This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If you're into desktop functionality, better VNC implementations are badly needed. It's not intuitive on most desktop distros how to configure a remote desktop solution correctly. We're nowhere near the "it just works" quality that RDP has on Windows.
If you're into hardware, I suspect there's work that needs to be done with BD-R DL/XL support. I don't think I've ever successfully burned a multi-layer Blu Ray disc across multiple distros, burners, and drives.
Seconding a desire for a defacto RDP solution for Linux. Bonus points if it works on android
X2Go is the closest I've seen to ease of use, and it's based on already widely available components (X over SSH). It also has an explicit confirmation counterpart (x2godesktopsharing) so people can give explicit permission to remote into their already running desktop session.
But the UI is terrible. It's badly laid out and wasteful and has dozens of arcane options that you have to dig through and figure out.
Man, just the "normies" user experience in general.
I've had so many issues from the start, even on "beginner friendly" distros. Hell, I'm a software engineer by trade - I literally use WSL2 every day for my job - but there are some things the OS should just do.
Prime example: wifi connectivity (er, just connectivity in general - Bluetooth included). It seems like every distro neglects this part to some degree. I've tried Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Kinoite, countless others - but it seems like every one either has some form of Bluetooth connectivity issue (a la Kinoite not detecting my Bluetooth headphones) or a straight up wifi issue (like Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Linux Mint ALL not connecting to Panera WiFi on a wiped 2012 MacBook Pro - it was because Panera has a popup to accept wifi terms, btw, which is extremely common. Starbucks was broken too).
It's that sort of stuff that prevents people from staying on Linux. People DO go to internet cafes to hang out and surf the web. It's a helluva deal breaker that I need to turn on my phone's hotspot just to connect to some Internet and then deal with LTE speeds. And as for the argument of "well that's super old hardware" - it's prime hardware that people will try Linux on and get pissed off.
Also, Nvidia support. It's one of the most popular graphics card options - it's a deal breaker that it doesn't work out of the box on a lot of distros. Never ran into this myself, but just scroll here for a bit to see how prevalent it is.
I REALLY want to daily Linux but man, these issues prevent it (even now that I've moved on from the MacBook). If you really wanna help Linux grow, fix these problems and / or work on improving the "non-technical" user experience. You shouldn't need to know what KDE is to use your desktop, nor should you need to Google like 15 things to get thru the installer with certainty.
I know this will get a lot of hate, and I really really want to love Linux, but I've been burned often so I'm skeptical.
Yea, sadly, Linux can do nothing to support Nvidia better since they don’t support the community with opensource driver and actively add DRM do make our lives harder. It’s just sad. Right now, I try to get my MacBook pro 5,5 with deticated Nvidia GeForce 9600m GT to work with openSuse I tested and failed with tumbleweed twice now and I’ll try leap next.
I said it yesterday and got crapped on, but I’m gonna die on this hill: We need fewer distros, opening up the people working on them to focus on the actual software.
We have plenty of Ubuntu forks. Stop making distros and start make awesome GUI apps for Linux.
There is a magic url by Mozilla I use a lot to get on public wifi on Ubuntu. I can find it if ya want?
Please share. It’s a very common problem.
I've been using this: http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html It's a feature build into Firefox. It can be a little chatty for some folks doing web debugging, never noticed it myself. https://iamyuthan.medium.com/how-to-stop-firefox-from-spamming-your-proxy-tools-like-burp-fiddler-with-detectportal-firefox-com-7db7ce1de9a0
Support for hearing aids
This. I have hearing aids too. I share your pain.
Error reporting to the UI is majorly broken in situations when hardware is involved, like a failing wifi adapter or USB deive, just like in windows. Maybe a system to surface dmesg activity as notifications? Idk maybe something already does this.
A GUI option in the Settings app to limit charging to 80%, extending the life of the device.
KDE system settings → Power Management → Advanced Power Settings
Every problem I have stems from Nvidia. I can't complain too much because it was a Christmas present from my friend and it's a really good card but damn Nvidia drivers.
The one thing keeping my friend from switching even tho he wants to is vst plugins for his DAW. He uses both Ableton and Bitwig and Bitwig works on Linux but the plugins can be Windows only. There are projects to make them work but it turns into a mess to manage it all.
