For me it must be kde plasma 6 and the wayland driver for wine.
Edit: I made the question gendered by using the word guys. I’ve fixed my mistake.
It’s the year of the Linux desktop! /s
But seriously, I think I’m going to buy a SteamDeck.
Do it! I’m not a very materialistic person, but there have been a few things I’ve bought in my life that genuinely made me happy and were just such a joy to use that I was kind of in awe each time using it, and the steamdeck is one of those things. People put a lot of focus on the hardware and the strength of the graphics, etc. But for me the impressive part is the software polish, the OS, the config menu’s, etc work so well and the thing was just so well thought out. Coming from a developer and someone who adores linux and open source, the thing is just a joy to use.
I would however go with a third party dock if you want one. I bought the steamdeck dock and it just doesn’t work correctly 100% of the time, I have random issues here and there. There was a reddit thread 6 months ago listing all the issues someone had and I had almost every one at one point or another. I’ve heard the cheaper 3rd party docks have been better.
Just got a steam deck and love it. I also got the official dock and can’t believe how bad it is. I have to unplug it and my TV half the time to get the dock to connect correctly. It works fine for a few days, then stops. I’ve had picture issues and audio issues and even issues with the deck right after disconnecting it.
Yeah, same issues. I bought my dock during the summer steam sale and didn’t use it much, but now that I’'ve tried using it more I feel like I want to send it back and get a refund, but it might be too late. I keep hoping the issues will get fixed with firmware updates, but so far they haven’t.
Awesome. Thanks!
I completely agree. I bought one in the preorder days and was a bit nervous. It came in, and it was so much better than I thought. It works and it works well, and is fun to use. I’ve connected to a tv and done “real” work on it to boot. It is some hardware I highly recommend to anyone if they can afford it. The other cool thing is my whole library of steam games are there and still playable.
I already have the LCD, but the OLED has me seriously considering retiring it far earlier than I usually do with my electronics.
I’ve had a gaming laptop for years but I think I did more gaming on the deck in the first six months than I ever did on my laptop. The suspend mid-game, actually using it away from a power plug…
The Deck announcement made me try linux on my desktop again, too, just to see if Valve’s claims about proton could be true… And I have yet to boot back into windows.
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I’ve been considering this too. I don’t have much time at all to game but feel like maybe I’d do better with a portable than can stream to a TV.
I need to search up if they support all games or just those that have been ported. Surely it’s more than what has been ported to Linux…
But my mouse and keyboard, hmm
Protondb is a hugely useful site (okay, maybe not that huge but it’s great)! There’s WineHQ for Wine but it’s kinda… a little creaky, if you know what I mean. Doesn’t seem to get much attention.
Protondb, on the other paw, has lots of useful info from a quick-and-simple “how likely is it to work?” indicator to “Here’s what I had to do to make it flawless” reports from users. VERY useful! wiggles emphatically! (also it splits reports between PC and Deck)
Oh, also GloriousEggroll’s Proton fork is kinda great, for critters who like to faff about with stuff as I do: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom Dunno if that’s of any use on Deck though.
That’s what the “verified for deck” is for in steam. In my experience every game works that fulfills these criteria:
A. Is not one of a few competitive multiplayer games that have decided to not allow Linux players to play. Among these are Destiny 2 and PUBG for example.
B. Does not require mouse and keyboard (and even then the touchpads and steam input sometimes makes it work anyways)
C. Is not VR (for obvious reasons)
If you are unsure you can also check protondb which someone else linked.
I swear I’ll too this 2024 hopefully a newer release doesn’t appear all of sudden (like just the Retro is Pocket 4 and 4 Pro happened right now, at least for me).
Nothing. Which is great: everything already works for me. Any improvements and extra market share is cool. But I’m vibing already.
It’s amazing that Linux gaming is becoming a thing that’s better sometimes than Windows gaming (minus the getting banned part in some games). I also like that AMD is making some big pushes on open source drivers, plus their ROCm open-source alternative to CUDA.
This is a great time for Linux users! :)
I just ROCm was built in to mesa. Because either you use the proprietary drivers that have some issues, or use mesa and fight with everything (amf, ROCm) to try and get it working.
More Wayland adoption, more protocols and desktop portals, color management and HDR getting closer, even better gaming
NVIDIA getting its shit together maybe?
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They just broke xwayland on my gpu so i’ve been forced to return to x11, bit of a backwards move
Gosh, NVIDIA literally pays just one guy to do the entire Linux support
At this stage I suspect its just 3 kids in a trenchcoat.
