Personally, I’m looking forward to native Wayland support for Wine and KDE’s port to Qt 6.
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.
I’ve been curious about Linux phones. Can you recommended any devices or operating systems to watch? Thanks.
Pinephone has a great active community, and the device itself is dirt cheap (also pretty low-specced). There’s a pro version with a much better specs in theory, but development state is much rougher. Not that the basic model is anywhere near daily driver material yet, but the progress is very appreciable every time i check in.
Your best bet right now IMO would be flashing PostmarketOS onto a used OnePlus 6, which is cheap, has good specs and none of the battery issues plaguing the Pinephone Pro. That said, it’s not 100% ready to be a phone yet- for now its best use case is as a mini-tablet / PDA kind of thing. Really feels like carrying a pocket laptop around, which is pretty fun as a starting point.
Linux phones
Will we be able to use messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal on Linux phones?
Yes, since you can run Android apps on them. They will be slower and have some quirks though I’m sure.
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.
Also, software becoming distributable in a uniform way. Though here, I strongly would advocate for flatpak.
Two things at completely opposite ends of the “Linux world”:
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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 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”
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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.
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Technically Android is Linux. I know what you mean though, and it would be great. Maybe some day…
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.
Like what? Have you got any examples?
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
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).
I switched my design workflow to FLOSS tools exclusively. Krita is a perfectly competent photoshop replacement, Inkscape has been developed at a breakneck pace in the past year, the workflow is different, but it’s every bit as good as illustrator, and Scribus is great once you get used to the workflow. If anything, Scribus’ workflow helps you plan and structure your projects better. IMHO FLOSS tools are absolutely ready for professional work, but you cannot expect the workflow to match
existingproprietary tools.If Affinity apps worked natively on Linux I’d ditch Windows for good.
Krita was developed for graphic design specifically. Gimp tackles other simpler use cases
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.
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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.
from which interesting derivatives will show up.
I don’t think that will happen and hope it won’t because NixOS can handle the usual preferences people might have internally.
Don’t like glibc? pkgsMusl is the entire package set but with musl instead of glibc.
Want static compilation? pkgsStatic.
Afraid of systemd? Well okay, we don’t have that right now but I don’t think anyone would be opposed to optional support for worse service managers. It’d just be an opt-in toggle that we could support with enough people interested in it.Nah, people always want to put their own spin on things and I welcome the diversity.
Arch can bring in all the necessary packages yourself, but Garuda exists and people enjoy using it. Horses for courses.
Garuda only exists because the only way to distribute a set of default configuration in regular distros is to create a whole new distro/installer. We don’t have that problem in NixOS because all configuration is declarative and composable.
In the NixOS world, Garuda would be a NixOS base config which users would import in their own config and extend with their own configuration. You’d still be using NixOS though.
If you’re packaging enough changes that somebody would say it’s a different experience, calling it the “X configuration” vs “X distribution” based on how it’s packaged is just splitting hairs.
What’s eBPF?
It’s a technology that lets you run code through the kernel’s JIT compiler. It’s an extremely flexible way to run code in kernel space; the typical example is using it to build XDP programs for networking, which can deeply analyse network packets without having to incur the performance penalty for changing context to userspace.
Just to be sure, what’s wrong with ARC and L2ARC?
My issue is not with the ARC, it’s a few things:
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kernel integration is iffy; I don’t want to attach a module to my system every time I compile the kernel and prey that the difference in pace between the release schedules of openZFS and Linux hasn’t caused issues, and because of the licencing issues my options of having a distro with zfs built in are very limited.
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it’s performance isn’t excellent from a NVME standpoint. It’s not terrible, but it could be better.
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it has a massive code base, making introducing things like performance improvements and new features quite a challenge (Though the openZFS team are doing a bang-up job despite this).
Ultimately if I was still holding on to 40+TB of important data, I’d be using ZFS and be happy about it. I want snapshots on my workstation, without all the strange issues I’ve had with btrfs. I’m sure bcachefs will have its own issues but it’s better to have options.
Sure, I understand the part about having to compile the ZFS module every time alongside the kernel. But that must be some heavy-lifting you’re doing if you’re regularly compiling your own kernel. I’d be interested in what you’re running that requires such efforts.
I don’t understand why you would need NVMe for ARC. Doesn’t it run in RAM only? Isn’t L2ARC what runs on storage devices?
Not really heavy lifting, I’m just running the Xanmod kernel, and need to turn on some features I need for eBPF development. I’m also keeping up to date with kernel releases, so every 6 weeks or so I need to rebuild.
The ARC runs in RAM, but is generally best when it’s given:
- A consistent amount of memory.
- An easily predictable workload.
- Long periods of time between restarts.
Conditions great for a server but not so much for a workstation. I don’t intend for my cache misses to go to spinning rust, so I have 2 2TB NVME drives. SSDs are cheap as chips currently.
The L2ARC is a victim cache of the ARC, and while it is persistent it’s still much more effective for me to just use a NVME drive for my pool.
Just went through Xanmod’s page: the list of features provided seem exciting, although I don’t really know much about some of them. Do you need these features for eBPF development?
Well, you’re right: ARC is best used in a server. What problems did you have with BTRFS that prompted you to switch?
I use Xanmod for gaming (fsync & related tweaks), but need other flags for development on the same machine.
My issues with BTRFS were mainly in their userspace tooling; ZFS volume management is just glorious, it felt like a significant downgrade to use BTRFS.
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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.
Flatpaks seaminglessly supporting all apps plus cli applications and drivers would be the holy grail.
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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.
Me too. I love XFCE so much, but it’s impossible to deny how large a step forwards Wayland is on a technical level (although there are still kinks to work out). When XFCE moves over, I’ll be able to confidently do so as well.
- 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!
