Big things are coming to Linux in 2024, but don't expect too much...

I already looked at the state of Linux as a desktop at the end of 2023 and I felt it was on a solid path but still in a messy state in some crucial areas like packaging formats but since we're now in 2024 I felt it was cool to look at what I think will happen during this year to the Linux desktop and open source software in general obviously these are all predictions so feel free to let me know in the comments if you think I'm wrong if you think I'm right or if you have other areas that you think I've missed and of course we can't begin without something that is sure to happen in 2024 and that's the segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace and chances are you all know what Squarespace is but if you don't just know that they're your all-in-one solution to create and run your own website Squarespace has all the tools you need to start your website improve it even without knowing anything about code they have pre-made layouts that you can customize heavily in terms of the colors of block placement just by drag and drop it's really easy to use you can create all your pages but you also have plenty of modules like anything you need to run a store complete with online payment you have a members only area you have a logo creator you can even buy your own domain name that you will need to have a serious website straight from Squarespace so they're your all-in-one platform to you create and run that website so to get started with Squarespace just click the link in the description or head over to squarespace.com the Linux experiment and you'll get 10% off your first website okay so my first prediction will not surprise anyone I think x.org is going to be even more deprecated than it already is I'm not saying every Dro will drop X11 during 2024 because that's not going to happen but I am expecting way more distributions and desktops to announce in 2024 that x.org won't be a supported platform anymore in 2025 or at the very least it won't be the default session gnome has already started making that clear plasma gave a lot of signals that X11 wasn't where they would focus their efforts Linux Mint already said that they expect 2025 to see a fully working Wayland session for them but G11 will abandon X11 altogether xfc has already started their migration and Elementary OS 8 will use wh on top of that red hat Enterprise Linux will drop X11 entirely and Fedora KDE will drop it as well with Fedora 40 in April or May with the gnome Edition wondering if they should do the same too so I would be surprised if during 2024 obuntu didn't announce that starting in 2025 x.org is gone from auntu and with that we should see a bunch of other we well liked and ran distributions follow suit which will basically spell the end of X11 for most people starting in 2025 and if you think that it is way too soon just remember that this would leave an entire year to fix the few remaining problems in the apps that don't support Wayland well or in the Wayland protocol itself with the native Wayland support in wine that landed at the end of 2023 we can expect proton and Linux gaming to work natively without X whand and with chromium getting Hardware acceleration on Wayland as well that's two big hurdles gone the rest will absolutely be solved in 2024 since Red Hat will want to make sure they can provide their customers with the same quality they had when they used X1 in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 so for me in 2024 X11 is still going to be there and probably the default in a lot of places but we should see a lot of announcements that starting in 2025 x.org will get get the boot now the second thing I think we will see is a fully open- Source tack for NVIDIA being available for Linux users with the Linux kernel 6.7 bringing support for the GSP firmware which lets Nvidia gpus be relocked by the open source noo drivers and with nvk the Vulcan driver now part of Mesa and providing decent performance already I would say 2024 will be the year where Nvidia users can finally enjoy a good experience on Linux without anything extra to install at least on distros that aren't super stable or LS I would expect for example Fedora 40 in April or May to ship with the Linux kernel 6.7 and with the latest Mesa drivers meaning that by default for NVIDIA users it's going to be nvo plus nvk if your Hardware is supported the performance will probably not be there yet but it's going to happen and since the brunt of the work on nvk in 2024 will be focused on supporting more Vulcan extensions and on improving performance I would say that at the end of 2024 the tradeoff will be worth it and sure I would estimate you'll still be 15 to 20% slower at the end of the year than with the proprietary drivers but you will have perfect wellon support nothing to install no risk of your drivers breaking after a cural update and no proprietary drivers on your system for a lot of people I think it will be worth it although for comput tasks and stuff related to open CL and Cuda I would expect you will still need the proprietary NVIDIA drivers but on that note Nvidia seems to have realized that they do need to improve those and with the latest releases of their proprietary drivers it really shows that they do want to support Wayland xwayland and more recent stuff so hopefully these drivers will