Submitted 11 months ago by lofenyy@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
Hey guys, I’m just an ordinary dev looking for something to work on. While messing around with my hobby projects, I couldn’t help but notice that under the surface, there are a lot of places that the libre desktop can be improved. I’d like to take on your suggestions on what I should seriously consider working on and helping out with.
Thanks for any comments and suggestions.
(For those wondering, I’m still working on my other stuff.)
Support for hearing aids
This. I have hearing aids too. I share your pain.
Most people think it’s an old-person problem, but a quarter of all hearing-aid users are under the age of 50. That’s a surprisingly large proportion of users.
Now granted, most younger hearing-aid users are such due to accidents or congenital issues, but still.
For me, it’s otosclerosis. Happens to people randomly.
But even if it was just an old-person problem, lots of old people use computers. As the population ages, people who have been using computers for their entire working lives are now 60+
This is a huge one.
Error reporting to the UI is majorly broken in situations when hardware is involved, like a failing wifi adapter or USB deive, just like in windows. Maybe a system to surface dmesg activity as notifications? Idk maybe something already does this.
A GUI option in the Settings app to limit charging to 80%, extending the life of the device.
KDE system settings → Power Management → Advanced Power Settings
Sleep battery usage.
Seriously, I don’t know what is up with Linux but it wastes so much battery during sleep. My laptop lasts 8 hours on normal, daily use, but if I put it to sleep: 24h max.
Isn’t sleep supposed to just keep the RAM powered on because that component requires power to keep state? How can “keeping the lights on” waste so much energy?
I gave up on sleep long ago. Why don’t you just hibernate? With ssds the boot is really quick.
I thought sleep would be good, but I think you’re right. At this point I might just give up on sleep.
Unfortunately, that means repartitioning my drive as I don’t have swap at all (64GB RAM) 😢
CC BY-NC 4.0
How old is your machine? Starting 10 or so years ago, but really picked up the pace is “modern standby” or S0 standby. Basically in sleep your laptop doesn’t go to sleep, it enters a “low power state” and even worse, keeps wifi on and tries to run background tasks. It’s supposed to be quick to wake from sleep but it’s not. S1 standby was incredibly fast to wake.
Literally the last thing I want my computer do do when in sleep is compute. I want it to use as little power as possible without dumping my ram.
I just use hibernation now. Fuck sleep. It was S3, but still wasting a lot of energy even though it’s supposed to be handled by hardware after the kernel hands it off.
@raldone01@lemmy.world let me to the path of light. Boot is slow, but that’s fine. Battery life is more important to me.
Hardware support, in particular:
The Arm support is there, its just not upstreamed because companies don’t like sharing
So I legit rub in to no issues on my 3 monitor setup on Linux what issues do you run into out of curiosity.
The latest updates (a few days ago) made my distro crash on the SDDM login screen (I’m using a KVM switch, I can confirm this is a KVM switch issue). I could work around it by doing autologin, but it’s disheartening that I had to do it.
ARM and RISC-V not hardware that is auto-discoverable. It’s the hardware not the software that is the problem.
Hibernation / sleep.
Hibernation straight up is not supported on many distros, and sleep is broken.
I’d also like better 2 in 1 support for things like HP devices.
Every problem I have stems from Nvidia. I can’t complain too much because it was a Christmas present from my friend and it’s a really good card but damn Nvidia drivers.
The one thing keeping my friend from switching even tho he wants to is vst plugins for his DAW. He uses both Ableton and Bitwig and Bitwig works on Linux but the plugins can be Windows only. There are projects to make them work but it turns into a mess to manage it all.
Depends on the specific plugin. I’ve been doing music production on Linux for several years now. Back then things looked a lot worse than now. Most popular bridge solution for Windows plugins on Linux is yabridge atm. The README is well worth a closer read, cause it will answer many questions on how to get even more modern plugins to display correctly (i.e. JUCE based ones).
Ye he was using yabridge but once again it becomes a mess to maintain and he just wants to make music
Buy-in from HW manufacturers, specifically related to audio production. Yes, can often hack your way into making a lot of the SW work (unsupported, of course), but HW support isn’t there. My NI Maschine is a non-starter - I might be able to hack together someway to get it to send receive basic midi, but that’s just a small part of why I own it. My audio interface might be cajoled into working, but it’s not supported and therefore not something I can really afford to invest into depending on beyond the fun of experimenting.
I also wish there was a alternative to Adobe Lightroom. Yes, I know about Darktable (it’s great), but the Adobe secret sauce is the bi-directional integration with mobile for lossless edits and catalogue management. This sort of thing is very, very hard to pull off in FOSS-land. (I’d even be happy if Adobe supported Linux.)
I have no issue with paying for functionality/services I need (I don’t want a free ride), but I wish the option was there.
So, I’m basically stuck with Windows and WSL.
Hey, I’m actually really big into audio development at the moment. I think you might appreciate this video.
