An honest look at the state of the Linux desktop going into 2024

so 2023 is almost over and I think it's time to look at how far our system of choice has come because it was a year full of progress and Improvement and it was a year which paved the way for an even better 2024 although for now we're still in the middle of the road situation where everything is aligning but nothing is completely There Yet now personally I published more than 120 videos plus about 50 episodes of the Linux and open source News podcast and about the same number of the patron cast but who cares what matters is the sort of weird situation we're stuck in at the end of 2023 so buckle up we're going to look at everything that has progressed during the year what we can look forward to in 2024 and the major challenges and problems we'll still have to face plus the segue to our awesome sponsor this video is sponsored by proton VPN you probably already know about proton mail one of the most secure and private email services out there but they also have their VPN service which is 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by clicking the link in the description below or they also have paid plans for more features and even more security so yeah click the link in the description to get started with protonvpn so first we've had a lot of efforts focused on trying to unify our various desktops and make them work better together Linux always had a problem of Standards things didn't always work together well preferences were not followed between desktops and apps and applications were packaged in tons of different formats with big discrepancies in terms of what features they actually support and I'll be blunt things are still a mess our desktops can still feel very disjointed at times especially when you mix and match gnome and KY applications things are improving but they're still a mess now unified theming between desktops is pretty much abandoned as a thing that should be pursued gnome moved towards liit V and almost no dist forces another theme onto every app you install that uses Liber V even Fedora decided not to theme cute apps inside of gnome anymore but we're also seeing an accent color standard emerge meaning that you'll be able to set an accent color in your desktop and have apps follow that setting no the toolkit it uses plasma already implements it Elementary OS Budgy cinnamon and even the upcoming Cosmic desktop all follow it gnome has plenty of merge requests open to implement it as well although it's not confirmed yet and it might seem like a small thing but having a preference you set at your desktop or Os level and that is followed by every single app in terms of the accent color that it uses does a lot to unify and bring together every app that you use now add that to the dark mode preference that is now followed by most desktops and apps and we're seeing a push for more consistency across desktops and that's also complemented by the work being done on Portals portals are these little tidbits of software that let sandboxed apps like flatbacks and snaps interact with your system in a secure way without needing you to fiddle too much with permissions and when they're implemented by desktops and apps they give you even more standardization and better integration for example if it uses the file Chooser portal an app designed for a specific desktop or toolkit or an app that's cross platform can display the right file picker for your chosen desktop instead of forcing The Gnome one or the KDE one with portals for settings screenshots remote desktops printing sending email creating shortcuts or transferring files there's now a solid abstraction layer between your desktop and the apps it runs which means that as more and more apps and desktops use these portals you'll see the correct interface all the time the correct settings panel open it will be better standardized and everything will work as it's supposed to and so the desktop will feel more cohesive but for now we are not there yet things are progressing and they're almost done but a lot of smaller desktops apart from gnome and KDE basically do not follow all of these and a lot of apps also haven't implemented them either so we're getting there but at the end of 202 three it's still kind of messy now packaging formats at the end of 2023 they're in a bad State not in terms of features because that's moving forwards pretty nicely but in terms of having one clear winner or option Linux packaging has never been Messier not only do we still have all the packaging formats of old like RPM Deb and all the others but we also now have flat pack app images and snaps and you can add NY packages and a few other on top of that and this situation is really starting to drag these recent packaging formats flat packs snaps and app Images were supposed to unify things and make it easier for users and for developers but in the end they're only easier for certain developers and for users they added a lot of confusion with missing features in certain versions of the apps and certain versions working better than others it's a mess as neither flatback nor snap are fully ready for 100% of some stuff simply cannot be packaged using these and they still have drawbacks that some users do not want to deal with like storage space or missing features and we're seeing some solid progress on flathub as a platform on flatback as a format and even on open 2 snaps with plenty of performance improvements and new features being added there's still a lot of missing stuff like Native Messaging that would let many password managers work with flatbacks and snap versions of web browsers so we're not ready to transition most Linux users to one single packaging format which also means that app developers cannot just say hey you know what we want to support Linux we're going to use this because that's what everyone uses and so our packaging problems are still not solved in 2023 now the display situation is much better though X11 is now clearly abandoned wear red hat won't be using it for rail 10 Fedora is dropping it for the next version with KDE and maybe for Gnome as well plasma recommends using whand instead starting with plasma 6 and gnome has merge request to start removing support for X11 now importantly X11 still works for a lot of people that still need it for a specific use case but there's a clear signal that Wayland is where we're going and work on that has been Stellar in 2023 it got support for remote desktops screen sharing with X whan apps was pretty much fixed with X whan Video Bridge and all major desktops improve their Wayland sessions by leaps and bounce although we will still need to wait for 2024 for a really good experience with plasma 6 mostly all desktops now have plans for whan including lxq cinnamon and xfc Cosmic will be Wayland only Elementary OS has an experimental session already and budgie will move to Wayland for Budgy 11 so everyone is in agreement now there still remained a few issues with whan notably for Nvidia users the proprietary NVIDIA drivers have made enormous progress especially with the very latest version fixing most of the remaining annoyances with Nvidia and whan but it's still not 100% yet now added to that work on supporting HDR has moved by Leaps and Bounds and we'll see a fully working implementation in 2024 with games already being able to run using hdr on Steam OS and on KD if you use the very latest beta drivers and plasma fractional scaling is now properly implemented on Wayland as well meaning we can finally do non blurry scaling with different scaling per Monitor and different refresh rates per monitor as well now on the display side of things everything has finally coalesced with a single vision and a single goal moving forward and it's really really solid at the end of 2023 the last few Kinks and problems will be ironed out at the beginning of 2024 so all good on that front as for drivers we've seen some solid progress as well