- NTSync coming in Kernel 6.11 for better Wine/Proton game performance and porting.
- Wine-Wayland last 4/5 parts left to be merged before end of 2024
- Wayland HDR/Game color protocol will be finished before end of 2024
- Nvidia 555/560 will be out for a perfect no stutter Nvidia performance
- KDE/Gnome reaching stability and usability with NO FKN ADS
- VR being usable
- More Wine development and more Games being ported
- Better LibreOffice/Word compatibility
- Windows 10 coming to EOL
- Improved Linux simplicity and support
- Web-native apps (Including Msft Office and Adobe)
- .Net cross platform (in VSCode or Jetbrains Rider)
What else am I missing?
that (and many other irritants) is why I switched to plasma. please try it before going back, it's way better in every regard.
I may because I'm clearly an outlier and it's a bit of an experiment now, but...
... you realize how just saying that is an absolute dealbreaker for Linux, right?
I mean, if you're a base Windows user trying Linux for the first time, it is arcane gibberish. If you're just trying to get a working computer it's a major hassle. If you're, like me, a grumpy old fart, you're getting flashbacks of sitting in front of a Pentium-133 doing this exact exercise of flipping back and forth across environments and bumping against different frustrations on each and just can't believe this is still the feedback you're getting online this many decades later.
absolutely. I have a list as long as my arm of irritants that are 99% just the absence of sane defaults. I'm not saying that's what's deterring people from switching over, but it's not helping either, is it?
every DE, distro, whatevs I install, I try to imagine what this looks like to a non-techie, how would a random grams deal with this... and it's not looking good.
apple has a vertically integrated tech stack and are free to focus their sinister efforts elsewhere; they don't have to dick around with 15 different DEs and 27 WMs, 50 teams pulling in 127 different directions, abandoned paths and duplicated efforts galore. just imagine where The Linux Desktop would be at if we had just one DE/WM and all devs would pull in the same direction...
I don't have the answer. it's chaos over here and out of that chaos eventually some order emerges. it's unquestionable that shit's way better than five years ago, let alone 10 or more... but it's so slow and wasteful and it pains me that I see no other option.
meanwhile this (hey, try this shit out) is the best we as users can do; I know I regarded KDE/Plasma for the longest time as something clunky and un-serious and whatnot - I couldn't have been more wrong. things that are outright deal-breakers (like the years-long refusal to implement scroll speed in Gnome) are handled beautifully over there, and then some.
Yeah, honestly given the time this has been at play I'm surprised nobody has tried to do that type of full control integration besides Google. Given how well ChromeOS and especially Android worked as platforms why hasn't... I don't know, Valve? Adobe? Apple, even? tried to create a major desktop PC take on Linux that does have the type of support and sensible UX you want out of the box?
It's probably too late now that MS is hell-bent into turning Windows into that sort of platform, but there was a period of time there, probably during the Win8 debacle or the early parts of Win10 where you could have come up with a "big boy ChromeOS" take that would have gotten this done. It's nuts that Valve only got as far as doing the basics of SteamOS and then failed to deliver on their promises of wider support before the community basically turned installing that into the same kind of nightmare every other distro is.
Well, no, that's not applicable here. I'm suggesting a proprietary, corporate-backed desktop default in the way we have a proprietary, corporate-backed laptop reference in ChromeOS, a corporate-backed mobile reference in Android and a proprietary, corporate-backed handheld default in SteamOS.
It's not about covering everyone's use cases, it's about applying commercial priorities and funding to one specific use case.
I mean, you know the Linux community craves that opportunity, because the amount of hype around SteamOS when that dropped on the Deck was insane, and despite their clear lack of interest in expanding it into a Windows alternative for other product types there's been no pushback in those circles.
But how does that differ from Fedora or Ubuntu, besides popularity?
That's a fair point. I suppose conceptually that's what those organizations were trying to do. So it's a failure in execution which then probably acts as a deterrent for other corporations considering stepping up to challenge MS on modular desktop PCs, which aren't that big of a market in the first place.
I guess if you were going to do that you'd pair it to rigid hardware instead for that reason and at that point you're Apple and we're talking about MacOS.
Fedora is considering switching to Plasma by default.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Change-KDE-Default-Prop
Many big maintainers are working hard to make the experience better for the average user. Things are getting better.
As a person that also went "screw it, I'm going back to Windows 95" for the exact same reasons in a previous millenium...
...no they aren't.
This isn't new, this has been the way this works for decades. Sure, there have been improvements, but also plenty of steps backwards. This run at it has been a noticeably worse experience than, say, being told about Ubuntu and being surprised at it having a smooth installer for the first time. Sure, gaming then was a no-go, but with PC hardware being a much narrower path then, it was so much easier to get the hardware itself running.
And yes, it was about to be the year of Linux desktop then, too.