Consistent keyboard shortcuts across apps and WMs, and a common config syntax and file location for them so customizations are easy to share and migrate between apps and WMs.
I know absolutely jack about Linux, but as someone with a steam deck, eGPU support would be pretty spiffy. Not sure how possible that actually is though.
eGPUs are supported on linux, but every device needs to have thunderbolt support, Steam Deck doesn’t have thunderbolt, so there’s nothing software can do. Maybe Steam Deck 2 will have it.
You can have an “external” GPU if your willing to give up your NVMe storage
Multiple workspaces per monitor, like OSX has. Currently it's multiple monitors per workspace. So, switching workspaces switches all monitors instead of just the active one. Both Gnome and KDE get this wrong. Only esoteric WMs like i3 and awesome get it right, but they are not suitable for most people.
Sorry, but what is the use case for workspaces?
Maybe I’m just a crusty old user (working with computers since 1982), but I prefer everything immediately visible and accessible all the time. I just don’t understand what the difference is between minimizing a program and shoving it onto a completely different workspace.
If anything, IMO it just generates needless confusion as I thrash trying to figure out why I cannot find a certain program that’s supposed to be up and running.
I have far too many windows open to display everything at once, even with my 3 widescreen monitors (the curse of being a developer). I usually need about 4-5 workspaces to organise everything. Sometimes more. Often there are also multiple windows arranged on a single screen (I use tiling, so windows never overlap). I know by heart which application is on what workspace and screen (because it's always the same). Because each workspace has a hotkey (Win + a numbered key) I can instantly pull up any window that I need, without searching for it.
I like to set up workspaces for general categories of software. For example, I tend to have a “work” workspace and a “communcation” workspace. I’ll have my IDE, a terminal window, my notes, a web browser etc. open across my two monitors in one workspace, and then email, Slack, Signal etc. open in another.
They all stay open all the time, and stay where I put them on screen, no minimizing. I nearly never look down at the window list to process if an app is open. If I hear a message arrive notification, I don’t really have to think about it, my hands just go to the hotkey, and my eyes look where the window should be.
Tiling everything on one workspace, even with two monitors doesn’t leave enough from for doing much work, and minimizing things means you have to consciously process “what app was that? What does the logo look like? Move mouse to, click there, where’d it open? Ah.”
Wayland Support for legacy nvidia grafic cards like GeForce 9600m GT (One should be allowed to dream, lol)
Okular (a rather good PDF viewer) can’t save sessions (open files & positions) in non-KDE environments.
The issue has been open since 2018: bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397463 .
There’s some partial merge request but it’s been dead for a year.
Tis gonna be an unpopular one, but CPU utilization for high core count CPUs. Could reaaally use that for my work.
Improve pipewire/pulseaudio to be more user friendly - to play different sound on both my tv and computer I have to use pipewire, set the audio device to pro mode, and then scroll through the 10 new devices listed to guess which 2 I need, with their incredibly unhelpful names.
And then, if I want loudness equalization because I have problems hearing voices, I have to run easy effects after looking up a guide for installing someone’s preset that does an ok job compared to the windows version.
Not to mention I have no idea why Linux aggressively turns off my audio driver whenever something isn’t playing, even though it takes almost 5 seconds after audio starts to turn back on, and I get to constantly listen to the crackle of my speakers turning on every time an app checks if I even have audio.
Oh, and for an unrelated gripe, for some reason Linux refuses to let my bt adaptor connect to my switch controller, even though the same adaptor worked fine on windows.
You might be having the problem specifically because the controller was paired with windows on the same machine. See the “dual boot pairing” section. wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth
Yeah, I have seen that, but that windows partition is long gone, and I have done my best to reset the controller.
Plus switch controllers can only remember 1 device at a time the the moment I connected it to my switch that should have resolved?
The ease of making a RAID array!
I wanted to set up two used hard drives in RAID 1, and the only way to do that was through obscure command line stuff. I tried following a tutorial but I would always divert from it somehow. So I turned to ChatGPT, and it seemed to set it up fine, but then when I tried to reboot, I couldn’t enter a GUI, even though the OS booted from a separate SSD.
mdadm is not bad, it’s just command line. There is loads of help out there too. Not obscure link: raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/A_guide_to_mdadm
I get the impression your real problem is the command line. I can’t emphasize enough how much it is worth getting comfortable on the command line. It’s where the power is, on all platforms, and is fundamentally simplier than GUIs. The big secret is that it isn’t hard.
Most of the mdadm commands look like some kind of wizard’s spell to a noob like me. I have no idea what I’m actually doing with the commands.
In NAS related software there’s plenty of nice UIs to make a raid array. I’m guessing not many people bothered making it for “normal” OSes since the subset of people who want raid on a desktop, and people who aren’t happy digging through the command line is pretty low.
The thing is that I’m not primarily running the computer as a NAS. It’s a used computer with a desktop OS and with two used 2TB HDDs, so I want the redundancy.
