Personally, I’m looking forward to native Wayland support for Wine and KDE’s port to Qt 6.
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.
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.
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’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.
RiscV laptops and precompiled binaries in package managers.
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.
A WINE type app but for OSX (or really just iOS) apps would be awesome to have both desktops and phone. Call it CIDER or something similar. I reckon the way Apple does their app stores these days it would be hard to actually get most software working, but I don’t think that alone is a showstopper.
Having both that and Waydroid on a phone would be pretty great. You might want to check out Darling for running Mac apps on Linux in the meantime, since its goals are similar to Wine’s (but it’s still early in development in comparison)
I’m just disappointed in the direction of UX they’re all taking. Ubuntu Touch was looking innovative and made me excited. Then that didn’t happen and now we just have a bunch of Android look-alikes but worse and buggier. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad to have GNU/Linux on a phone either way (especially NixOS Mobile), but I’m not excited to use one.
I don’t know if it’s just me getting older or if innovation in how we interface with technology has just sort of stagnated. In the past there was so much happening. New input methods (all kinds of pointer devices, joysticks, weird keyboards); graphical paradigms (floating windows vs tiling panes, tabs, stacking, grouping, virtual desktops); display technologies (vector graphics, convex screens, flat screens, projectors, VR headsets, e-ink); even machine architectures (eg Lisp machines) and how you interacted with your computer environment as a result.
As far as I can tell, VR systems are the latest innovation and they haven’t changed significantly in close to a decade. E-ink displays are almost nowhere to be found, or only attached to shitty devices (thanks, patent laws) - although I’m excited for the PineNote to eventually happen.
How do we still not have radial menus?! Or visual graph-like pipelining for composing input-outputs between bespoke programs?! We’ve all settled on a very homogenous way of interacting with computers, and I don’t believe for a second that it’s the best way.
Just want to add that I don’t think it’s a technological plateau. I think it’s capitalism producing shiny and “upgraded” versions of things that are easy to sell. Things that enable accessible and rapid consumption. High refresh rate, vertical high-resolution screens for endless scrolling in apps optimised for ads-scrolled-past-per-second. E-ink devices only good enough that you can clearly see the ads on them as you read your books. Things are just not made for humans. They’re made for corporations to extract value out of humans.
SteamOS is making huge strides for adoption, i look forward to more people being freed from corporate lock in.
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While what you say is true it is also irrelevant to OPs question. SUSE is a corporation, so is canonical, so is mozilla’s corporate wing. can you clarify what your point was, pal?
edit: ah, i used the word corporate, fair point then. I meant in the sense of vendor lock to defacto standards rather than ‘corporate bad’.
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They’ve made my life more enjoyable for reasonable cost, they bring vast amounts of resources to open source projects, and they deliver a platform that the least technical of people can use an enjoy. You’re free to say they are not your friend, but i won’t make perfect the enemy of good.
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Steam/Proton/Gamescope work outside of steamOS. Valve contributes to open source software, including linux amd drivers, that can easily be used outside of steamOS
Valve contributes to open source software
Maybe so, but Steam itself is still proprietary, closed source software.
It is, but you are not really locked in it
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Steam is not a corporation, it’s an online video games store lol
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pop os new de
Yea, Cosmo Desktop sounds really cool.
If you’re not familiar with Linux and distros, this reads like a foreign language lol
Pop_OS!, a popular Linux distribution, is writing a new desktop environment. A desktop environment is basically the functionality of the desktop, think the taskbar and window snapping, etc. on Windows and the dock and top bar on macOS. A desktop environment also comes with its own set of apps, like how Windows comes with Explorer and Task Manager.
- 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!
It has so many interesting possible applications. Declarative and reproducible wine configurations for games and software; universal (cross-distro) packaging (without emulated runtime environments like flatpak); reproducible user environments managed easily with a GUI with trivial version control (both for config and software versions); pre-configuring a system before even setting it up (such as configuring a raspberry pi before you’ve even bought one so that once you have, you just install and configure everything in one go).