AMD now has solid drivers on launch day for their new gpus Intel has finished their new XE driver that's now ready to be merged in the Linux kernel Arc gpus are now well supported and NVIDIA drivers have progressed immensely in terms of whand support screen tearing and general Linux support it is not a perfect experience if you don't have an RTX card though as Nvidia unfortunately seems to have pretty much abandoned the G GTX line of gpus with their Linux drivers we're also seeing very strong efforts for open- Source NVIDIA drivers with the newvo drivers finally being able to deliver decent performance thanks to supporting the GSP firmware and being able to change the GPU clock speed on recent Nvidia gpus plus the nvk Vulcan drivers are being added to Mesa and they're fully Vulcan 1.0 compliant Nvidia even dropped some open- source code for their own drivers although this is far from being usable right now in terms of graphic drivers we're in a really really good place in 2023 probably the best we've ever been on Linux and with the open- source Nvidia stack we'll probably see a first fully integrated version in 2024 although performance will probably not be good enough but I would expect 2025 to be the year where some dros start not offering the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and just rely on the open source stack as per firmware the Linux firmware vendor system or lvfs has also seen broad adoption letting you apply firmware updates on the Fly and easily this already supplied 100 million firmware updates and Google is even pushing manufacturers to support that for their own Linux based chromeos and we still have some driver issues mostly for fingerprint readers because those are not well supported on Linux and some USB Bluetooth or Wi-Fi dongles as well but generally the hardware support on Linux nowadays is really really good probably the best it's ever been it's very rare to end up on a piece of Hardware that doesn't support Linux at all now gaming has been incredible in 2023 not only did Linux pass Mac os's market share for steam but we've seen great support for the steam deck which in turn means great support for Linux and sure it's all driven by proton and wine it's not native Linux sports but my opinion is is that it doesn't matter if you can click install and then play and Run the game with a performance on the level that you'd expect things are good the steam deck has been so popular that it kickstarted a full category of handhelds and the steam deck is arguably the best and most successful of them right now with the most controller friendly interface compared to windows-based handhelds it even got a sequel in the form of the OLED steam deck non steam gaming has also progressed immensely with heroic becoming a really fantastic launcher for Gog and epic games really plug andplay and lutrus is still handling most of the rest pretty well and we gain support for R tracing for HDR for dlss for FSR meaning that we can play with all the nice tools that everyone else has access to we still have the major issue of some anti-che not working or certain game developers not wanting to enable antiche support for Linux or the steam deck but I'm pretty sure that as we're seeing these games slowly drop off in popularity and new games coming that do tend to support Linux and the steam deck this problem will solve itself now for app support I'd say we haven't seen many improvements in 2023 now sure our own open-source apps have progressed this year but The Usual Suspects are still missing that would let a lot more people move to Linux still no Microsoft Office still know Adobe apps a lot of content creation software or CAD software are still missing with no indication that it will change we are seeing a push from Adobe to bring at least Photoshop to the web which might mean Linux will get at least some form of that in the future but that's not much we've seen Studio 1 come to Linux a popular digital audio workstation but that's about it I'd say the only way we can improve this is by gaining market share on the desktop reaching 5 to 10% would probably be enough to get good support from many professional apps but we are far from that and we would also have to solve our whan migration because we need one single system for apps to support we need to solve all our little driver problems because if Nvidia or opencl or Cuda aren't well supported that's also a problem for certain professional apps and we would also need to solve our packaging problems because with tens of thousands of ways to package an app for many disos developers just don't want to expand the time so I'm not seeing this progress much further in 2024 either so the Linux desktop is in a weird place at the end of 2023 we finally know where we want to go which is Wayland And probably Sandbox Apps and portals but while the transition to Wayland and all the drivers is pretty much on the rails and it's really almost done for all major desktops all the packaging stuff the portal stuff the sandboxing stuff it's not catching up as fast or as well as it should should which means that there's still one big missing piece which is how do you distribute an app on Linux and at the end of 2023 we still have not solved that problem and there are some other challenges coming as well the big one I can see is AI integration in the desktop and the apps it's a move Microsoft is making with Windows 12 they're adding AI powered search and automations throughout the desktop this is only possible because first Microsoft has tons of data on their users because Windows is basically spyware and second because they have a big infrastructure that lets them combine Cloud powered Ai and locally run AI now whether we should chase that Trend or not that's for you to decide but what's for certain is that after four five or six years where users have context sensitive search that lets them find any file whether they remember the name the location who sent it or the app doesn't matter they can find it if they have the right apps opening at the right time or one click button that automates 30 or 40 minutes of work thanks to AI then they're never going back to apps and os's that don't have that now we'll have to see if AI is truly a transformative technology or not after all people were just as excited with AI assistance and from what I can see no one really cares about those anymore and no one really uses them for anything else than a reminder or timer in any case the Linux desktop has progressed a lot in 2023 but 2024 looks like it will be the year when things really come together not the year of the Linux desktop because that's nonsense but at least the year where there's a unified Vision a coherence a standardization of things maybe not in every area but at least offering a very solid stable experience for most users with a common path for most dros we will still have a lot of work to do but at least we'll be in a really good place to get that work done just like our sponsor is a really good place to get yourself a 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really really solid it's all I use these days to run this Channel and to gain my steam o console is a tuxedo PC so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications or to write a comment and if you didn't like the video well you can always dislike it and tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to help me make more of these videos and keep doing that as a day job there are plenty of links in the description as well for Libra pay PayPal patreon YouTube memberships you know how this works so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one [Music] bye

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 144,730

Keywords: linux, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, opensource, linux tips, distro, linux for beginners 2023, linux tutorial 2023, linux vs windows

Id: usvgAR9qLVI

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023