What are some exciting projects that you follow and hope to see progress on?
I’ll start!
- Wayland greeter on SDDM
- rust support on gcc
- more Wayland adoption (especially VSCodium & Firefox forks)
- Reproducible Build
- ReactOS
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This one is really close!
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More nixOS development. It’s the reproducible builds on the OS scale, one configuration file that will always generate exactly the same system when run, and you can update and rebuild from that file without restarting the system in most cases. This should make triangulating and fixing distro issues much easier, as well as making a distro easier to maintain from the user side.
Wait, it’s like docker, but for entire OS with packages, configuration and stuff like that?
Yes, and every package specifically defines the exact version of its libraries that it needs and the system symlinks everything together package by package, so there’s no chance than an update will break something further upstream. The configuration file also controls things like MySQL configuration and user permissions so you can get literally the exact same system. I think even docker doesn’t control for library versions with its regular configuration.
EDIT: And it keeps older versions of the configuration file and its symlink arrangement around, so if something goes wrong, you can reboot the machine and select an older version from the bootloader.
Definitely docker (well, let’s say containers) control the library version, if you didn’t build the image specifically not to do that (e.g. fetching dependencies at runtime, which is generally a bad practice and not the default).
However, at build time if you use things like “apt install …” You will get different versions depending on when you build the image, but once the image is built, you have always the same software inside. Obviously it is very different from nix as they serve very different purposes (one day I will find the motivation to switch to nixOS!).
Wow, that’s great! I’m not sure if I need those features, but I’ll check NixOS out, thanks
Better than Docker in terms of reproducibility. While Docker containers are usually more or less reproducible, Docker images are not as the Dockerfiles depend on lots of external state such as the repositories of the distro used as a base image. This is also partially true for NixOS, but it’s far more realistic to pin a version of nixpkgs (the Nix(OS) repository) than do the same with Debian repositories. The new Flake format even provides a way to pin nixpkgs by default.
NVK drivers for nvidia GPUs
- I don’t realistically expect to see any progress here but video hardware acceleration gaining first-class support in popular applications would be a nice dream. The one area Linux is complacent to be “inefficient”.
- One of the KDE devs has been working on some magic that might keep application state even after the desktop crashes.
- Chimera Linux.
Is Chimera Linux still under development? I thought that project died a while ago…
You must be confusing Chimera Linux with something else. The project had a new release over a week ago. https://chimera-linux.org/news/
Wayland on Plasma (sure, it works but still work in progress)
Lapce (like vscode but native)
Proper keyboard and screen sharing for WaylandSo many Wayland…
too many.
Helix editor, especially plugin system
With this and neovide intergration I’ll probably switch to helix.
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Wasn’t this the one originally abandoned by Mozilla and then getting picked back up by someone?
- bcachefs
- the EEVDF scheduler
Bcachefs sounds incredible.
it sucks that bcachefs cannot be run as a dkms as it cannot be run as a module (only built-in)
It is coming in 6.7, I think. What are the advantages of bcachefs over something like ext4 or btrfs?
All the advantages of btrfs + the ability to combine SSDs and HDDs in a way that maximizes speed and space.
Isn’t that what I’m already doing with standard bcache + btrfs?
I had bcache + btrfs (RAID1) before this but it was a huge waste of space because bcache had to cache two identical copies of the data in order to be effective (since BTRFS and bcache don’t communicate and BTRFS picks from a random disk); that’s half as much cache.
With Bcachefs everything is integrated so it knows to cache only one copy in RAID1 (and it doesn’t even need to hold two HDD copies, the fast/“cached” copy counts). Data is read from the fastest source and every resource is best utilized.
Nice.
So it’s kind of like RAID?
It has RAID modes and it intelligently rearranges data s.t. commonly used files are stored in a fast drive and fetched from there, whereas BTRFS will write to and read from a “random” drive regardless of its speed.
The previous solution of using btrfs raid1 + bcache (not the FS) separately was very wasteful because the cache had to store both/all copies of the data since btrfs picks a random drive to read from.
Does it provide any advantages for home users? I can see how this could be useful in enterprise settings, but does it benefit regular desktop users?
Yes, lots of storage space with redundancy and the speed advantage of an SSD. If you have enough data where a pair of reasonably priced SSDs is not enough then it is highly advantageous to combine them with (cheaper/bigger) HDDs.
Personally I would not consider a filesystem without data redundancy for my personal files, and I have enough pictures to fill some hard drives but I don’t like waiting for them to load.
I’d love to see more work on Nvidia for wayland
Oculus on Linux, but thats a slow project
I just bought a Valve Index instead. Better tracking anyways with lasers now.
Lapce
Ooh, this one is promising!
Bcachefs getting merged in the kernel
A Synergy/Barrier/Input-Leap for Wayland
Note that Input Leap will be supported on a Wayland session in GNOME 45 / Fedora 39 thanks to the new InputCapture portal and Peter Hutterer’s libei work.
Barrier seems to be dead upstream and Synergy is closed source though, so those 2 probably won’t get updated soon
Yeah I’ve been following along, just want Waylamd support for Inout Leap on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
Polonium - autotiling for KDE 5.27. Ever since KDE Plasma broke Bismuth on wayland, i’ve been running with bare Plasma. Polonium is the first project to work (mostly) as Bismuth used to, although it’s just one developer working on it as far as i understood and it still has a bunch of bugs. But really looks promising.
Also, KDE 6 (which will break everything again probably) :D
Careful, @[email protected] will call you rude. He does that. I think it’s a syndrom.
- System76 Virgo
- CosmicDE
- Wayland in general