Depends on the specific plugin. I've been doing music production on Linux for several years now. Back then things looked a lot worse than now. Most popular bridge solution for Windows plugins on Linux is yabridge atm. The README is well worth a closer read, cause it will answer many questions on how to get even more modern plugins to display correctly (i.e. JUCE based ones).
Sleep battery usage.
Seriously, I don't know what is up with Linux but it wastes so much battery during sleep. My laptop lasts 8 hours on normal, daily use, but if I put it to sleep: 24h max.
Isn't sleep supposed to just keep the RAM powered on because that component requires power to keep state? How can "keeping the lights on" waste so much energy?
I have given up on sleep long ago. Why don't you just hibernate? With ssds the boot is really quick.
Edit: I got frustrated with ACPI and uefi issues on my laptops. I wish we had open source uefis for most laptops.
Hardware support, in particular:
The Arm support is there, its just not upstreamed because companies don't like sharing
Buy-in from HW manufacturers, specifically related to audio production. Yes, can often hack your way into making a lot of the SW work (unsupported, of course), but HW support isn't there. My NI Maschine is a non-starter - I might be able to hack together someway to get it to send receive basic midi, but that's just a small part of why I own it. My audio interface might be cajoled into working, but it's not supported and therefore not something I can really afford to invest into depending on beyond the fun of experimenting.
I also wish there was a alternative to Adobe Lightroom. Yes, I know about Darktable (it's great), but the Adobe secret sauce is the bi-directional integration with mobile for lossless edits and catalogue management. This sort of thing is very, very hard to pull off in FOSS-land. (I'd even be happy if Adobe supported Linux.)
I have no issue with paying for functionality/services I need (I don't want a free ride), but I wish the option was there.
So, I'm basically stuck with Windows and WSL.
Hibernation / sleep.
Hibernation straight up is not supported on many distros, and sleep is broken.
I'd also like better 2 in 1 support for things like HP devices.
Consistent keyboard shortcuts across apps and WMs, and a common config syntax and file location for them so customizations are easy to share and migrate between apps and WMs.
Multiple workspaces per monitor, like OSX has. Currently it's multiple monitors per workspace. So, switching workspaces switches all monitors instead of just the active one. Both Gnome and KDE get this wrong. Only esoteric WMs like i3 and awesome get it right, but they are not suitable for most people.
Wayland Support for legacy nvidia grafic cards like GeForce 9600m GT (One should be allowed to dream, lol)
Okular (a rather good PDF viewer) can't save sessions (open files & positions) in non-KDE environments.
The issue has been open since 2018: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397463 .
There's some partial merge request but it's been dead for a year.
I know absolutely jack about Linux, but as someone with a steam deck, eGPU support would be pretty spiffy. Not sure how possible that actually is though.
eGPUs are supported on linux, but every device needs to have thunderbolt support, Steam Deck doesn't have thunderbolt, so there's nothing software can do. Maybe Steam Deck 2 will have it.
You can have an "external" GPU if your willing to give up your NVMe storage
Tis gonna be an unpopular one, but CPU utilization for high core count CPUs. Could reaaally use that for my work.
There are lots of older KDE apps that could use some TLC.
Improve pipewire/pulseaudio to be more user friendly - to play different sound on both my tv and computer I have to use pipewire, set the audio device to pro mode, and then scroll through the 10 new devices listed to guess which 2 I need, with their incredibly unhelpful names.
And then, if I want loudness equalization because I have problems hearing voices, I have to run easy effects after looking up a guide for installing someone's preset that does an ok job compared to the windows version.
Not to mention I have no idea why Linux aggressively turns off my audio driver whenever something isn't playing, even though it takes almost 5 seconds after audio starts to turn back on, and I get to constantly listen to the crackle of my speakers turning on every time an app checks if I even have audio.
Oh, and for an unrelated gripe, for some reason Linux refuses to let my bt adaptor connect to my switch controller, even though the same adaptor worked fine on windows.
I'm pretty happy with Linux actually. I've used a few distros and DMs over the years and honestly we're at a point in time where it's pretty nice. A more user friendly and robust connectivity management would be nice, and a few of the file browsers could benefit from a UX revamp. DMs could also enforce stricter design choices by default to gently guide developers towards a consistent UI/UX. But overall it's quite solid.
