Imagine a standardized API where you provide either your own LLM running locally, your own LLM running in your server (for enthusiasts or companies), or a 3rd party LLM service over the Internet, for your optional AI assistant that you can easily disable.
Regardless of your DE, you could choose if you want an AI assistant and where you want the model to run.
I've run LLMs locally before, it's the unified API for digital assistants that would be interesting to me. Then we'd just need an easy way to acquire LLMs that laymen could use, but probably any bigger DE or distro can create a setup wizard.
Not just hypothetically but practically too. A foss program called koboldai let's you run LLMs locally on your computer and a project that takes advantage of this is the koboldassistant project. You can essentially make your own Alexa,Cortana,Siri whatever that doesn't collect your data and belongs to you
To be fair - people don't know what they want until they get it.
In 2005 people would've asked for faster flip phones, not smartphones.
I don't have much faith in current gen AI assistants actually being useful though, but the fact that no one has asked for it doesn't necessarily mean much.
To be fair, in 2005 a lot of people dreamed of "mini portable computers that could fit in their hands". They just didn't associate it to the form created with smartphones, and when the smartphones came to be, people were amazed by it. I don't see the same level of reception when it comes to AI assistants.
I don't think speed was a complaint anyone had about phones right before smartphones launched.
People were mostly concerned with cell phone plans. Talking used to be charged by the minute, texting was charged per text, and data was practically non-existent.
Cell phones have come a long way, but I think a lot of people take for granted just how much cell service has improved. I pay $25/month for a single line that gives me unlimited talk, text, and data (Visible). Couldn't be happier.
Would be a cool feature if it could be leveraged in a secure, private, efficient way that was more useful than 99% of the algorithmic monkey typewriter garbage that's on the market these days. I don't need a glorified Cleverbot rifling through my unspeakables.
Local LLMs are getting better at a very rapid pace. Still a bit too resource hungry to have running in the background all the time, but for example Mistral-7b is quite competent for its size.
That’s why your phone has a brightness slider, or better yet an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness. DE will need something similar.
Definitely. It improved recently (like 2 last versions) and was a big thing when the fractional support was added, since now some software can finally be usable. But I still have too many problems regarding speed, animations, different sizes of things in different places, mouse cursors being wrong, crashes or lock ups sometimes happen, etc.
But it's getting there and am really hopeful for next version and how good it could be.
Really want to finally be able to properly use my external monitor with the laptop monitor also connected at different sizes and fractional settings.
It's interesting nowadays. My windows 11 navigation bar on my work computer now crashes 10x as much as plasma Wayland does. Completely reverse of years earlier.
Along with dozens of other problems like invisibly disabling the microphones so the only way to unmute them is to use the audio troubleshooter, my windows laptop gets more unstable with every update while KDE Wayland gets more stable with every update.
and was a big thing when the fractional support was added
I don't get the need for fractional scaling. If you had bought nonsensical hw like a 4k screen in a 15" notebook, just change display resolution and maybe global font size?
The way I parsed your earlier comment was that the solution to making a resolution like 4k usable on a laptop was just to lower your resolution.
My point is that if instead of lowering your resolution, meaning you're not utilizing the full potential of your screen, you can instead use UI scaling to make the resolution usable while still benefiting from the higher resolution in terms of sharpness in text, games etc.
I'd only tolerate ads if I also have to pay for my OS. If they're just going to give away the OS, then what's the point of ads? I need to know that I'm worthy of being stolen from.
A cool feature that appeared on Linux desktops in the late 2000s, it was multiple desktops on a 3D cube that you could rotate or move arbitrarily with your mouse, and it used GPU acceleration, so you could actually have VLC for instance play a video on the edge of two desktops on the cube while rotating it around.
After a while though, the gimmick wore off and it was sorta like the Jurassic Park "This is a UNIX system!" vibes. It seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared. It was really only there to impress your n00b Windows-using friends.
Which DE? With KDE I don't think I've ever had to edit a config file. I do recall that being an issue with Gnome; it's been years since I've used it though.
XFCE is really bad with this. KDE is much better, but still when setting up something a bit more complicated, you are quickly back to reading man pages. And man pages really aren't great.
Basically competent support for hardware for laptops newer than 2014. Proper thunderbolt, displaylink, trackpad, fingerprint reader, facial rec support.
My company insists on buying these shitty Dell DisplayLink docking stations. They suck so hard they are just a stupid expensive 90W charger. Even OS X users hate them. The frustrating thing is, these things were supposed to allow us to plug our laptop in anywhere and get two working screens, keyboard and charging. The only bit that works reliably is the keyboard and mouse.
Yes however on windows and mac displaylink "sucks" on linux it is practically unusable. I do agree Dlink sucks, but modern laptops have no alternatives to speak of.
Really? I find displaylink awesome I alternatively use ChromeOS, Linux and windows with no issues even gameing on windows (lowers the FPS but fine for my abilities)
Curious what HW you are using I have a couple of different Dell DL models
Linux on displaylink was iffy but it has been great the last few years.
I wish Wayland had support for multi-finger gestures. I know my System76 laptop's trackpad supports them on Windows, but Windows is trash. I use them all the time on my Mac, but I just use a mouse on Linux.
wdym, gnome and kde have 1:1 3/4 finger gestures and smooth scrolling OOTB.
And it works GREAT!! much better then on win10! ONLY under Wayland though....
if you're using x11, you won't get the gestures.
I have a System76 Kudu from 2018. I won't buy anything from them again, honestly. It was overpriced for what it was, and the screen is awful. And it still has features that only work on Windows 10. Not at all what I expected from a company that claims to be Linux-first.
afaik tuxedo laptops are great... but I don't own any (and don't need a new laptop rn) so idk
also maybe you need a legacy driver for your touchpad like xf86 synaptics
What do you need RDP for? I did everything i ever needed to do remotely via SSH (I mean this as a genuine question, not that we shouldn't have better RDP support)
A lot of proprietary engineering software (CAD, MATLAB, etc) or GUI heavy programs have poor or no terminal interface to work with, so the need remote desktop solution is valid
I should be able to use my system wirelessly without having to connect it up. I was running baduk (weiqi/go) simulations on the GPU and I wanted to see live output on the board instead of staring at some SSH'd numbers
I dont know how to mount external drives on Bash without root privilegues. On the Desktop environment it can be done by just clicking without root password.
I can do anything I "need" to via ssh. But I would really like the convenience.
At work they monitor web traffic and block vpns, but they dont block ssh. So I use an ssh tunnel to rdp to my home system so I can easily look something up, navigate to the web interface of one of my self hosted apps, or get a torrent downloading at home.
Setting up vnc is not as easy as it should be. I really wish it as just send auth, if auth create virtual display and perf devices as user that actually sends it to remote client, user sees desktop env loaded.
That's my biggest issue so far. With RDP I knew I could hook up my cheap Android Tablet on my private network and RDP my way to stuff I forgot to do or I needed urgently. Now I can do similar things with SSH but I still struggle to use VNC without it breaking my gdm, and not even to the full extent I'd wish for.
Give https://remmina.org/ a shot. Solid RDP connection. I have been using it for a few years and works well with my work laptop (windows). I hated the VNC route.
Using RDP clients like Remmina is great. The problem is running a RDP server in linux.
In order to connect you must already be logged in to the remote computer locally and have unlocked your keychain. If the remote computer lost power and rebooted you will not be able to get in unless you have set the computer to login automatically and have set the keychain password to be blank, which is not great for security.
You can not use a different screen resolution in the client than you have setup in the server. This means that using "RD Client" on my Android phone to connect to my desktop computer with a resolution of 1920x1080 doesn't work. I need to use an alternate RDP client on my phone where a I can specify a custom resolution of 1920x1080. And then the user interface is tiny and does not fill my screen.
yes But not in any way that makes it useful. It starts when the user logs into the computer locally. If I was going to do that I wouldn't need a remote session.
You can set the account to login automatically, but this doesn't unlock the keychain which is needed to decrypt the user's RDP password. So you can do it but you need to set your account to login automatically and set your keychain password to be blank.