“ChatGPT, write a Linux driver.”
I think the teams that are responsible for bringing proper HDR support are moving slow and waiting for HDR to get its shit together, as right now it’s a poorly standardized dumpster fire of various protocols and definitions and implementations. It’s still a bit of a pain in windows and macos despite the fact that official support exists already.
Plasma 6, but just as excited for kernel 6.7 featuring:
- bcachefs
- AMD Seamless Boot (for flicker-free streamlined booting)
- Scheduler improvements for better responsiveness/performance
- IO_uring FUTEX support for better performance
- More FUTEX2 work for potentially better gaming performance
- Better write performance for eMMC chips (great for many IoT boards)
- TCP network performance improvements
- DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.1 support over Type-C
What about bcachefs excites you? Like, what does it offer that ext4, Btrfs and zfs don’t?
Initial benchmarks show better performance than btrfs (at least for some workloads), but more importanty, I like that it offers tiered/cache storage - so you can use a fast and small drive (NVMe) to speed up a slow and bigger drive (HDD). You can do that with ZFS as well of course, but it doesn’t have the massive RAM requirements. Also it’s much more easier to set up and configure in comparison.
It’s like btrfs, but faster, and less prone to data loss.
Btrfs is data loss prone? OpenSUSE Tumbleweed uses it as default, I assumed it was good enough.
BTRFS is honestly really great and has been for the last few years. Dont take the word of random people on the interwebs, check out some modern sources of info on the subject. Some people love to complain about RAID5/6 but if you use BTRFS the BTRFS way then it is solid.
With that said, if you dont need snapshots, drive mirroring, sub volumes, bit rot protection etc then EXT4 is hard to beat for reliability.
Snapshots changed my life. And I don’t exactly demand ultra reliability for my home PC. Thanks for the feedback!
Thats why I’m still on trusty old ext4. Dunno if this is true but I dont want to risk data loss.
Ext4 just went through a data loss fix in the kernel, too.
Its got a closer feature set to ZFS (tiered storage is going to be huge for me personally), but a much friendlier license. ZFS’s licensing drama solidly convinced me not to touch it with a ten meter pole. BTRFS isn’t bad as well, I currently use it, but tiered storage is excellent. Was the only reason I used to consider ZFS, but becachefs is getting to have my cake and eat it too.
Ps: isn’t ‘guys’ gender nutral, similar to ‘dude’?
Dude!
What about dudette? /s
I’m Tom Dudette, and I’ll leave the light on for ya. (guitar outro…)
The classical answer to a male is: do you sleep with guys?
I don’t remember the grammatical names, but there’s a difference between using “guys” in your phrase and the way it’s used in the title. So it can be gender neutral depending on context.
The same as in “All men are equal”, and “Do you like men or women?”.
I guess having to explain this is a good enough reason to avoid this allegedly gender-neutral word in gender-neutral contexts
Only for people that did not made through elementary school.
Do you include in this group everyone with English as a foreign language like me?
English is my second language too, but my mother tongue has neutral genders the same. I don’t know how it works in your primary language, but if it is not the same, I guess you have to learn more about how it works before trying to tell the native speakers to abandon context.
I’m happy that we can now at least forget about inferring the education levels of people.
What I do see though is the usage of the language by native speakers. I pretty much never see a woman addressing a group of women by the “gender-neutral” “guys”. I often see males addressing a group of males by “guys”. Even this mismatch tells me enough about how neutral this term is among the people I see.
I also see males addressing a mixed group by “guys”. When called out, they say “oh, but I didn’t mean it like that, many other people do that, the word is now neutral”. Which might be even true despite the evidence mentioned above, but it still carries an awful lot of resemblance to other excuses about non-neutral language and behavior. I guess you can see why some people see this as an excuse.
I come from a country which in the last century had probably the best women’s rights in the whole world. And it still struggles with appropriate usage of neutral-gendered and “female”-gendered forms of words, and the excuses are all the same.
sometimes they might
Sure, and this only strengthens the point of the counter question
Heh. “Guy” has some interesting history. It originally referred to Guy Fawkes, because that was his name. Then it came to mean any person, gender neutral, then it became any man, now gendered, but the neutral definition never went away, so we have both meanings floating around still, but the original meaning, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, died.
