Hey guys, I’m just an ordinary dev looking for something to work on. While messing around with my hobby projects, I couldn’t help but notice that under the surface, there are a lot of places that the libre desktop can be improved. I’d like to take on your suggestions on what I should seriously consider working on and helping out with.
Thanks for any comments and suggestions.
(For those wondering, I’m still working on my other stuff.)
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Fractional scaling. Granted i’m a diehard GNOME fan and I hear KDE is better.
Accessibility. I should be able to give my grandma Ubuntu and she should never have any trouble.
Also fuck Nvidia
support in desktop environments for managing dual backlights when provided by the kernel. I was working on this for a bit but got too busy
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is actually… Completely wrong. Open sourcing video drivers are getting really good a and, in a few years, they’ll be probably just as good, if not better than the proprietary ones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Making the GUIs not follow the axiom of one tool for each job. I shouldn’t have to use the terminal if I want to zip a file with a password. It should just be an option in the GUI that uses both commands on its own
The whole point of a GUI is to make the system more approachable not to just replicate the terminal but with buttons
Doesn’t 7zip do that?
Excellent point, it’s easy to forget that sometimes. What makes a good gui, in your opinion?
I grew up in the XP era so I despise modern GUIs in general, I might not be the right person to ask.
I just want all the information clearly labeled and accessible easily. I want to have buttons and checkmarks for every option possible.
The few times I come across the XP control panel menus or a visual basic app I find it so refreshing and useful. Not having to go through 5 screens to change a basic setting or having to Google how the fuck I access the systems energy plan settings because everything’s practically hidden away to keep users from getting “confused”
I just hate the modern trend of “streamlining” and “sleek and modern” designs that just means you have less information, less options and everything is hidden behind 15 submenus.
It’s like when you find a web page that hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s and suddenly you realize how hostile modern web design is to the user
TL:DR: Not wanting to scare users and hiding away everything just makes users more tech illiterate and makes the experience worse for the tech literate users
Edit: My answer was more of a rant than anything but I really believe a good GUI should be even more practical and easy to use than copy pasting commands in a terminal. It shouldn’t be afraid to give detailed Information (albeit in a human readable format) and should seek to improve the user experience not just replicate the backend.
For example if an option that runs a command fails but the guaranteed solution is to run another command first the error sign should say exactly that and have a button that runs the other command with the necessary parameters according to the context of the error
I would kill for a server distro which came very very well optimized after install and you can run it in a bread toaster.
Alpine Linux?
Currently I’m using Armbian for my SBC servers, working pretty well but I wasn’t aware of Alpine Linux, I will check it later maybe it could work for my objective…
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I mean for me on that its already their
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.
I also wish for a complete desktop environment with workspace semantics of tiling wms. Someone’s actually building one out of sway, I remember. Don’t remember the name though.
I also have high hopes for Pop! OS, but it looks like they are trying to be a full DE instead of just a set of Gnome extensions now.
I just checked the name. It’s nwg-shell. Last time I tried was around 8-10 months ago, I think and it was still rough around the edges. Seems to have matured quite a bit.
Thanks, I will check it out!
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.
mdadm is not bad, it’s just command line. There is loads of help out there too. Not obscure link: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm
I get the impression your real problem is the command line. I can’t emphasize enough how much it is worth getting comfortable on the command line. It’s where the power is, on all platforms, and is fundamentally simplier than GUIs. The big secret is that it isn’t hard.
Most of the mdadm commands look like some kind of wizard’s spell to a noob like me. I have no idea what I’m actually doing with the commands.
It’s all documented what it all means. If you keep using all this stuff, it will become normal. Like anything does. When you’re familiar with the command line, it is a leveling up in what you can do and how much computer you need to do it.
Did you try a search for “mdadm GUI”? I found Webmim that has a mdadm GUI (https://webmin.com/docs/modules/linux-raid/) but no idea if it’s ok.
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)
What kind of phone apps would you like to see made?
A good matrix client with notifications. That way, we could get nearly any messaging service on Linux phone. Additionally better webapp support (install on homescreen) and notifications support for PWA. And as last point, power efficiency must be better.