I just hope GNOME's developers would stop being so insufferable. Lots of Wayland extensions and FreeDesktop portals unimplemented on GNOME because of the developers' stubbornness. These also adversely affect to other DEs and WMs and Wayland's evolution itself because other DEs would have less reasons to support a standard if one of the largest DEs themselves don't support it.
I really love GNOME because it's polished, but if KDE would be just as polished I will immediately switch. I know KDE works really hard to make the DE and the apps in general as polished and modern as possible, but I can't still help but feel better at GNOME.
One example is the color scheming protocol by FreeDesktop. You can now make your apps look greenish or purplish or whatever color you want regardless of the toolkit they're made with. Right? Well no, because the insufferable GNOME developers keep blocking the proposal because they want the colors to be hardcoded by the DE. They were offered a compromise where a DE can just offer a limited, curated color picker to the user when they go to the theming settings and allow any arbitrary color hidden behind commands, but the insufferable GNOME developers said no. And the proposal, last time I heard, is still stalled because of GNOME.
I really want to have better tiling and window management in Gnome. Ubuntu has an add-on released with 23.10 that I haven't got around to test yet. And I know that Gnome has that feature in the works, but it annoys me that Windows 11 has better management of windows with window-snapping than my DE of choice.
Oh man I was playing with Mycroft and Mozzilla's Deepspeach back in the day just for this. Though honestly a free desktop supported API that apps could integrate still seems like the best way for this. The next one would be getting Voice User Interface (VUI) support into major frameworks so it's just native to apps built with major frame works. The latter makes more sense AFTER the desktop API starts getting standardized.
Yeah, I tried Hyprland but never really felt alright coming from KDE because I don't have the skill learning all config apps like eww or wayfire Panel etc.
A community workshop thing like KDE does would be even more awesome.
General support for Wayland screen sharing in flatpack apps.
Swap between KDE and GNOME without restart.
Not for me but selecting different premade layouts for KDE on install.
App by app file backups that integrate with cloud storage.
Context menu of application dock shows Application window settings (otherwise only accessible via main settings or titlebar. (very niche)
Casting the whole screen to Android TV built in.
Option to remove PPAs that error via gui.
Move window to an activity shortcut.
Native support for installing webapps (think Samsung installing a website) so I don't have to use a separate browser window or an unsecure electron package.
But if I'm being completely honest the amount of use cases I have that are covered by KDE is completely insane. These are the ones I want for "1-2 times per day saves 10 seconds" or "1-2 times per montt saves a minute + standing up". If it were not for these I'd have to list "Interact with my IoT devices via laptop and KDE connect to make me coffee without standing up". Love KDE.
It's easy on lighter on DEs like XFCE or Sway, by using TTYs. Press Ctrl+Alt+F3, Ctrl+Alt+F4 etc. and start the DE with their start command (like startxfce4).
On KDE or GNOME it should be too, but I haven't figured it out yet.
Cool. I honestly was hoping that someone would chime in with something better.
I used to have a fluent work flow with xmonad and keynav. I kinda stopped using computers seriously about a decade ago. Trying to recover some of my work speed lately, but I can't seem to get back into keynav.
Please inbuilt on screen keyboard. For the love of god windows on screen keyboard is miles ahead of any Linux alternative and on Wayland the scene is even worse.
KDE: When using multiple monitors, being able to configure their relative position on start up. Right now, it just does who knows what, but they're out of order. Also, I only need 1 logon screen in total, not one in each monitor...that happen to be out of order anyway.
Never quite understood this complaint tbh. I use Windows at work and I find the blanked out screens look weirder than just having the login screen everywhere
It's just slightly confusing because (1) I don't know what screen the cursor is on, and (2) since they're out of order, trying to use a specific one is a little confusing.
Better Wayland support across the board, but also more Wayland compositors and window managers from which to choose. I'd make my own but I know so very little about Wayland right now and it would take me a while to learn.
Also, I have always wanted desktop environments to be more like Emacs, i.e. to be fully programmable in a Lisp language like Common Lisp or Scheme, where you can just whip-up a GUI app for anything you want in a few minutes with a few lines of code. Operating systems like that existed back in the 1970s and 80s, but went extinct when Windows and Macintosh took over everything, which were never designed to be programmable by end users. It sucks because there hasn't been anything like it ever since.
A better "desktop as an IDE" experience would be killer to me too. Even if it's not for everyone, I think as an accelerator for FOSS designers of Linux desktop apps it would be cool
Hmm! Very strange! I probably don’t have the same setup as you at all, but I’ve only had the system entirely freeze on me when I’ve run out of memory (compiling big projects that takes like 60 gigs of memory, ugh). Enabling zram completely solved this problem for me (the memory compresses super well in my use case). 16gb is a decent chunk of memory and I wouldn’t expect you to run out in normal circumstances, though. If you’re doing some heavier work on your computer it could be tight.
What kind of system are you running? I probably can’t help, but maybe somebody else would have an idea. Any clue when it freezes? Like a certain application or something?
KDE Neon, AM4 platform. GPU is 8 years old. The freeze event commonly happens when Firefox with 10 to 15 tabs open is the active application, and mouse movement is present.
Swap is painfully slow, but unless you have a really high swappiness setting you shouldn’t just be swapping all the time. If that is the case, though, try zram.
Still waiting for a DE that's looks and acts like i3/sway but takes care of everything under the hood like monitor config, shortcuts for brightness, volume etc. Essentially everything Gnome or KDE does.
Apparently you can configure KWin (the WM for KDE) to act like a tiling WM. It's very customizable. Also, you can replace KWin with a TWM, such as i3. I remember doing this a long time ago, can't remember how, though.
I'm currently doing this with xfce replacing it's window manager with i3. Sadly that doesn't work on Wayland anymore because the concept of a window manager doesn't exist anymore. Your DE is a compositor now.
But then your still using i3 + lots of custom scripts. I don't find the time anymore to maintain all this custom config. I want to switch to Wayland but I don't want to invest all that time with sway again.
The point is that you don't have to maintain any custom scripts. Everything come per-configured out of the box. You only have to tweak what you don't like. Is that any different from KDE, Gnome, XCFE or any of the "easy" DEs and their configs?
I am pretty new to Linux and have mostly been using Ubuntu. The few times I have read about Wayland, it was mostly Ubuntu users blamimg it for things not working.
Can you tell me why you are looking forward to using it?
It supports things like multiple screens with different DPIs and refresh rates which X11 supports badly, if they work at all.
Wayland still has some use cases that the devs are chasing down and Nvidia were dragged into things kicking and screaming, but it's mostly complete now.
Here's the basic rundown:
Most if not all desktop environments for Linux have used a component called X11, which is the window manager. X11 is exceptionally old; it's been around since the 1980's. Computer display technology - and what we expect computer displays to do - has changed drastically since X11's creation. X11 is old and busted, there's stuff it just outright can't do that we're beginning to expect computers to do. But, because it has been around for so long, a lot of software is written with X11 in mind, sometimes software that isn't actively developed anymore.
If X11 is old and busted, Wayland is the new hotness. Wayland has been in development for approximately ten years now; when I started getting into Linux in early 2014 I heard whispers that there were a couple projects working to replace X11, Canonical was working on their thing, Mir, and there's this other thing called Wayland.
Wayland is actually out and in service, and it can do some cool things, but also it breaks a lot of things, especially for users of Nvidia GPUs if my understanding is correct. We're still not at a point where we can kick X11 in the head and standardize the whole Linux world on Wayland yet.
Cinnamon - Mint's signature DE - hasn't even begun to try to switch over to Wayland. I'm a Cinnamon user, I'm extremely still using X11, I don't even know if I've ever run Wayland on my current hardware, so I don't have much practical experience with it.
Personally, I'd like to use Gamescope for my games. In addition to super low latency it has a number of nice features like being able to force games into borderless fullscreen and therefore be easily minimized, being able to use FSR to upscale any game, setting a framerate limiter, etc
It's modern and faster, has more features, and supports X11 apps. If your hardware is friendly with it, it's pretty much a straight upgrade. Problem is not all hardware supports is well.