(I skipped a few steps in there because they’re not relevant between guy Fawkes and any person)
I’d have to say I’m eager to see an official release of the rust cosmic desktop from system76. I know it’s going to be fairly bare bones and I know you can already download it and play around with it. I’m just excited for another option.
This.
SDDM Wayland Greeter, to have 100% wayland on KDE
I’m currently using greetd-tui but I would instantly switch over to sddm if the Wayland session actually works. (I use hyprland as my window manager )
Fedora 39 KDE/Kinoite already has this
SDDM with Wayland greeter? AFAIK It’s not even finished on the git master branch…
It’s not finished, but it works on the current release. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM#Running_under_Wayland
its not in any stable release of sddm, but its one of the exceptions Fedora makes for git releases in its stable branch. KDESIG devs were desperate to get an end to end wayland experience happening for the KDE spin.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefaultForSDDM
Nothing. 6.6.6 was already released.
Scary number
GIMP 3.0
Is this actually happening in this decade?
Unlikely
I’m looking forward to Plasma 6
Seeing m$ lose a little more market share.
Plasma 6 is at the absolute peak of the mountain for me, however I am incredibly excited about the Wayland improvements within Wine, that are slowly coming in
What are you most excited for in Plasma 6?
Consistency. Both visual, and internal logic. Cleanup of dead code, and migrations to uniform new systems
Plasma 6 for sure. I’m a Gnome user waiting with bated breath to see if it actually delivers the goods.
Always hoping for Nvidia to stop being bullshit. Definitely not buying from them again.
You can test it today. The feature freeze has happened already, thus nothing will change until the release
I don’t really know how to install something like a beta version of KDE, especially without messing up things on my own computer.
With an immutable system you can’t fuck things up. I guess you aren’t on one. In that case, use boxes and install it in a vm :)
What Plasma 6 feature has you most excited?
None in particular. Just the totality of the changes. Many of them are small default changes or usability changes, but when taken together it sounds like a nice, somewhat overdue bundle.
Not OP, but I’m excited about the baked in tiling. Nervous about Wayland as I think I have some stuff that will break, but we’ll see.
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Probably true convergence between mobile and desktop, where your linux phone is powerful enough to be your only computing device. You would only need something like a lapdock (basically a laptop without the guts) and instead of a cable connecting the two, a slot maybe somewhere within the keyboard that your phone slips into. Maybe this exists already, I don’t know.
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I’ve been waiting yeeears for a Linux phone. Can’t wait until the day finally comes. Tried Ubuntu touch out on an old nexus 4, but it was slow due to old hardware, and I didn’t like the fact you couldn’t just run Linux apps, they had to be special built for Ubuntu touch (unless you did a container and vnc kind of thing). I’ve been eyeing postmarketOS but I’m a little confused if it supports VoLTE which I think is a requirement now on most USA towers.
I think once the hardware support gets there with better battery life, ability to sleep and still get calls notifications, etc, the app ecosystem shouldn’t be a problem with waydroid as a backup
It feels like we are at the “Linux phone daily driver” equivalent to 2004 Linux desktop right now. It’s probably a decade or more away from being a useable device.
It needs a champion–an Ubuntu or Redhat to drive it but the economics of open source being what they are, means it’s probably not worth the effort. Whoever does it needs to provide quality hardware with it imo. Maybe a system76-type company for phones?
If whoever takes up the mantel can nail the camera and video, they could potentially over one all of the other weaknesses of Linux phones (like shit maps/directions, and lack of support for things like banking apps).
I feel like we won’t get it for ARM devices but with Google/Android going in to support RISC-V I believe we’ll see more risc phones and more developers will happily hack away at a risc-v device.
Asus EEE Pad Transformer TF101
That whole line of products was before it’s time, I really wanted one of the phone/tablet combos, but man were they expensive.
This is what I’m most excited about. I started using gnome mobile on my OnePlus 6. It’s still not there yet but it feels better than phosh, Few more bugs tho. I’m so excited for it and what you mentioned is the future I dream about.
How is hardware support these days on OnePlus 6? I’m close to buying one for Linux but keep waiting thinking that a newer alternative might appear.
Not as good as I hoped. I’d wait. Wifi works, didn’t try putting a SIM in yet but the gryo doesn’t work so there’s no auto rotate and scaling is off. It’s either too big or too small. I don’t think the GPS works either but I’ll have to test it.
It’s a cool idea and there are similar devices, but they never seem to catch on because most people would rather carry a laptop that’s still useful if something happens to their phone
