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?
An immutable OS that run all app whatever are their package distribution.
Later a full OS rewritten in Rust with goods tools that share folder's content accross all devices and mass storage device as syncthing do.
Let's imagine a button where you click on add devices, then you scan the QR code and chose which folder you want to share. :)
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 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.
I don't know what you mean by "unofficial versions". All the hardware being supported is simply not feasible because there is no financial interest for manufacturers to do so. You as a user have to make sure you are buying hardware with a good rep. How often did you call/write to a support in terms of computer hardware in the last 10 years? Fixing the problems yourself is a much faster way of solving issues. And this never will cease to be the case for any linux distro.
Your friends are not prioritizing freedom/privacy over comfort, so Linux will never "solve" their problem.
I'm not talking about how it is today, I'm talking about how I think it should be in the future. Of course there are reasons why the things are like they are today, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't or can't change.
Someone buying a Windows laptop or Android phone for example doesn't need to check if that OS is well supported on that hardware or whether they will get official support for it. The device comes with the OS and the manufacturer guarantees that it will work, that is what we should achieve for desktop Linux as well. E.g. those dev machines with Linux preinstalled and officially supported by the OEMs are a great step in the right direction, but we need that for the regular consumer across a wide range of devices!
Unofficial versions are versions created by the community because the manufacturer of a software doesn't officially support it on your platform. A simple example would be Flatpaks for Discord or Teams, or running games with Proton or regular programs with Wine. If it works it works, but the original devs won't invest any time to improve it, and they might even break things in new releases because it's just not on their radar.
And many of my friends and family do think about privacy a lot, but most of them just cannot fully migrate to Linux without extensive and continuous help from me or other techy friends/relatives. They cannot fix a broken boot or a game that won't launch unless you tweak the configs! They can use a preinstalled Windows or macOS however, and they can call/write the support of whatever they want to use if it doesn't work. There is no reason desktop Linux can't reach the same level of official consumer support, and it needs to in order to be a true alternative for regular people. They should not have to sacrifice comfort for privacy and freedom.
Again, you don't understand Linux. There never will be official consumer support for Linux. Also Linux is the wrong answer if you don't want to fix problems yourself.
You are free to think that, but I completely disagree! Desktop Linux is in this "you have to fix it yourself" niche by necessity right now, not because it's a good solution. And it actively prevents most people from enjoying its benefits.
I mean I upvoted because you can have your opinion anyway, even though I disagree. But I really don't get how people rely on support to fix there problems. I never contacted windows support or whatever, I always researched myself how to fix something. I feel this is like an illusionary argument.
Maybe the problem is that there shouldn't be a financial interest in order to motivate or enable support.
The problem I am alluding to is the way that "financial interests" means somebody reaping the value from others' labor. There is more than enough talent, interest and time available to develop robust solutions to hardware enablement if we stop feeding the machine what it consumes today. There is simply no reason that a manufacturer shouldn't be producing hardware with open specifications to a global market that consumes its product. Additionally there is more than enough revenue that goes to paying people that contribute less than they produce for the hardware purchased by consumers. We fix this by making it illegal to create walled gardens that make us beholden to vendors.
There is simply no reason that a manufacturer shouldn’t be producing hardware with open specifications to a global market that consumes its product.
Are you aware of Intel scandal in regards to AMD? What do you think Microsoft was/is doing? Also if you criticism is aimed at hardware manufacturers, then this is the wrong topic for it? Linux cannot do anything about it, because it has no financial interest.
Whatever it is I hope we don't end up "selling out" for a higher market share. KDE is proof that you can have stability while also having infinite configuration options. Gnome seems to be openly hostile to any other way of doing things that isn't the gnome way.
I don't mind gnome existing but it isn't for me and I hope I don't get forced into using something that I can't modify to meet my workflow wishes. I'm seeing a lot more programs being written without prioritizing being desktop agnostic. I think we can forge our own path making a desktop that is both as stable as Mac OS and as approachably configurable as Linux should be.
Idk why people are so passionate about it, cause there is no "Linux" - there is a lot of "Linuxes".