at least be good now in terms of market share we've seen some Healthy Growth in 2023 ending the year on a potentially anomalous 3.8% it's the highest the Linux desktop has ever been added to Chrome OS we generally land at about 7% market share and yes adding chrom OS in there makes sense since it's getting closer and closer to a regular Linux drro in terms of architecture just with a proprietary desktop on top of it in 2024 I would expect this trend to continue people don't seem to enjoy Windows 11 that much and they already did not enjoy Windows 10 all that much either and with Microsoft cramming more and more ads inside of their OS and desktop and potentially moving to a subscription based model for Windows 12 I would expect more people to give Linux a go especially since Linux as a desktop is now way more capable than it ever was gaming on Linux is absolutely a thing no doubt about it and for general purpose Computing like using a web browser an email client and an office suite Delux has been doing that for 10 years perfectly fine so there's no reason people trying out Linux wouldn't stick with it at least some of them we also have efforts like the steam deck that while gaming focused also introduced some people to a Linux desktop with the desktop mode although again it is probably seeing anecdotal Usage Now All In All I don't think the Linux desktop will jump to 8 or 10% market share in 20124 but I would be surprised if it didn't hit 5 or 6% before the end of the year with probably something around 10% if we add Chrome OS to that and since we mentioned gaming Linux also saw a solid progression over 2022 and 2023 mostly thanks to valve proton and the steam deck we're now above Mac OS in terms of gaming market share at least if the steam survey is an accurate representation of that but we're at about 2% which is still laughably small still we can play about 79% of the top up 1,000 Steam games in comfortable conditions which I would Define as being platinum or gold status on proton DB this percentage Rises to 90% if we include titles rated silver but these can have some sizable issues and require some work so I wouldn't count them 70% of the top 10 games are also playable under the same criteria so about 34 of the most played games on Steam are available and playable in one click on Linux and things will get even better than that with the steam deck there are still some holdouts mostly due to anti-che fortnite or destiny 2 for example refuse to support Linux for mysterious reason since it's a one-click operation in both cases and League of Legends is moving to a Cel level anti-che which will prevent Linux Gamers from accessing the game altogether it's the same anti-che valerant uses then again one might say that the Linux Community is toxic enough as it is and we don't need need to add these gaming communities on top of that maybe still no game retains popularity forever and so these games at some point will drop off and the newer ones will absolutely support the steam deck if it keeps growing so this is a temporary hold out but the end result is that in 2024 a lot of popular games will still not run on Linux or on the steam deck now I would also expect 2024 to see a standalone release of Steam OS for any computer with NVIDIA drivers improving and an open- Source stack to support Nvidia I don't think there's a blocker anymore for that I don't think we'll see other manufacturers using that to create dedicated consoles or handhelds just yet but I think we'll see a downloadable ISO from valve we can also expect full HDR support on Linux in 2024 which is going to bridge a gap for higher end Gamers so to conclude on gaming I think our market share on Steam will rise I would say we will probably hit 3 or 3.5% tops but a lot of big names will still be missing in 2024 won't be the year where everyone can move to Linux for gaming now let's talk about the things I feel will stay exactly the same in 2024 starting with packaging formats sure flat packs and snaps will get better they will support more portals more apps will use these formats we might even see support for paid apps on flathub or in the Snap Store but the general situation will still be a mess with multiple packaging formats to choose from and no real unified solution for a thirdparty developer to say oh that's the Linux format 2024 won't see enough improvements to any of these formats to change the minds of people who don't like them because generally people who don't like these formats dislike them for their very concept I also don't see auntu abandoning snaps I don't see app Images Dev saying you know what we're quitting and flat pack being pushed heavily by a lot of the major players in the Linux world it's not going anywhere either this Ro packages are still needed for a lot of stuff so they're also staying so no changes here what we might see is more distributions relying on the official snap or the official flat pack package instead of packaging certain applications like what red hat is doing with lib office where they're abandoning the packaging of this app themselves they're just using the official flatback that's normal it doesn't make sense to replicate that work at all and I think we'll see more of that but that won't change the status quo same thing for what we generally call immutable distributions I don't think they will gain that much popularity in 2024 