Actual proper touch support, which includes a decent built-in keyboard (looking at you KDE...).
I love 2-in-1's, but I do wish touch support would go all the way. It's like... 70-80% there, with Gnome having a good keyboard and KDE having the better touch support overall. But it just needs to go the final stretch to make it a good experience.
Completely agree. Like you, I found Plasma to be a much better DE with a touchscreen than GNOME (ironic, isn't it?).
maliit-keyboard is not bad even now (responsive, fast and beautiful). But there are still problems with the fact that it does not work everywhere (some sites, Signal Flatpak).
As a new linux user, I would like KDE to fix their trackpad gestures because they suck. Please copy Windows or macOS.
And I want fractional scaling in GNOME without everything looking blurry.
Just install it and not have to care about anything system related. Just keep out of my way and let me do what I need to do. Linux, Windows, MacOS, the operating system should not be an end, but a mean.
If you need to update, just do it and don't bother me.
I plug something, just show it to me. Something is proprietary? I don't care, just want it to work...
Better trackpad support on KDE on Wayland. I use multi-finger gestures all the time on my MacBook, and my System76 laptop supports them on Windows, but the only gesture that works on Linux is two-finger scrolling.
Oh, I like these topics and was until recently frustrated because kwallet didn't implement secret service, but nowadays it does so most things should be working correctly.
I've recently been trying to change my usages to use keepass, so I've been disabling kwallet, so, what are your current problems with kwallet?
That was something that frustrated me a lot back in the days as I had to constantly log in Minecraft launcher each time I wanted to play, same with XIVLauncher, and some other games I forgot about.
Ability to pin applications to the taskbar depending on which virtual desktop/workspace you are in. For example, I'd like a coding desktop that just has an ide, browser, and terminal.
I think it's a feature of some tilling window managers that allow to put each virtual desktop assigned to each different monitors. So instead of the normal thing where when connecting an external monitor it extends the area of the virtual desktop, you could have the virtual 1 on the laptop monitor and the external with the desktop 2, so you could easily switch desktops that could have different windows, for example changing laptop monitor to virtual desktop 3 and keep external monitor with desktop 2.
I've never used it, but after hearing about this for the first time some time ago it made so much fucking sense compared to the chaotic way that normal window managers behave that I really want to experiment with it.
Yeah - this is what I meant. One virtual desktop per physical monitor.
I used to have it on a forked version of Openbox, but then I lost the binary and it doesn't compile anymore. If just makes much more sense to me and makes window management just a little easier. Especially when apps get confused about which monitor they're supposed to start on or try to be on both in an unhelpful way.
Better support for gaming laptops with both igpu and dedicated gpus like in windows so that I can stop having to reboot when I want to go from portable mode to gaming mode
Idk about amd but I do know Nvidia has Optimus on Linux that works as it should, maybe your talking about a laptop with a mux switch? Which you have to reboot no matter what when seitching
I want to be able to see true integration between Apps and the WM. I saw a lot of good stuff with the way that Instant Messengers, Downloaders and IRC clients and various accounts could be made part of the normal interface. Now everything is web apps, or worse, Web Desktop Apps, which is also a big huge Electron apps that are more Isolated from each other than ever.
The only things apps share today are notifications, and I could definitely have less of those.
Desktop as a service. With the latest feature being worked where apps can be handed off to another compositor, I want the next stage where my compositor and desktop can be swapped with my intervention or notice. Wanna do redundancy? Running the backup live as a hot swap. Wanna do live updates with no interruption? Start the next compositor, try and loads the apps, if nothing breaks, swap the user, if the user doesn't hit the notification to revert kill the last session.
Add in better remote compositor support and it can get really cool. Allowing for a distributed DE across your devices. Making high availability more possible as well, but that might actually be overkill.
I am very excited for Pop OS to get the new Cosmic desktop. Not really a specific feature but an entirely new DE that is quite different from the others and built from the ground up in Rust. Hopefully the first version won't be totally broken and full of bugs!
There's not much I'm "dying" for in Cinnamon; it's very complete.
I wouldn't mind if the Nemo Actions system got a GUI editor. I think it's such a little known feature...if you go to ~/local/share/nemo/actions, you can add config files that can add items to the right click context menu, including but not limited to shell scripts. I have a few basic ImageMagick scripts that allow me to do things like edit images or convert them from one file format to another just by right clicking a file.
Let's hope they can pull it off soon, XFCE really surprised me with the speed at which they transition but it's a huge project for any DE and we are slowly getting to a point where it's actually neccecary!
Literally just button remapping support for my MX Ergo.
And for the fool who always comes into these threads to tell me again that I must not have tried in several years, I tried last month. Talked to the Solaar dev, tried to reach out to Logitech, literally nothing to be done.
I mean... you can already open a terminal to the current directory. But I'm not sure why I would want the terminal to be opened inside the file manager?
Sometimes I just need to type one or two quick commands, maybe at the current path. I don't think this is necessarily to do a lot of work, it's just to give some more flexibility. I can see myself tapping F4, typing "chown blabla something", tapping F4 again, or similar because it's quick and easy.
Nothing wrong in having options that some might find useful sometimes. As long as it doesn't bother those who don't use it.
They're the same kind of tab; not a completely different application. Should we also listen to music in Dolphin? Watching video in Dolphin? Edit files in Dolphin? Should we make Dolphin the only app on the system and do everything in it?
Typically, when I open a terminal I want a normal size one, so I can see file listings, scrolling data etc. In my case I would say 99 times out of 100 I want a regular terminal rather than a small one at the bottom.
Should we also listen to music in Dolphin? Watching video in Dolphin? Edit files in Dolphin?
I mean, yeah. I use Krusader, and the reason why I use it instead of Dolphin is because Dolphin doesn't give me an easy way to edit files and view images. In Krusader, "Edit" is F4 and "View" is F3. (It does open a new window, though.)
Music and video files are easy. Previews, baby! Previews are very convenient. I want to make sure that I'm about to open the correct file. Or I'm trying to find a specific file, and the file names aren't making it obvious. And so on. Now, this isn't something that I've felt the need for, but it's easy to see use cases for it.
Should we make Dolphin the only app on the system and do everything in it?
I would say that if something is going to take me only a minute or two to do (or less), then it's more convenient to do it from the file manager than to open a whole new program. Technically, Krusader is using kate, etc. under the hood to do all of that stuff, but it's through the Krusader interface.
Typically, when I open a terminal I want a normal size one, so I can see file listings, scrolling data etc. In my case I would say 99 times out of 100 I want a regular terminal rather than a small one at the bottom.
In your case, sure. But other users are going to have other use cases. Not everybody thinks and works the same way, so what works and makes sense for you isn't necessarily going to work and make sense for other people. That's why I like KDE so much. It's very flexible to the needs of users.
HOW? I looked all over the menus, pop up menu too.
Assuming you're talking about XFCE's Thunar file manager, it's either File > Terminal or Terminal in the context menu for a directory.
If you don't already have it for some reason you can add it in Edit > Configure custom actions. Create a new entry that runs your favorite terminal app and give it %f as the parameter that will take the value of the directory you want. Please make sure to select only "Directories" in the "Appeareance conditions" tab.
You can create other custom actions too, for example I use zenity --question && shred -fu %F to shred and remove a file after asking for confirmation.
I don't have it, and the custom command doesn't seem to apprear anywhere, but thank you anyway - at least I now know it's supposed to be there and can look for fixes
Edit: i've reread your post and Appearance Conditions did the trick. Thank you!
Some kind of easy notification system and panel/dock/taskbar notification emblems. The support for stuff like that is incredibly spotty right now and is one of the final things preventing me from switching off windows.
EDIT: Have found a decent solution to this via Dash to Panel. I have been running Zorin OS for over the last month now on my main PCs!
I saw the cool feature of ChromeOS Desktop where you can save all open Window states inside a Workspace and resume them on another day again. Never used it on ChromeOS as I am not sure how but this seems easily possible soon with Plasma 6 where you can hibernate or rather store the current state of your Window.