I mean, what defines Linux? The kernel? The desktop environment? The flexibility?
Cause, dude, in a desktop level linux has many options, some very little smooth (like any window manager you have to configure everything by yourself) and some very smooth (like KDE and Gnome). I risk to say that Gnome and KDE are as smooth as MacOs/Windows.
Applications are kind the same. What applications are we talking about? There is a huge range of possibilities, which includes apps that run only in windows as well as apps that run only in Linux. Surely main stream apps are most designed for Windows, cause they have the majority of market share, however almost always there is an alternative good enough in Linux.
I wish the future of Linux would be our own people don't blame on projects trying to innovate, like Gnome and KDE does. People on Linux looks like loves to makes things hard or exclusive, but man, we need simple things as well. Simple things on Linux does not "rot" Linux, but make Linux more usable and, as consequence, makes development faster while big techs have to start paying attention to Linux.
We all know that nobody respect these definiotions and mostly when someone says linux, reffers to the full operate system
Well okay, since it's up to me: Let's have free software. Fully free Linux on every phone, including all "firmware" which has gotten awfully soft lately. No more proprietary driver blobs for ethernet controllers or cellular modems. No more proprietary DRM modules. No more "smart" consumer goods that come without source code. The free software revolution has gone pretty well in some respects, but we need to finish the job and put an end to all that garbage.
Accessible for everyone.
If the desktop UX has very good screen readers, keyboard navigation, voice to text etc., I believe its benefits would automatically spill over to all.
Also it would retain the UI / UX experts who become forced to abandon Linux for macOS which maintains a niche in this.
My favorite idea is Linux or Android-derived, or a completely new, Rust-based AGPL-licensed OS, running on 100% open RISC-V hardware. Same for its phone equivalent. All chips must be open, no secret code in them.
There are a couple factors that play into future-planning. The first, and most important factor is that most people neither care what OS their hardware uses or actually need more than the barest baseline. They want to spend time with their friends doing the things their friends are doing.
This is what has allowed Android to gain such massive prominence in the mobile space. It's all that's needed to play crap web games, listen to music, watch videos, and commune on social media. Expect more and more consumer hardware to be ARM-based devices running Android for the next few years.
The next big factor is that Linux has become a sort of driver dumping ground for reputable hardware manufacturers. Want to sell a piece of hardware? Better make damn sure it's got Linux driver support so that it can be part of an Android device. This means that more manufacturers are contributing drivers and code to the rest of Linux. It doesn't necessarily mean that code that works with Linux is going to be open source or play well with others. nvidia has proven to be an absolute bastard in this regard.
I don't think that means the future for Linux is going to be dim. I do think we need to expect and plan for more corporate presence. Some of that presence will be good. It doesn't take much to be a good member of the community. However, we do need to keep our collective eyes out for nvidia-like presences that will only serve to anchor everyone else down.
Where I'd personally LIKE to see Linux going is to provide more power to older hardware. We have a wealth of hardware that's in the 10-20 year-old range that can be doing useful work. The problem there is maintainership. It's harder to get volunteers to work with older hardware. If you can get people to work on supporting that hardware, it means fewer PCBs in landfills and more doing hobbyist or scientific work.
In the 'modern' Desktop Linux space, I'd like to see a renewed focus on privacy. I'd like to see privacy features baked into the kernel alongside security features. In a lot of cases those are the same feature.
For Linux in general? If I could decide? Here goes:
- I would want people to realize that distro maintainers are actually important and Flatpak and co. are not actually as good of a thing as everyone makes them out to be.
- I would want a full actively developed GNUstep-based desktop environment as the "default" Linux desktop (which apparently was the original intention).
- I would want Xorg to finally go away.
- while the current state of flatpaks might not be perfect. Aren't they on a good path to provide a futuristic packaging format?
Does what they built work well? I suppose so. But is what they're doing a good idea? I would say no, and the reasons as to why are in the post I linked.
What would you consider a "futuristic packaging format"?