The same can't be said about most of the OSS that goes with it. Most of the apps available for Linux are garbage. I mean, they do some things well obvioulsy, but are overall terrible to use. With their crap UX and a UI stuck in the last century the only reason people use them is they have no other choice and are desperate...
Easy ways to reset to sane defaults. I think Plasma has this, but I mean for the whole OS, especially systemd units and config files in system and home. In Linux , we are allowed to do all kinds of tweaks and modifications, but a way to rollback these configurations easily, I believe is not there. Now, please don't talk about immutable distros or restoring snapshots, that's not what I mean with "easy".
Improvement to Libre Impress or an alternative that is better. PowerPoint is one of the only things keeping windows around for me.
You can use PowerPoint in a web browser with office 365. Really don't need windows to run it anymore.
Vendor support, which is something you can't fix. I'm sick of having to use a Windows VM to connect a device running Linux to my PC running Linux.
In all other aspects, Windows is so much worse, which I've just recently noticed again while installing Windows 11 inside a VM without creating a Microsoft account. It gets harder with each update. Now you have to add a custom key with 3 Dwords to the registry of the installer, manually launch an exe from a subfolder of system32 and cut off internet access to do it.
I know everyone hates gnome software center, but I happen to like its interface a lot- it has a really irritating bug that makes your view refresh periodically, taking control away from the user until it does. Apparently it'll take a while to fix because it's caused by some underlying problem with how things were structured that needs to be reworked, or something to that effect.
Other than that its mostly just software availability honestly. Freecad is so hard to use it makes me wanna scream, and gaming on my old crappy laptop has given me challenges.
Oh! And I have a weird bug I can't for the life of me find a solution to that makes my track pad stop working periodically, and I have to reboot to fix it 🙃 I'm desperately hoping that a probable upcoming switch to debian, or maybe arch (switching from fedora) will fix it, cause I straight up don't have the technical know-how to diagnose and address it. I only managed to find one reference to the same issue online, on the fedora subreddit, someone else using a hybrid laptop/tablet device. Though when I was trying out new versions of Ubuntu I think it happened then too. I don't think it used to happen with (I think) Ubuntu 18.04, which is what I was previously using
I'm sure a lot of folks would also appreciate better battery performance, thats a pretty universally appreciated area with laptops at least
The ease of making a RAID array!
I wanted to set up two used hard drives in RAID 1, and the only way to do that was through obscure command line stuff. I tried following a tutorial but I would always divert from it somehow. So I turned to ChatGPT, and it seemed to set it up fine, but then when I tried to reboot, I couldn't enter a GUI, even though the OS booted from a separate SSD.
As someone else suggested, there are plenty of kde apps that could use some devs.
Kde plasma multi-monitor support could also use some love, though its much better than it was a year ago.
I know that mobile linux could definately use more devs, if you want to stretch the meaning of desktop 😁. Kde plasma mobile specifically needs help porting their stuff to qt6 for the up coming plasma 6 release.
I want gnome-mobile to be good and that alpine linux get more mobile friendly apps (I’m running pmOS)
Setting up secure boot and sensible defaults for it.
Verity in installers.
Being able to hibernate in kernel lockdown.
Actually just detecting when a volume is on encrypted media in udisks would be great.
i wanna use the stuff i bought for windows, like my streamdeck (i'm aware that there's an FOSS app already), or my Thrustmaster steering wheel. Working together with big game companies to bring anticheat-protected games to linux would be awesome, but not something a single dev would be able to easily do.
my steering wheel and my stream deck are really holding me back right now. not using linux currently, but i'd have to boot into windows anytime i want to crash some cars in beam.ng
not something a single dev would be able to easily do.
More importantly, not something a Linux dev can do. At this point it's a decision by the game publishers to actively block the game from running on Linux
the question is: can we talk it out? what do the game devs have to gain from the game not running on linux? could the game being able to run on linux boost sales slightly?
this topic is really about being reasonable and not immediately bursting out into "big company bad"
They don't think it's worthwhile to devote manpower to testing whether the anticheat engine works reliably on Linux. If Linux users can circumvent it, it ruins the fun for the majority of users. The safer option is to cut out 2% of the market.