Wayland needs stacking window managers that aren't just KDE and Gnome. I want more things like openbox. There's labwc but that's it.
And also Wayland needs more customization programs designed around stacking window managers. Waybar, yambar, and others are all only designed for tiling window managers.
support tags in all applications and have combined search for them (e.g. let me tag e-mails and files, and when I search for my tag the tagged emails and files show up) (AFAIK GNOME developers already said, this will never come, because it would confuse GNOME users. Apple and Apple users have this feature for years now.)
Bring back F3 dual pane views in the file manager, having two windows side by side is not equivalent
Integrate and polish dash to dock or dash to panel, I don't care which one just make it work perfectly OOTB.
In Gnome:
Proper calDav integration in the gnome "online accounts" section. Smaller titlebars. Nothing else please. No dock, dash or whatever, no stupid clutter, just nice and simple like it is currently.
In DWM:
Nothing needs to change, use the default setup every day on my laptop.
A linux vpn gui that connects to a universal api for all vpns that reports load and location to allow automatic switching for fastest VPN speeds all the times. Possibly with the ability to multiplex the packets to two or more VPN providers for better obfuscation. And with a nice GUI that has presets for popular vpns
There were UX bugs though it's been some time so I don't remember all of them.
One of them was that when I pressed the windows key and searched for an app sometimes it just wouldn't react at all, and I had to press it multiple times or use another way to launch an application.
Also the default file manager would often hang up for no apparent reason.
The desktop widgets would change their position every single time I logged in and would even disappear.
Edit: just remembered a hilarious one that took me a lot of time to figure out what was happening. If I had my second display turned on while logging in, the visual scale would always set itself to a ridiculous value like 1% or something and everything would be too small to do anything. I had to turn off the display every time I would log in. Before this I didn't even know the PC could detect whether a display is turned on or off.
No matter what I set the scale to in display configurations, it would get fucked if I logged in with a second display turned on.
Notice how none of these replies are “AI assistant”?
"AI assistant" just seems like a euphemism for "increased tracking".
Imagine a standardized API where you provide either your own LLM running locally, your own LLM running in your server (for enthusiasts or companies), or a 3rd party LLM service over the Internet, for your optional AI assistant that you can easily disable.
Regardless of your DE, you could choose if you want an AI assistant and where you want the model to run.
I've had this idea for a long time now, but I don't know shit about LLMs. GPT can be run locally though, so I guess only the API part is needed.
I've run LLMs locally before, it's the unified API for digital assistants that would be interesting to me. Then we'd just need an easy way to acquire LLMs that laymen could use, but probably any bigger DE or distro can create a setup wizard.
Check out koboldAI and koboldassistabt projects. That's Litterally the thing you are describing and is Open source
Yeah. I'm really annoyed by this trend of having programs that could function offline require connecting to a server.
Not just hypothetically but practically too. A foss program called koboldai let's you run LLMs locally on your computer and a project that takes advantage of this is the koboldassistant project. You can essentially make your own Alexa,Cortana,Siri whatever that doesn't collect your data and belongs to you
To be fair - people don't know what they want until they get it. In 2005 people would've asked for faster flip phones, not smartphones.
I don't have much faith in current gen AI assistants actually being useful though, but the fact that no one has asked for it doesn't necessarily mean much.
To be fair, in 2005 a lot of people dreamed of "mini portable computers that could fit in their hands". They just didn't associate it to the form created with smartphones, and when the smartphones came to be, people were amazed by it. I don't see the same level of reception when it comes to AI assistants.
I don't think speed was a complaint anyone had about phones right before smartphones launched.
People were mostly concerned with cell phone plans. Talking used to be charged by the minute, texting was charged per text, and data was practically non-existent.
Cell phones have come a long way, but I think a lot of people take for granted just how much cell service has improved. I pay $25/month for a single line that gives me unlimited talk, text, and data (Visible). Couldn't be happier.
cries in Canadian
What if it's a friendly purple gorilla
Would be a cool feature if it could be leveraged in a secure, private, efficient way that was more useful than 99% of the algorithmic monkey typewriter garbage that's on the market these days. I don't need a glorified Cleverbot rifling through my unspeakables.
Local LLMs are getting better at a very rapid pace. Still a bit too resource hungry to have running in the background all the time, but for example Mistral-7b is quite competent for its size.
HDR
Its current work in progress from different companies and groups working together (Gnome, Kde, RedHat, Valve, etc)
immediately thought of that too
what's HDR?
High Dynamic Range. Compatible software, computer and monitor can display a greater range of brightnesses.
That's Display Server level, DE is 2 levels higher. HDR in a DE sounds like a pain. You know, that flashing problem with the phone in the night?
Well, yeah, but actually, no.
Flashing problem?
Too bright in the dark.
That’s why your phone has a brightness slider, or better yet an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness. DE will need something similar.
Why does everyone like it so much?
I’d tell you… if I had it!
I think it's one of those things like freesync, high DPI and high refresh rates that you really have to see for yourself.
Is that why games always look better on Linux than on Windows?
Would be great for the tv screen with 4k and hdr that I have around for example.
A more polished wayland with plasma 6 :)
Definitely. It improved recently (like 2 last versions) and was a big thing when the fractional support was added, since now some software can finally be usable. But I still have too many problems regarding speed, animations, different sizes of things in different places, mouse cursors being wrong, crashes or lock ups sometimes happen, etc.
But it's getting there and am really hopeful for next version and how good it could be.
Really want to finally be able to properly use my external monitor with the laptop monitor also connected at different sizes and fractional settings.
It's interesting nowadays. My windows 11 navigation bar on my work computer now crashes 10x as much as plasma Wayland does. Completely reverse of years earlier.
Along with dozens of other problems like invisibly disabling the microphones so the only way to unmute them is to use the audio troubleshooter, my windows laptop gets more unstable with every update while KDE Wayland gets more stable with every update.
I don't get the need for fractional scaling. If you had bought nonsensical hw like a 4k screen in a 15" notebook, just change display resolution and maybe global font size?
And waste all those pixels? Scaling let's you keep the sharpness while also getting reasonably sized ui
More sharpness than you have pixels?
edit: You didn't like the question?
I didn't downvote you
The way I parsed your earlier comment was that the solution to making a resolution like 4k usable on a laptop was just to lower your resolution. My point is that if instead of lowering your resolution, meaning you're not utilizing the full potential of your screen, you can instead use UI scaling to make the resolution usable while still benefiting from the higher resolution in terms of sharpness in text, games etc.
A bunch of ai garbage and also some ads please! Maybe collect info about me and sell it to marketing corporations while you're there.
Yes yes! This is what I want! Can you also include a completely useless search bar?
I'm fine with this as long as I can get candy crush in the start menu
this the only thing keeping me from moving from windows
I'd only tolerate ads if I also have to pay for my OS. If they're just going to give away the OS, then what's the point of ads? I need to know that I'm worthy of being stolen from.
I want the cube back.
KDE still has it
Yes, along with wobbly and exploding windows!
Here it is. https://github.com/Schneegans/Desktop-Cube
It never left, you can still use Compiz!
The what
A cool feature that appeared on Linux desktops in the late 2000s, it was multiple desktops on a 3D cube that you could rotate or move arbitrarily with your mouse, and it used GPU acceleration, so you could actually have VLC for instance play a video on the edge of two desktops on the cube while rotating it around.
After a while though, the gimmick wore off and it was sorta like the Jurassic Park "This is a UNIX system!" vibes. It seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared. It was really only there to impress your n00b Windows-using friends.
Look up "compiz 3D cube" on YouTube or something.
Nice
I don't think it ever left
But but Compiz and burning windows and cube... The times are not the same.
Here it goes. The cube one was posted above. https://github.com/Schneegans/Burn-My-Windows
There's wayfire
A consistent system settings app that actually handles all configs without requireing manual editing of config files.
Which DE? With KDE I don't think I've ever had to edit a config file. I do recall that being an issue with Gnome; it's been years since I've used it though.