I can't find that flatpaks are mentioned in that article
I guess mostly sandboxing, permission control, distribution and reproducibility
I can’t find that flatpaks are mentioned in that article
Flatpaks, like Snap (that it does mention) are the "upstream packaging" the entire article is about. Specifically about how they both have software vendors directly publish packages to their repositories without maintainers in between.
sandboxing, permission control [...] reproducibility
Yes, those are good. (Not sure how reproducible it actually is since I can't find a way to download build files from flathub, though...)
distribution
What do you mean by that?
Snaps only have one central repository which is controlled by canonical. I can set up a flatpak repo myself if I want to.
I haven't validated a package either but I read that you are able to do it.
For Linux desktop to grow past the single digit market share it is at today. It needs to be led by tech visionaries not by code evangelists . The average user doesn't care about if it's running Wayland or x11 or whatever shit you name it they only care about their OS having all the features they need and support all the latest hardware they buy.
Add to that any average Joe would freeze at the prospect of having to enter a command line to maintain their computer or use their firewall. In short for Linux to grow it needs to copy windows or macOS otherwise it will keep being used by nerds and sys admins
To be more mainstream granted it isn't because of a shitty locked down distro incompatible with the others.
What I love most abou Linux is its freedom. It doesn't try screwing me over for their own benefit, gives me full control of the system and is broken down into components. Having the underlying system foss for many is great to provide and make it easier to adopt more ethical software for computing.
The RedHat and Canonical oligarchs are well underway in achieving their windows-like linux desktop through systemd and flatpaks and what not, so we may see a small but highly deployed number of immutable distros becoming the forced de-facto standard.
Microsoft continues their new approach at EEEing linux through WSL Azure, and everyone's happy about it.
Torvalds will eventually die, as will Stallman, so all that'll be left are the communities, which unfortunately don't have that much strength/voice.
TLDR: The future are linux hardware vendors, governments deciding to use linux, and RISC-V+ARM.
There are already a few linux hardware vendors out there and my favorites are Tuxedo Computers as well as Starlabs and Slimbook (the guys who make the KDE laptop. Not to be outdone by linux phone vendors like Pine64, Purism, and Volla. We need more of them.
Hopefully they will have the funds to start marketing and ad campaigns to change the image of linux from "just for geeks" or "only if you have spare time" to something like "better for privacy", "the only option for true freedom", "cheap but classy", "subscribe to nothing", etc.Linux has no problem providing a fluid experience with RISC-V and ARM, while windows struggles - especially due to the amount of proprietary and legacy software that exists on it. Windows might be able to prepare for it and provide a translation layer or VM for those things, but probably not with a good experience.
Finally, governments. I thank Trump a lot for this: getting China to start accelerate ditching Microsoft. The EU is also wary of Trump winning again to start a tradewar + there is an EU level decision to use opensource. Countries are slow to implement this decree, but I only see it accelerating and countries wising up to international collaboration to create either their own distro (e.g EULinux or something), or paying emergent opensource vendors to write solutions for them.
I don't believe this will be done before 2030, probably 2035 we might see ~50% of government desktops and laptops on linux, but the future is very difficult to predict.
Honestly my biggest hope is some generally accepted way to install software that is consistent among distros. I'm leaning toward liking flatpak for this currently, but I also like how appimage works too.
It is really close now, close enough I've dropped windows entirely at home, but occasionally there's still something I'll stumble across that officially only has Deb or rpm download options and if I try from my distro package manager it fails for one reason or another and I give up, just skip it, and be disappointed for a bit.
Oh and support from devs of games at least as far to get anti-cheat stuff to work via proton, but I avoid a vast majority of those games even on windows because their anti-cheat can be so system invasive...
Packaging software for linux is an insane problem. All distributions are so similar yet so different, all of these nuisances prevent you from making much assumptions about the host OS which for instance forced flatpak to be basically a generic distro you run apps on. For obvious reasons it's not an ideal situation, memory consumption is bad, performance in various ways is impacted. I believe that the true packaging format will have to cut some corners and be specific by design to smaller set of distributions. Pretty much how snaps are built around Ubuntu, which imo. is a necessary compromise to have something reasonably fast and lightweight.
Better documentation for any distribution not called Arch. Better bugtrackers for all major projects? (KDE, Thunderbird etc)
