea. Keep the security requirements strict.
I am conflicted about this one. I really miss playing Rust (uses EAC)… wish there was a way to toggle the kernel level anticheat when I wanted to play.
To my limited knowledge. EAC (Easy Anti Cheat) is Linux compatible, it just has a setting that needs to be toggled by the game devs and pushed out in an update.
But then developers refuse to support that. With missing kernel-level stuff just being an excuse for being intentionally Linux-hostile…
You would seriously want to give some game studio kernel level access? That seems like a extreme risk for not a lot of gain. If nothing else there is a high chance of it being spyware. More likely they would pull a crowdstruck and kill your machine by wiping out the firmware.
That’s what I’ve read as well. The real kicker is Rust runs better for me on Linux. I’m pretty sure Facepunch heavily funded EAC’s development too. Garry’s kind of a bitter cunt about playing on Linux for whatever reason.
Might as well make an EAC Kernel to replace the Linux kernel at this point.