XFCE is really bad with this. KDE is much better, but still when setting up something a bit more complicated, you are quickly back to reading man pages. And man pages really aren't great.
On KDE, if you want NumLock to start on at the login screen, you need to edit a file.
Also, to remap mouse side buttons, you need to either mess with a config file or install something like Input Remapper.
Neither of these things are true, if you're using Wayland for both sddm and the session
Basically competent support for hardware for laptops newer than 2014. Proper thunderbolt, displaylink, trackpad, fingerprint reader, facial rec support.
tbf more often than not displaylink just sucks, no matter the OS.
My company insists on buying these shitty Dell DisplayLink docking stations. They suck so hard they are just a stupid expensive 90W charger. Even OS X users hate them. The frustrating thing is, these things were supposed to allow us to plug our laptop in anywhere and get two working screens, keyboard and charging. The only bit that works reliably is the keyboard and mouse.
There is a driver for it, but it bricks my OpenSuSE and stresses the CPU so much on OS X that it's literally unusable.
I wonder why Displaylink still gets used when DP alt mode has existed for many years now.
We used Dell WD19 docks and they worked well enough. A bit buggy sometimes but a firmware update usually fixed it.
Yes however on windows and mac displaylink "sucks" on linux it is practically unusable. I do agree Dlink sucks, but modern laptops have no alternatives to speak of.
Really? I find displaylink awesome I alternatively use ChromeOS, Linux and windows with no issues even gameing on windows (lowers the FPS but fine for my abilities)
Curious what HW you are using I have a couple of different Dell DL models
Linux on displaylink was iffy but it has been great the last few years.
trackpads work fine on Wayland or wirh xinput2
I wish Wayland had support for multi-finger gestures. I know my System76 laptop's trackpad supports them on Windows, but Windows is trash. I use them all the time on my Mac, but I just use a mouse on Linux.
wdym, gnome and kde have 1:1 3/4 finger gestures and smooth scrolling OOTB.
And it works GREAT!! much better then on win10!
ONLY under Wayland though....
if you're using x11, you won't get the gestures.
I'm using the latest Plasma on Wayland on Arch and NONE of those gestures work!!
I am NOT using x11!!
something must be broken then.
thy work perfectly on both my 8 year old asus laptop and a new dell model from 2021
I have a System76 Kudu from 2018. I won't buy anything from them again, honestly. It was overpriced for what it was, and the screen is awful. And it still has features that only work on Windows 10. Not at all what I expected from a company that claims to be Linux-first.
afaik tuxedo laptops are great... but I don't own any (and don't need a new laptop rn) so idk
also maybe you need a legacy driver for your touchpad like xf86 synaptics
That's fair.
I'm glad I don't rely on any of that, personally. Aside from the trackpad, which works as it should.
Remote desktop working like it does in windows.
I love linux and it is really all I use but RDP support is severly worse than windows.
What do you need RDP for? I did everything i ever needed to do remotely via SSH (I mean this as a genuine question, not that we shouldn't have better RDP support)
A lot of proprietary engineering software (CAD, MATLAB, etc) or GUI heavy programs have poor or no terminal interface to work with, so the need remote desktop solution is valid
I should be able to use my system wirelessly without having to connect it up. I was running baduk (weiqi/go) simulations on the GPU and I wanted to see live output on the board instead of staring at some SSH'd numbers
I dont know how to mount external drives on Bash without root privilegues. On the Desktop environment it can be done by just clicking without root password.
I can do anything I "need" to via ssh. But I would really like the convenience.
At work they monitor web traffic and block vpns, but they dont block ssh. So I use an ssh tunnel to rdp to my home system so I can easily look something up, navigate to the web interface of one of my self hosted apps, or get a torrent downloading at home.
Setting up vnc is not as easy as it should be. I really wish it as just send auth, if auth create virtual display and perf devices as user that actually sends it to remote client, user sees desktop env loaded.
I've had various VNC systems fail to interoperate. Like you have to use the same server and client.
That's my biggest issue so far. With RDP I knew I could hook up my cheap Android Tablet on my private network and RDP my way to stuff I forgot to do or I needed urgently. Now I can do similar things with SSH but I still struggle to use VNC without it breaking my
gdm, and not even to the full extent I'd wish for.rustdesk it truly awesome.
@FarLine99 @beirdobaggins
It's great that on the download page they have a scam warning, all remote services should have this.
Agree. When the program became more popular, many scammers appeared who used this software.
Give https://remmina.org/ a shot. Solid RDP connection. I have been using it for a few years and works well with my work laptop (windows). I hated the VNC route.
Isnt Remmina a client only? Or can it be configured to autolaunch a VNC/RDP server?
I use Remmina and it is great as a RDP client. But that is not my issue.
The issue is the way RDP is implemented at the server level.
Gotcha, sorry I miss understood what you were looking for.
Using RDP clients like Remmina is great. The problem is running a RDP server in linux.
In order to connect you must already be logged in to the remote computer locally and have unlocked your keychain. If the remote computer lost power and rebooted you will not be able to get in unless you have set the computer to login automatically and have set the keychain password to be blank, which is not great for security.
You can not use a different screen resolution in the client than you have setup in the server. This means that using "RD Client" on my Android phone to connect to my desktop computer with a resolution of 1920x1080 doesn't work. I need to use an alternate RDP client on my phone where a I can specify a custom resolution of 1920x1080. And then the user interface is tiny and does not fill my screen.
Which server are you using on linux? How did you configure autostart?
I use the one built into Gnome but I have run into even more issues trying to install and use other ones.
that one does support autostart?
yesBut not in any way that makes it useful. It starts when the user logs into the computer locally. If I was going to do that I wouldn't need a remote session.You can set the account to login automatically, but this doesn't unlock the keychain which is needed to decrypt the user's RDP password. So you can do it but you need to set your account to login automatically and set your keychain password to be blank.
HDR
You could use game scope if I remember correctly
Kde, cast the screen wirelessly. The gnome app does work but it's not integrated in kde display configuration
How is the GNOME app called? I'm asking for a school project
It should be gnome-network-displays
I just hope GNOME's developers would stop being so insufferable. Lots of Wayland extensions and FreeDesktop portals unimplemented on GNOME because of the developers' stubbornness. These also adversely affect to other DEs and WMs and Wayland's evolution itself because other DEs would have less reasons to support a standard if one of the largest DEs themselves don't support it.
I really love GNOME because it's polished, but if KDE would be just as polished I will immediately switch. I know KDE works really hard to make the DE and the apps in general as polished and modern as possible, but I can't still help but feel better at GNOME.
One example is the color scheming protocol by FreeDesktop. You can now make your apps look greenish or purplish or whatever color you want regardless of the toolkit they're made with. Right? Well no, because the insufferable GNOME developers keep blocking the proposal because they want the colors to be hardcoded by the DE. They were offered a compromise where a DE can just offer a limited, curated color picker to the user when they go to the theming settings and allow any arbitrary color hidden behind commands, but the insufferable GNOME developers said no. And the proposal, last time I heard, is still stalled because of GNOME.
I really want to have better tiling and window management in Gnome. Ubuntu has an add-on released with 23.10 that I haven't got around to test yet. And I know that Gnome has that feature in the works, but it annoys me that Windows 11 has better management of windows with window-snapping than my DE of choice.
Like Material shell?
TTS & STT, tightly integrated. And perhaps language translation.
Oh man I was playing with Mycroft and Mozzilla's Deepspeach back in the day just for this. Though honestly a free desktop supported API that apps could integrate still seems like the best way for this. The next one would be getting Voice User Interface (VUI) support into major frameworks so it's just native to apps built with major frame works. The latter makes more sense AFTER the desktop API starts getting standardized.
This
Accent. Colours. Now. (I'm looking at you, gnome)
As a Gnome user I approve of this comment, some more colors would be awesome, especially if they are standartized through xdg!
The tiling concept that was shown off some time ago for GNOME looks amazing
@visnudeva perhaps look into the EndeavorOS Sway community edition. It's pretty sweet!
