I’m not proposing anything here, I’m curious what you all think of the future.

What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?

I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.

A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it’s now your desktop computer. That’s one vision. ChromeOS has its “everything is in the cloud” vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it’s free software.

If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?

  • bitwolf
    37•1 year ago

    Steam Deck gets more popular.

    Steam console released with improved multi user experience and VR.

    PlayStation sales drop in growth.

    Steam OS released, PCs can use it with generic kernels.

    Gaming PC manufacturers offer steam OS as a preinstalled.

    PC manufacturers start to offer popular distros preinstalled.

    System 76 puts their in house laptops into Best Buy shelves.

    Adobe and Office no longer stuck on Windows and are distributed as wasm applications.

    • @djtech
      9•1 year ago

      I can see, in some rare-but-actually-possible conditions, all of those elements happen, but not the last one.

      Why would Adobe and Microsoft release software for WebAssembly/Web environments, when Microsoft wants to keep you locked in their shitty environment?

      What I could see is that the FOSS alternatives keep getting updated (some of them, like LibreOffice, are full alternatives to close-source software and they have been like that for years), the user population expands (expecially with Adobe and MS wanting to put subscriptions everywhere) and using FOSS software as alternatives for Office, Premiere, PhotoShop, … becomes the norm.

      • bitwolf
        2•1 year ago

        I actually believe Adobe has already started to. Iirc that’s what powers the web version of Photoshop.

        MS with Office is purely speculation. But I believe wasm will be very disruptive once we have a stable abi and I’m sure MS will want to make their own superset of that stable abi to sell Azure integrations.

        This could likely also be used to make a more fully featured online office suite. If the others did come true. There could be some pressure to make office available if it put enough of a dent into Wundows market share.

        • @djtech
          3•1 year ago

          The azure speculation might be true, but Office? Naaahh…