The future of Linux
I'm not proposing anything here, I'm curious what you all think of the future.
What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?
I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.
A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it's now your desktop computer. That's one vision. ChromeOS has its "everything is in the cloud" vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it's free software.
If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?
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Pantherina
in reply to pmk • • •- Linux Distros finally work together better. Canonical merges its Snaps with Flatpak. In times where we are so closw to unifying all apps in one package format, and Canonical does THAT.
- a smooth Desktop that is cleaned up and focusses on stability. I think KDE 6 will be very good, as they cut off old and duplicated code. But tbh I also look forward to Cosmic, as I think a new desktop, in Rust, fast and stable, made with all the modern features planned in from the beginning, has an awesome future.
- More Value in FOSS from Companies. Reverse-engineering sucks, but maany of the supported devices simply use Blobs, which is not the future I want. So Hardware with real opensource drivers, this also goes for entire Mainboards i.e. Coreboot. Coreboot is so unknown, even though its literally the only BIOS there should be. Novacustom, 3mdeb, Starlabs, System76 all work on small projects, not to forget Googles Chromebooks (with their horrible hardware)
- Accessibility, standardisation, unifying of standards. I talked with some people and they meant for example Access
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Jacob Urlich 🌍
in reply to pmk • •Michael Murphy (S76)
in reply to pmk • • •like this
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chicken
in reply to pmk • • •like this
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shrugal
in reply to pmk • • •I want to be able to use all the software I want on Linux, officially supported by the manufacturer. No more unofficial version that's kinda working but not really. All the hardware in my new Laptop should come with official Linux drivers, so I can actually use all the things I payed for. I want to be able to contact the support if something doesn't work, and not get a "we don't support that" as an answer. And I want to be able to truly recommend a Linux OS to my non-techy friends and family, so they too can enjoy the freedom and privacy instead of having to sell it out to big corporations because they just can't use a terminal.
I don't think this "plug in your phone and use it as PC" will ever really work. Apps and games always get more fancy and demanding as computers become more powerful, and desktop PCs will always be much more powerful than phones. E.g. a couple of years ago I thought at some point I can buy a tablet and use it for heavy duty coding because it will have become powerful enough, but all the tooling just eats up the performance increase to help you be more
... show moreI want to be able to use all the software I want on Linux, officially supported by the manufacturer. No more unofficial version that's kinda working but not really. All the hardware in my new Laptop should come with official Linux drivers, so I can actually use all the things I payed for. I want to be able to contact the support if something doesn't work, and not get a "we don't support that" as an answer. And I want to be able to truly recommend a Linux OS to my non-techy friends and family, so they too can enjoy the freedom and privacy instead of having to sell it out to big corporations because they just can't use a terminal.
I don't think this "plug in your phone and use it as PC" will ever really work. Apps and games always get more fancy and demanding as computers become more powerful, and desktop PCs will always be much more powerful than phones. E.g. a couple of years ago I thought at some point I can buy a tablet and use it for heavy duty coding because it will have become powerful enough, but all the tooling just eats up the performance increase to help you be more productive.
I also don't believe in the "OS in the cloud" thing. Always connected programs and games are shitty already, just image that with your entire OS. There are physical limitations that will always make it inferiour to a good local setup imo, at least until we figure out how to connect network devices with wormholes instead of cables. What I do believe in is having a small always-on personal server in your home, that can replace most of the cloud services we rely on today.
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bitwolf
in reply to pmk • • •Steam Deck gets more popular.
Steam console released with improved multi user experience and VR.
PlayStation sales drop in growth.
Steam OS released, PCs can use it with generic kernels.
Gaming PC manufacturers offer steam OS as a preinstalled.
PC manufacturers start to offer popular distros preinstalled.
System 76 puts their in house laptops into Best Buy shelves.
Adobe and Office no longer stuck on Windows and are distributed as wasm applications.
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Ibaudia
in reply to pmk • • •I think it's already a great system, its philosophical foundation of being built around user freedom is fantastic. It just has a few things that are definitely still problems for desktop users. Namely,
- Sensible defaults
- Proprietary driver management
- Distros needing to distribute software in their repos instead of authors doing it themselves
- Too many competing application formats, each with glaring issues
- Inconsistent theming with GTK vs QT (mostly app developers' faults tho)
- Both popular display servers have huge issues
- Lack of manufacturer support for hardware (this will come with time if Linux continues to become more popular)
- Incompatibility with existing standards, especially Microsoft products
- Lacking proper professional applications for things like video editing that actually work consistently
- Gaming anti-cheat compatibility
- Generally being easy to break the whole system on accident
- Power consumption on mobile devices
I guess that's a lot, but it's still a great system ha.
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ExLisper
in reply to pmk • • •Nothing special. Normal adoption of new standards, protocols and features and some new, easier ways to develops desktop apps for it.
For example let's say we want to add moving windows between phone and a desktop by swiping. It would be some new protocol and would be handled by DE on Linux and Android. Someone would develop the standard and different Linux app would add support for it. Exactly the same way we have bluetooth now.
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SapphironZA
in reply to pmk • • •I wish distro's would combine efforts much more so we have a better desktop experience. Do we really need 15 window managers when we could have 2 or 3 much better ones.
Unify to a single package manager, they are all functionally the same.
Standardize on flatpacks and abandon snaps and appimage
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tar_xf
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