This with Nvidia support :(
Yeah, I tried Hyprland but never really felt alright coming from KDE because I don't have the skill learning all config apps like eww or wayfire Panel etc.
A community workshop thing like KDE does would be even more awesome.
Have look at nwg https://github.com/nwg-piotr/nwg-shell
I'm on KDE.
Wallet sync with Android.
Wayland crash recovery.
General support for Wayland screen sharing in flatpack apps.
Swap between KDE and GNOME without restart.
Not for me but selecting different premade layouts for KDE on install.
App by app file backups that integrate with cloud storage.
Context menu of application dock shows Application window settings (otherwise only accessible via main settings or titlebar. (very niche)
Casting the whole screen to Android TV built in.
Option to remove PPAs that error via gui.
Move window to an activity shortcut.
Native support for installing webapps (think Samsung installing a website) so I don't have to use a separate browser window or an unsecure electron package.
But if I'm being completely honest the amount of use cases I have that are covered by KDE is completely insane. These are the ones I want for "1-2 times per day saves 10 seconds" or "1-2 times per montt saves a minute + standing up". If it were not for these I'd have to list "Interact with my IoT devices via laptop and KDE connect to make me coffee without standing up". Love KDE.
It's easy on lighter on DEs like XFCE or Sway, by using TTYs. Press Ctrl+Alt+F3, Ctrl+Alt+F4 etc. and start the DE with their start command (like startxfce4).
On KDE or GNOME it should be too, but I haven't figured it out yet.
I love the cover photo bro
Not a DE user, but I would like Cosmic to be stable.
(Plus, mouse-keys.)
Have you played with keynav? https://github.com/jordansissel/keynav
Thanks. I use Warpd.
I meant I would've like that option in a DE like Cosmic.
Gnome has this option already, or at least had it.
Cool. I honestly was hoping that someone would chime in with something better.
I used to have a fluent work flow with xmonad and keynav. I kinda stopped using computers seriously about a decade ago. Trying to recover some of my work speed lately, but I can't seem to get back into keynav.
Please inbuilt on screen keyboard. For the love of god windows on screen keyboard is miles ahead of any Linux alternative and on Wayland the scene is even worse.
Honestly nothing. Im pretty happy with it for a few years now.
Seamless transition from X to Wayland
For that to work Wayland has to be just as broken as x
KDE: When using multiple monitors, being able to configure their relative position on start up. Right now, it just does who knows what, but they're out of order. Also, I only need 1 logon screen in total, not one in each monitor...that happen to be out of order anyway.
I thought this was fixed in the more recent versions by remembering placement based on hardware ID.
This seems a problem for the login manager and kernel framebuffer before plasma/kwin even gets involved.
Ah, I see. I heard SDDM is going to be getting some attention soon so hopefully they can bring it up to speed with the rest of Plasma.
I think this was fixed on Plasma 5.27.x onwards. There was major rewrite of display configuration handling, that fixed these issued for me at least.
Never quite understood this complaint tbh. I use Windows at work and I find the blanked out screens look weirder than just having the login screen everywhere
It's just slightly confusing because (1) I don't know what screen the cursor is on, and (2) since they're out of order, trying to use a specific one is a little confusing.
I've never had this problem. At least not with my Thinkpads (T480 and W540). But I never used the nvidia card on them.
Yep, I'm using an NVidia GPU
Better Wayland support across the board, but also more Wayland compositors and window managers from which to choose. I'd make my own but I know so very little about Wayland right now and it would take me a while to learn.
Also, I have always wanted desktop environments to be more like Emacs, i.e. to be fully programmable in a Lisp language like Common Lisp or Scheme, where you can just whip-up a GUI app for anything you want in a few minutes with a few lines of code. Operating systems like that existed back in the 1970s and 80s, but went extinct when Windows and Macintosh took over everything, which were never designed to be programmable by end users. It sucks because there hasn't been anything like it ever since.
To see what I am talking about, check out the historical preservation projects for Lisp Machines like the InterLisp Medley desktop environment or the CADR ZMacs editor.
A better "desktop as an IDE" experience would be killer to me too. Even if it's not for everyone, I think as an accelerator for FOSS designers of Linux desktop apps it would be cool
Maybe Arcan will be a thing to experiment with.
Zero unrecoverable freeze events per month
That’s weird… I never freeze. Do you run out of memory?
No, in fact I struggle to use more than 6 out of 16gb. If I knew how to use dmesg (or any logging functionality) I would pursue it further.
Hmm! Very strange! I probably don’t have the same setup as you at all, but I’ve only had the system entirely freeze on me when I’ve run out of memory (compiling big projects that takes like 60 gigs of memory, ugh). Enabling zram completely solved this problem for me (the memory compresses super well in my use case). 16gb is a decent chunk of memory and I wouldn’t expect you to run out in normal circumstances, though. If you’re doing some heavier work on your computer it could be tight.
What kind of system are you running? I probably can’t help, but maybe somebody else would have an idea. Any clue when it freezes? Like a certain application or something?
KDE Neon, AM4 platform. GPU is 8 years old. The freeze event commonly happens when Firefox with 10 to 15 tabs open is the active application, and mouse movement is present.
Perhaps it's a swap issue?
Swap is painfully slow, but unless you have a really high swappiness setting you shouldn’t just be swapping all the time. If that is the case, though, try zram.
Same but I guess that's just what happens when you basically beta test i915 (i use fedora)
This sucks, it happens to be when my system runs out of swap and memory usage spikes
Theming, controlled one central place.
This goes for both Gnome (GTK, Qt, Gnome Shell) and Sway (GTK, Qt, Sway, Rofi, Waybar...)
Still waiting for a DE that's looks and acts like i3/sway but takes care of everything under the hood like monitor config, shortcuts for brightness, volume etc. Essentially everything Gnome or KDE does.
Apparently you can configure KWin (the WM for KDE) to act like a tiling WM. It's very customizable. Also, you can replace KWin with a TWM, such as i3. I remember doing this a long time ago, can't remember how, though.
I'm currently doing this with xfce replacing it's window manager with i3. Sadly that doesn't work on Wayland anymore because the concept of a window manager doesn't exist anymore. Your DE is a compositor now.
I think you've just described the EndeavourOS i3 installation.
But then your still using i3 + lots of custom scripts. I don't find the time anymore to maintain all this custom config. I want to switch to Wayland but I don't want to invest all that time with sway again.
The point is that you don't have to maintain any custom scripts. Everything come per-configured out of the box. You only have to tweak what you don't like. Is that any different from KDE, Gnome, XCFE or any of the "easy" DEs and their configs?
Yes, it's still X11. I want to switch to Wayland.
XFCE with polish/feature parity of Gnome (with Dash-to-panel), and Wayland support.
Wayland support. I use Cinnamon
At this rate xfce will get Wayland support before cinnamon does
MATE, too. It's genuinely getting close
Xfce already had Wayland support merged, no?
Its not complete but its getting there
I am pretty new to Linux and have mostly been using Ubuntu. The few times I have read about Wayland, it was mostly Ubuntu users blamimg it for things not working. Can you tell me why you are looking forward to using it?
The most basic and obvious thing is that external monitors with different DPIs than the laptop screen will finally work correctly.
It supports things like multiple screens with different DPIs and refresh rates which X11 supports badly, if they work at all.
Wayland still has some use cases that the devs are chasing down and Nvidia were dragged into things kicking and screaming, but it's mostly complete now.
𝔚𝔞𝔶𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡 ℑ𝔰 𝔒𝔲𝔯 𝔏𝔬𝔯𝔡 𝔄𝔫𝔡 𝔖𝔞𝔳𝔦𝔬𝔯 𝔄𝔫𝔡 ℑ𝔱𝔰 ℭ𝔬𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔚𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔐𝔞𝔨𝔢 𝔈𝔳𝔢𝔯𝔶𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔄𝔩𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱
Here's the basic rundown: Most if not all desktop environments for Linux have used a component called X11, which is the window manager. X11 is exceptionally old; it's been around since the 1980's. Computer display technology - and what we expect computer displays to do - has changed drastically since X11's creation. X11 is old and busted, there's stuff it just outright can't do that we're beginning to expect computers to do. But, because it has been around for so long, a lot of software is written with X11 in mind, sometimes software that isn't actively developed anymore.
