Personally, I’m looking forward to native Wayland support for Wine and KDE’s port to Qt 6.
IPFS has a ton of potential behind it, as it makes publishing, accessing and retaining content drastically easier than HTTP. The content-addressing also means you can basically sidesteps the whole act of “downloading”, no more need to download a file, extract a file, etc. You just access it directly in your file system by a unique name.
That said, I am also very pessimistic on it. IPFS suffer from “underspecification”. The protocol is completely focused on just moving bytes around. It doesn’t care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS. It’s very much like Bittorrent in this regard, but worse as even Open Source licenses don’t help here. IPFS, unlike Bittorrent, doesn’t even guarantee that content will stay together, e.g. you can pin and reshare your favorite icon, without a hint of what license it is under or what icon theme you picked it from. For the time being everybody seems to just ignore the problem, but I think it will kill it if it gets popular before this problem is solved.
Another problem is that it’s just buggy and slow, especially when it comes to the fuse daemon that provides the /ipfs and /ipns directories. Though that at least is fixable on the client side. The copyright problem might not without some fundamental changes to the protocol itself.
It doesn’t care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS.
Sounds like a feature, not a shortcoming
deleted by creator
No it doesn’t. Maybe in some places? But not in most. You can break copyright laws with pen and paper, which don’t have any protection against it and are perfectly legal
deleted by creator
I think that would go against the philosophy of ipfs. Sticking drm on top of it would crash with the intended self-archiving capabilities and censorship resistance, as well as with the whole point of a decentralized network since some entity or entities would have the power to block or delete content from it
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.
Two things at completely opposite ends of the “Linux world”:
-
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.
-
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”
The Valve one has been the most exciting for me. AFAIK Valve has been thinking about the issues with Windows controlling PC gaming since Windows 8 first came out. The Steam Machines were a flop at the time but in recent years they’ve been able to maks big moves for Linux gaming and instead of giving up has been doubling down on the importance of it.
Ahh yes the Steam Machines. Definitely contemporaneous with windows 8.
I think it’s likely Valve have intensified efforts recently for a number of reasons but not least of which is the ongoing encroachment of Microsoft turning the Windows PC experience into more of a walled garden across more segments. It can’t have gone unnoticed that Microsoft are 1) selling games on the Microsoft Store and 2) are normalising the concept of hardware root of trust etc with the windows 11 TPM requirement.
EFI secure boot was one thing. Setting conditions up so every PC in the world has hardware support for verifying that user space programs are signed by Microsoft is another. I’m not saying overnight they’ll flick a switch and every windows installation in the world is on S mode. But it’s clearly trending that way. That would be good night for Steam if they so chose. And clearly Microsoft believe they can fob off regulators well enough
-
Wine + Wayland for sure. It’s time to let X11 rest, it’s earned it.
What do you mean? I play games with Lutris on Wayland without issues.
It goes through XWayland, whereas Wine on Wayland would do away with that later
Its all finished, the main developer is porting the source code by patches so its easier for the MR to get accepted by the Wine devs.
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.
Proton and wine for sure
-
bcachefs; I currently use zfs and am not a huge fan of btrfs. Having another filesystem mainlined will be fun.
-
eBPF, particularly if somebody picks up after the presumably abandoned bpfilter.
-
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.
-
long term: the newly introduced accelerator section of the kernel might make SoCs with NPUs and the like have better software support.
-
very hyped for plasma 6, and Cosmic both. I’ve got a lot of confidence in KDE devs, and Cosmic previews look very nice.
-
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.
Just to be sure, what’s wrong with ARC and L2ARC?
My issue is not with the ARC, it’s a few things:
-
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.
-
it’s performance isn’t excellent from a NVME standpoint. It’s not terrible, but it could be better.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
-
SteamOS is making huge strides for adoption, i look forward to more people being freed from corporate lock in.
Steam is a corporation bud
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’.
Yeah not what I meant. Steam store is proprietary, you can’t move your games from them and they are the one that kick-started always online DRM and lootboxes and basically surfed the wave of online money laundering.
Corporation or not they are not your friend,never were and never will be.
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.
Steam is not good XD wtf people here are young I guess
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
Sure. Still a corporation and not your friend.
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
since when you can get your steam games outside of steam? because if not thats the definition of locked in
As long as the game does not depend on Steam APIs for DRM (which is not Valve’s fault), you can absolutely copy over the game files and play it outside of Steam, and even use Proton, although it’s only officially supported in Steam.
sure except if you dont have access to your account you dont have access to your files which means you can get cut off at anytime for any reason. plus you need proprietary software to download those files in the first place afaik
Steam is not a corporation, it’s an online video games store lol
… Sure buddy
*freed from Microsoft’s monopoly. Valve is still a corporation.
They have a lot of work to do before they can publicly release it. They really messed up basing it on Arch, IMO. Whereas Fedora has their Silverblue and SUSE has their CoreOS, Valve is really treading new ground with an immutable Arch distro. As it is now, the immutability is a major barrier to doing even very simple things. If I want to install an external driver on Silverblue, I just navigate to it’s folder and run
rpm-ostree install -driver-. SteamOS has no rpm-ostree equivalent, so you have to disable read-only which is more complicated and defeats the purpose of immutability anyway.Valve will have to develop a bunch of brand new tools or (more likely) contract the work out, which as far as I know hasn’t happened yet even 1.5 years after official release.
I guess my point is they made an easily accessible experience that is not frustrating to use for the average user which will help dispell the belief that linux is hard to use or that gaming is only for windows. They provided a console like experience and made it hard for normies to break it. You’re free to install silverblue on the thing. Personally i’ll probably re-image with arch later but for my use so far I haven’t really have to change anything. I haven’t run into an issue that couldn’t be solved with a flatpak yet.
As a gaming OS it works great, I’m just talking about what they need to do if they want it to be a successful desktop OS. Their plans are to release it as such so I hope they put in the necessary effort before that, because it’s severely lacking right now.
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
I’m curious, will that work with Motherboards released until then, or just new motherboards from that point onwards?
New motherboards. Unless AMD collaborates with board makers to push updates to their BIOS/UEFI to include OpenSIL compatibility, which is likely not going to be the case in my opinion
I like the kind of revival of nice TUIs that is going on right now. I just wish it continues !
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.
X12
Easy fractional scaling on sway
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.
Would absolutely love for Serif Labs to create a port for Affinity Photo and Designer. Of the programs I’ve tried, those two have the closest UX to Photoshop and Illustrator without the software-as-a-service model.
Hell, I’d even take it if all they did was support it working under WINE. While I would prefer a seamless UI that fits in with both GTK and Qt, it’s understandable that they might not consider it worth the effort.
Krita was developed for graphic design specifically. Gimp tackles other simpler use cases
A patch for Lenovo Legion sound.
