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?
I was always in and out with Linux.
My problem was always that something was always a bit off with the apps or environment than I got used to, and most of thr times I just couldn’t adapt. Things like my laptop touchpad worked differently, the mouse moved differently, apps had functions differently or lacking onebthing, others other things.
Also, most DEs was lacking functions (like dbl click on window icon to close), or were buggy. Then KDE4 came out and it was a trainwreck after 3.5 and I lost all my hope for a while.
And, on my mission to kinda solve these resulted always me bricking the system.
Now, to be fair, this was 10 years ago.
But, I know I won’t use Windows 11 for a while now and I kinda bored with Windows 10 so few weeks ago installed Debian on my PC with KDE Plasma. Tho I have nothing against Windows, it served me well in the past… 25 years. But now I’m more focused on dev work and productivity, and Windows 10 became slowly awkward for the different works I had. Most of the times I used WSL so why not just hsve the realdeal at the first place? Also, lots of Pis and some servers I have are also running Linux, so why not have it on my main machine?
It’s nice. Still have some minor annoyance or inconvenience with it, but I don’t care. Honestly, seeing what Linux became in these 10 years made me go ‘wow’.
So, I have hope in Linux in the future. Especially since OS and architectural boulders are rapidly disappearing.
I remember Wine being no more than a POC you can run Notepad or Solitaire on Linux. Now you can almost run any fucking game on a Linux system. This is awesome.
So, I’m testrunning Linux again before I invest a motherload of money into a new PC (I’m using a 2009 era server machine as my desktop atm) and if it’s good, I will continue to use Linux and probably Debian on my new machine and will format my drives and set up a partition table that is Linux-y, and not just mount all my NTFS drives and use them like they are native to the system.
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. :)
Network shares aren’t exactly a new thing. They exist now for almost exactly half a century.
Yes and i didn’t reinvent the whell. However, I still remind people to do backup accross those devices. It’s not news but it’s not well applied by lot people, so i would hardcode it into the OS.
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Do you have a phone ?
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Please scan qr code
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Choose folders
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Do you have a mass storage device ?
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Connect it
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Chose folders
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Warning : you haven’t setup any backup
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Warning : your last backup was last week. please connect your mass storage device to save your backup.
So, for something new, i would like to improve those utilities/tools and expand their use.
Syncthing hahaha. Would just need a very simple system tray / settings page UI with just the “show ID” “select folders” and more buttons
Ahah yeah but completely integrated in the OS so we do need to remind people to save their important data in 3 differents supports. I’m pretty sure people don’t do thoses saves. Except techies and people who learned it the hard way.
And a better UI where you can setup the folder space as a disk manager. eg : don’t save video on my phone. Limit the folder to 1gb on phone. And on external mass storage, share everything : 1tb
I think there is lot potential and that Syncthing should be integrated in the GNU/Linux’s core.
I’d go a few levels deeper: the kernel development process seems to become more and more dysfunctional. Legacy code hindering innovation, bad people being bottlenecks and this absurdly ancient “send a patch via mail” process.
Currently, that’s only sand in the gears, but if it gets worse, this could seriously threaten the future.
I’m 100% with this. It doesn’t have to be on GitHub, but something like GitHub would really help. It’s easy to create a fork, a PR, and get good reviews on relevant lines of code. With email, not so much. In my opinion, If email really was better, few folks would adopt a VCS like GitHub.
I think stability is a huge factor. Just yesterday, my laptop shit off without any forewarning. There is still too much random issues that seemingly have no reason.
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.