If X11 is old and busted, Wayland is the new hotness. Wayland has been in development for approximately ten years now; when I started getting into Linux in early 2014 I heard whispers that there were a couple projects working to replace X11, Canonical was working on their thing, Mir, and there's this other thing called Wayland.
Wayland is actually out and in service, and it can do some cool things, but also it breaks a lot of things, especially for users of Nvidia GPUs if my understanding is correct. We're still not at a point where we can kick X11 in the head and standardize the whole Linux world on Wayland yet.
Cinnamon - Mint's signature DE - hasn't even begun to try to switch over to Wayland. I'm a Cinnamon user, I'm extremely still using X11, I don't even know if I've ever run Wayland on my current hardware, so I don't have much practical experience with it.
Personally, I'd like to use Gamescope for my games. In addition to super low latency it has a number of nice features like being able to force games into borderless fullscreen and therefore be easily minimized, being able to use FSR to upscale any game, setting a framerate limiter, etc
It's modern and faster, has more features, and supports X11 apps. If your hardware is friendly with it, it's pretty much a straight upgrade. Problem is not all hardware supports is well.
Wayland being a true improvement over X, with things like Barrier working and having a true session lock instead of just drawing over everything.
Actual proper touch support, which includes a decent built-in keyboard (looking at you KDE...).
I love 2-in-1's, but I do wish touch support would go all the way. It's like... 70-80% there, with Gnome having a good keyboard and KDE having the better touch support overall. But it just needs to go the final stretch to make it a good experience.
Completely agree. Like you, I found Plasma to be a much better DE with a touchscreen than GNOME (ironic, isn't it?).
maliit-keyboard is not bad even now (responsive, fast and beautiful). But there are still problems with the fact that it does not work everywhere (some sites, Signal Flatpak).
As a Gnome user, a expansion of that background apps think that properly replaces Appindicators!
This is going to my wallpaper collection
I don't understand. The penguin is wearing some kind of goggles?
Oh got it. I can attempt to fix it! I think I just have to scale the logo and change the lighting a bit.
https://imgur.com/a/V2pj9r0 https://imgur.com/a/ko5ZOcd
Thanks you're doing god's work
Well to wayland work with nvidia
KDE with GNOME design or GNOME with KDE functionality.
Consistency between all elements, apps and other things.
Heh, I actually really like the way you put that.
To be fair, though, KDE is pretty unified. Not as unified as it could be (or gnome), but it's close.
Dunno, KDE Plasma has it all. I would not mind some design improvements, but that is what Plasma 6 will bring. I just need to wait :)
As a new linux user, I would like KDE to fix their trackpad gestures because they suck. Please copy Windows or macOS. And I want fractional scaling in GNOME without everything looking blurry.
Doesn't Gnome 45 have improved scaling (haven't tried it yet)?
Idk, it wasn't there on Fedora 39.
All the Wayland stuff related to gaming in GNOME.
Tabbed windows like Haiku has. I love that feature so much but I've only ever seen it on tiling WMs on Linux
I think the Forge extension for GNOME has that feature
KDE has this.
I think it had at one point and was removed.
I'm looking at it right now.
Does it? I've never been able to find it
In Dolphin, right-click and then choose "Open in New Tab".
They mean being able to group several windows together as tabs, rather than tabs implemented in specific applications.
What would that look like?
Just like a bunch of windows stacked on top of each other that move and resize together with tabs in the title bar to switch between them
Here's Haiku's explanation (this also covers the tile feature which I had forgotten about but is also super useful): https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/gui.html#stack-tile
Just install it and not have to care about anything system related. Just keep out of my way and let me do what I need to do. Linux, Windows, MacOS, the operating system should not be an end, but a mean.
If you need to update, just do it and don't bother me. I plug something, just show it to me. Something is proprietary? I don't care, just want it to work...
Better trackpad support on KDE on Wayland. I use multi-finger gestures all the time on my MacBook, and my System76 laptop supports them on Windows, but the only gesture that works on Linux is two-finger scrolling.
Working Screensharing from first boot lmao
a better on screen keyboard for gnome
What is wrong with it? (I have no clue, never used it)
its very small and the backspace deletes every second character for some reason
I'm on a tiling WM. If I want a specific feature, I make it happen.
Ability to run Android apps.
Configurable touchpad gestures on Plasma. And a non-nonsense gesture to open the overview effect (waiting for Plasma 6, already done :)
Why's there an AI image attached to this question?
Well this isn't a DE thing but I would like good ray tracing and the new frame gen support for my AMD GPU.
In KDE, proper secrets handling.
Oh, I like these topics and was until recently frustrated because kwallet didn't implement secret service, but nowadays it does so most things should be working correctly.
I've recently been trying to change my usages to use keepass, so I've been disabling kwallet, so, what are your current problems with kwallet?
Maybe I should take a look once again then.
That was something that frustrated me a lot back in the days as I had to constantly log in Minecraft launcher each time I wanted to play, same with XIVLauncher, and some other games I forgot about.
Ability to pin applications to the taskbar depending on which virtual desktop/workspace you are in. For example, I'd like a coding desktop that just has an ide, browser, and terminal.
Desktop per monitor.
Explain
I think it's a feature of some tilling window managers that allow to put each virtual desktop assigned to each different monitors. So instead of the normal thing where when connecting an external monitor it extends the area of the virtual desktop, you could have the virtual 1 on the laptop monitor and the external with the desktop 2, so you could easily switch desktops that could have different windows, for example changing laptop monitor to virtual desktop 3 and keep external monitor with desktop 2.
I've never used it, but after hearing about this for the first time some time ago it made so much fucking sense compared to the chaotic way that normal window managers behave that I really want to experiment with it.
Assuming that I'm describing this correctly.
Yeah - this is what I meant. One virtual desktop per physical monitor.
I used to have it on a forked version of Openbox, but then I lost the binary and it doesn't compile anymore. If just makes much more sense to me and makes window management just a little easier. Especially when apps get confused about which monitor they're supposed to start on or try to be on both in an unhelpful way.
Thats the reasson i use hyprland at work Gnome, cinnemon and kde are really nice but monitor independent virtuall desktops is a must for me
Trackpad gestures, KDE (like 3 finger swipes customisation). THEM TO STOP MOVING AROUND THE SETTINGS.
You can install touchegg to customise touchpad gestures, I learnt it because I also needed it!
The ability to easily resize scrollbars, KDE.
We had them right for so long.
I'm just mostly waiting for Plasma 6 so I can use all the Wayland goodies it comes with.
Another thing I'm looking forward to is Wine-Wayland to be ready.
Better support for gaming laptops with both igpu and dedicated gpus like in windows so that I can stop having to reboot when I want to go from portable mode to gaming mode
Idk about amd but I do know Nvidia has Optimus on Linux that works as it should, maybe your talking about a laptop with a mux switch? Which you have to reboot no matter what when seitching
Working and well-integrated "run this on that rendering GPU", with unused GPUs being switched off (laptop use case).
I want to be able to see true integration between Apps and the WM. I saw a lot of good stuff with the way that Instant Messengers, Downloaders and IRC clients and various accounts could be made part of the normal interface. Now everything is web apps, or worse, Web Desktop Apps, which is also a big huge Electron apps that are more Isolated from each other than ever.
The only things apps share today are notifications, and I could definitely have less of those.
Gnome mobile shell
Not a DE, but I'm really waiting for tearing on sway so I can play games without a second tty 🥲
Cinnamon has this but I wish KDE had it. The ability to right click an application in the task bar and have the option to "move to other monitor."
Desktop as a service. With the latest feature being worked where apps can be handed off to another compositor, I want the next stage where my compositor and desktop can be swapped with my intervention or notice. Wanna do redundancy? Running the backup live as a hot swap. Wanna do live updates with no interruption? Start the next compositor, try and loads the apps, if nothing breaks, swap the user, if the user doesn't hit the notification to revert kill the last session.
