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.

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.

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”

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.

RiscV laptops and precompiled binaries in package managers.

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.

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).

• 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.

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

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.

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

IIRC the next few Wayland updates this year will solve and improve a lot of problems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

X12

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.

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.

pop os new de

• 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!

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)

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.

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)

For now i just want color management on Wayland KDE.

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

Easy fractional scaling on sway

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.

Proton and wine for sure