because they are often linked to using either flatback or snap or NYX packages I can't forget about NYX because if I do I will get comments again and since we're not making these formats the only choice anytime soon I don't think this group of Linux distros will conquer the general Linux desktop audience either and to be clear immutable distributions is a terrible name because they are not immutable you can change everything in them it's just a different way of changing things now we will definitely see more stuff on that front though because obuntu wants to provide a desktop on that format where everything is provided as a snap including the kernel and the drivers which has plenty of advantages when you really think about it and if more gaming focused devices come out running Linux they will definitely use image-based systems as well just like valve and the steam deck and Steam OS so I don't think we'll see a shift towards those immutable distributions in 2024 they'll be refined they will get better but the general Linux desktop user is not moving to them as per app support that's another area where I feel we are not going to see much progress and I'm talking big name apps like office the Adobe suite AutoCAD and the like even if my predictions for Linux market share come true the potential revenue from supporting Linux is still low and will still be low compared to the effort of porting the app finding a packaging format that allows you to do everything you want and then supporting that version I don't expect 2024 to be the year where we have feature complete web-based versions of adobe's apps or of Microsoft Office and while we have seen stuff coming to Linux in 2023 like Studio 1 that's just one app and it's pretty much an experimental beta with plenty of missing features I mean if companies like proton don't find it easy enough to use flatpack to bring something like Proton Drive on Linux even though there's a pretty giant overlap between Linux users and privacy Enthusiast I don't think Microsoft or adobe are going to do it either now you will notice I have been pretty conservative in these predictions and that's because Linux as a desktop is in a state of flux these days we know where we're going but we're having a hard time embarking everyone on that boat which slows things down pipewire portals and Wayland are undeniably the new Linux desktop platform maybe with flat packs on top but not everyone is willing to accept that because it's easy to get hung up on what's currently missing and it's easy to miss the bigger picture of it is software and those problems will get fixed and so I think that what we will see in 2024 is finally moving all the pieces together to move towards this new more stable better integrated easier to support future that the Linux desktop is transitioning towards this is going to be the major change but at the end of 2024 we will still not be there yet I would expect all of this to gel together probably in 2025 with what I think will happen which is the abandonment of the X server by Major desktop disos which will probably help some people move forwards and will probably make some people stop using Linux altogether because they won't find a Dro that still has the X server and works well for them so let me know what you think about all of these do you think I'm right do you think I'm wrong did I miss any important topic in there let me know down in the comments and in the meantime I'll let you know about our sponsor it's tuxi computers they make laptops desktops and no that run Linux out of the box they picked all the hardware specifically because it runs Linux well and in their testing if some stuff didn't quite work out they submit patches Upstream so everyone can benefit from these fixes so you can buy them with a selection of pre-installed dros or you can just slap your own in there and if it's relatively modern it's going to run just fine so all their laptops can be opened repaired and upgraded all the hardware is pretty customizable you can change most of the components you can have your own keyboard layout your own logo on the lid they have multiple colors for certain devices you can basically do exactly how you like so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux on it and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself a computer from tuxedo they're really really good and they're all I use these days for gaming and for running this channel 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 to write a comment you know what to do to make this video more popular and make YouTube recommended to everyone else and if you want to support the channel there are plenty of links in the description to do just that so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one [Music] bye [Music] h

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 128,192

Keywords: linux, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, linux tips, distro, linux for beginners 2023, linux tutorial 2023, linux vs windows, linux experiment, linux for beginners 2022, linux gaming, linux operating system, linux distros 2023, linux distros comparison, linux predictions 2024, linux desktop 2024, linux gaming 2024, linux distros 2024, linux mint 2024, linux laptop 2024, arch linux 2024, asahi linux 2024, linux ubuntu 2024

Id: msiKpFV8HNY

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024