Add in better remote compositor support and it can get really cool. Allowing for a distributed DE across your devices. Making high availability more possible as well, but that might actually be overkill.
read "as a service" and was immediately turned off tbh.
edit: as in that phrase immediately conjures up thoughts of subscriptions. Might want to call it something more appealing
I wasn't sure what to call it either. I'm not a subscription fan either...
That's actually on the way with Plasma 6...
Sliding Tiling Window Management akin to PaperWM for Gnome.
I am very excited for Pop OS to get the new Cosmic desktop. Not really a specific feature but an entirely new DE that is quite different from the others and built from the ground up in Rust. Hopefully the first version won't be totally broken and full of bugs!
GNOME desktop icons that aren't an extension that isn't as good as something native.
Couldn't you just use the overview?
There's not much I'm "dying" for in Cinnamon; it's very complete.
I wouldn't mind if the Nemo Actions system got a GUI editor. I think it's such a little known feature...if you go to ~/local/share/nemo/actions, you can add config files that can add items to the right click context menu, including but not limited to shell scripts. I have a few basic ImageMagick scripts that allow me to do things like edit images or convert them from one file format to another just by right clicking a file.
Wayland on Cinnamon would be great
Let's hope they can pull it off soon, XFCE really surprised me with the speed at which they transition but it's a huge project for any DE and we are slowly getting to a point where it's actually neccecary!
I trust Clem and his team to roll it out when it's genuinely ready for prime time.
GNOME mouse navigation + I3/Sway keyboard navigation.
Literally just button remapping support for my MX Ergo.
And for the fool who always comes into these threads to tell me again that I must not have tried in several years, I tried last month. Talked to the Solaar dev, tried to reach out to Logitech, literally nothing to be done.
XFCE, press f4 to open a terminal pane at the bottom of the file manager, like in KDE.
OMG I can do that? Yes I can do that!
I keep discovering these things about Dolphin, like remote filesystems through SSH using "fish://" and now F4.
KDE is full of little things like this, it is great when it works :)
I mean... you can already open a terminal to the current directory. But I'm not sure why I would want the terminal to be opened inside the file manager?
Sometimes I just need to type one or two quick commands, maybe at the current path. I don't think this is necessarily to do a lot of work, it's just to give some more flexibility. I can see myself tapping F4, typing "chown blabla something", tapping F4 again, or similar because it's quick and easy.
Nothing wrong in having options that some might find useful sometimes. As long as it doesn't bother those who don't use it.
It's like Yakuake but with the added benefit of being in the current directory.
Why would you want it outside the file manager? Why spawn a separate window if it isn't necessary?
Are you paying by the window in KDE or something?
It's the same reason why tabs in a web browser are convenient. Why do you need tabs? Are you paying by the window?
They're the same kind of tab; not a completely different application. Should we also listen to music in Dolphin? Watching video in Dolphin? Edit files in Dolphin? Should we make Dolphin the only app on the system and do everything in it?
Typically, when I open a terminal I want a normal size one, so I can see file listings, scrolling data etc. In my case I would say 99 times out of 100 I want a regular terminal rather than a small one at the bottom.
I mean, yeah. I use Krusader, and the reason why I use it instead of Dolphin is because Dolphin doesn't give me an easy way to edit files and view images. In Krusader, "Edit" is F4 and "View" is F3. (It does open a new window, though.)
Music and video files are easy. Previews, baby! Previews are very convenient. I want to make sure that I'm about to open the correct file. Or I'm trying to find a specific file, and the file names aren't making it obvious. And so on. Now, this isn't something that I've felt the need for, but it's easy to see use cases for it.
I would say that if something is going to take me only a minute or two to do (or less), then it's more convenient to do it from the file manager than to open a whole new program. Technically, Krusader is using kate, etc. under the hood to do all of that stuff, but it's through the Krusader interface.
In your case, sure. But other users are going to have other use cases. Not everybody thinks and works the same way, so what works and makes sense for you isn't necessarily going to work and make sense for other people. That's why I like KDE so much. It's very flexible to the needs of users.
HOW? I looked all over the menus, pop up menu too.
Re. Why, it's convenient for a quick task, and reduces clutter.
Assuming you're talking about XFCE's Thunar file manager, it's either File > Terminal or Terminal in the context menu for a directory.
If you don't already have it for some reason you can add it in Edit > Configure custom actions. Create a new entry that runs your favorite terminal app and give it
%fas the parameter that will take the value of the directory you want. Please make sure to select only "Directories" in the "Appeareance conditions" tab.You can create other custom actions too, for example I use
zenity --question && shred -fu %Fto shred and remove a file after asking for confirmation.I don't have it, and the custom command doesn't seem to apprear anywhere, but thank you anyway - at least I now know it's supposed to be there and can look for fixes
Edit: i've reread your post and Appearance Conditions did the trick. Thank you!
Some kind of easy notification system and panel/dock/taskbar notification emblems. The support for stuff like that is incredibly spotty right now and is one of the final things preventing me from switching off windows.
EDIT: Have found a decent solution to this via Dash to Panel. I have been running Zorin OS for over the last month now on my main PCs!
I saw the cool feature of ChromeOS Desktop where you can save all open Window states inside a Workspace and resume them on another day again. Never used it on ChromeOS as I am not sure how but this seems easily possible soon with Plasma 6 where you can hibernate or rather store the current state of your Window.
Wayland needs stacking window managers that aren't just KDE and Gnome. I want more things like openbox. There's labwc but that's it.
And also Wayland needs more customization programs designed around stacking window managers. Waybar, yambar, and others are all only designed for tiling window managers.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Stacking
GNOME:
WMR support, I would ditch Windows in a heartbeat
I want the ability to play all my steam, gog, origin and play natively, all this in a nice shiny cool looking desktop.
bonus if they add android app support
A GUI to build these EWWidgets I suck at making. The only reason I'm using them is the fancy animations, otherwise xfce4-panel or tint2 would be fine.
wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1
Or ext-screencopy-v1 if it gets merged
In Gnome: Proper calDav integration in the gnome "online accounts" section. Smaller titlebars. Nothing else please. No dock, dash or whatever, no stupid clutter, just nice and simple like it is currently.
In DWM: Nothing needs to change, use the default setup every day on my laptop.
I already have everything. I use Sway... :)
bspwm - i do miss alt-tab from time to time.
I know there is a few sxkhd entries that sort of mimics it, but I miss something like gnome or cinnamon alt-tab
A linux vpn gui that connects to a universal api for all vpns that reports load and location to allow automatic switching for fastest VPN speeds all the times. Possibly with the ability to multiplex the packets to two or more VPN providers for better obfuscation. And with a nice GUI that has presets for popular vpns
honestly I'd just want a DE that isn't bugged and has all the basic functionalities. So far I couldn't even find one.
That's xfce.
Yeah screw Nvidia
Did you try KDE?
There were UX bugs though it's been some time so I don't remember all of them.
One of them was that when I pressed the windows key and searched for an app sometimes it just wouldn't react at all, and I had to press it multiple times or use another way to launch an application.
Also the default file manager would often hang up for no apparent reason.
The desktop widgets would change their position every single time I logged in and would even disappear.
Edit: just remembered a hilarious one that took me a lot of time to figure out what was happening. If I had my second display turned on while logging in, the visual scale would always set itself to a ridiculous value like 1% or something and everything would be too small to do anything. I had to turn off the display every time I would log in. Before this I didn't even know the PC could detect whether a display is turned on or off.
No matter what I set the scale to in display configurations, it would get fucked if I logged in with a second display turned on.
Just use the command line, I dont think youll ever find it.
Custom per-folder themes in Nemo with drag/drop templating like os/2 had. Extend to all apps, actually.
GNOME, turn off screen backlight dimming?
oh no fucking ai "art"
Driver manager like the one on windows and ability to install driver with just inf files, so I can install windows driver on Linux
for them to admit that wayland is just not ready. Get feature parity first, then switch.
X is not ready. I am running X and it doesn't do vsync properly on the desktop or browser