I'm pretty happy with Linux actually. I've used a few distros and DMs over the years and honestly we're at a point in time where it's pretty nice. A more user friendly and robust connectivity management would be nice, and a few of the file browsers could benefit from a UX revamp. DMs could also enforce stricter design choices by default to gently guide developers towards a consistent UI/UX. But overall it's quite solid.
The same can't be said about most of the OSS that goes with it. Most of the apps available for Linux are garbage. I mean, they do some things well obvioulsy, but are overall terrible to use. With their crap UX and a UI stuck in the last century the only reason people use them is they have no other choice and are desperate...
Vendor support, which is something you can’t fix. I’m sick of having to use a Windows VM to connect a device running Linux to my PC running Linux.
In all other aspects, Windows is so much worse, which I’ve just recently noticed again while installing Windows 11 inside a VM without creating a Microsoft account. (It gets harder with each update. By now you have to edit the registry of the installer, manually launch an exe from a subfolder of system32 and cut off internet access to do it)
I don’t care, as long as it just works and uses a fraction of the resources of windows. We’ll get there one of these days, too.
I mean for me on that its already their
www.gnu.org/help/help.html is kind of unhelpful actually.
I know everyone hates gnome software center, but I happen to like its interface a lot- it has a really irritating bug that makes your view refresh periodically, taking control away from the user until it does. Apparently it’ll take a while to fix because it’s caused by some underlying problem with how things were structured that needs to be reworked, or something to that effect.
Other than that its mostly just software availability honestly. Freecad is so hard to use it makes me wanna scream, and gaming on my old crappy laptop has given me challenges.
Oh! And I have a weird bug I can’t for the life of me find a solution to that makes my track pad stop working periodically, and I have to reboot to fix it 🙃 I’m desperately hoping that a probable upcoming switch to debian, or maybe arch (switching from fedora) will fix it, cause I straight up don’t have the technical know-how to diagnose and address it. I only managed to find one reference to the same issue online, on the fedora subreddit, someone else using a hybrid laptop/tablet device. Though when I was trying out new versions of Ubuntu I think it happened then too. I don’t think it used to happen with (I think) Ubuntu 18.04, which is what I was previously using
I actually have the same trackpad problem on a Windows 10 2-in-1. Seems it’s not unique to Linux.
Wait, really? What device are you using? I’m using a first gen thinkpad helix
I have to assume its due to similar but different reasons, thats genuinely super interesting. Though I guess its possible its genuinely just a hardware thing…
Small things like my bluetooth mouse working 100% of the time or not having to unhook/reattach my Surface Go 1 from my external screen for it to be fast again.
Although some of these things might only be linked to my hardware as it’s not happening with the same disto on my girlfriend’s MacBook Pro.
i wanna use the stuff i bought for windows, like my streamdeck (i’m aware that there’s an FOSS app already), or my Thrustmaster steering wheel. Working together with big game companies to bring anticheat-protected games to linux would be awesome, but not something a single dev would be able to easily do.
my steering wheel and my stream deck are really holding me back right now. not using linux currently, but i’d have to boot into windows anytime i want to crash some cars in beam.ng
not something a single dev would be able to easily do.
More importantly, not something a Linux dev can do. At this point it’s a decision by the game publishers to actively block the game from running on Linux
the question is: can we talk it out? what do the game devs have to gain from the game not running on linux? could the game being able to run on linux boost sales slightly?
this topic is really about being reasonable and not immediately bursting out into “big company bad”
I would kill for a server distro who comes very very optimized after install and you can run it in a bread toaster.
Alpine Linux?
Currently I’m using Armbian for my SBC servers, working pretty well but I wasn’t aware of Alpine Linux, I will check it later maybe it could work for my porpoises…
Making the GUIs not follow the axiom of one tool for each job. I shouldn’t have to use the terminal if I want to zip a file with a password. It should just be an option in the GUI that uses both commands on its own
The whole point of a GUI is to make the system more approachable not to just replicate the terminal but with buttons
Doesn’t 7zip do that?
Excellent point, it’s easy to forget that sometimes. What makes a good gui, in your opinion?
I grew up in the XP era so I despise modern GUIs in general, I might not be the right person to ask.
I just want all the information clearly labeled and accessible easily. I want to have buttons and checkmarks for every option possible.
The few times I come across the XP control panel menus or a visual basic app I find it so refreshing and useful. Not having to go through 5 screens to change a basic setting or having to Google how the fuck I access the systems energy plan settings because everything’s practically hidden away to keep users from getting “confused”
I just hate the modern trend of “streamlining” and “sleek and modern” designs that just means you have less information, less options and everything is hidden behind 15 submenus.
It’s like when you find a web page that hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s and suddenly you realize how hostile modern web design is to the user
TL:DR: Not wanting to scare users and hiding away everything just makes users more tech illiterate and makes the experience worse for the tech literate users
Drop the ‘GNU’. We don’t need to coddle Stallman any more.
You could also help preparing XFCE for eventual Wayland compatibility: wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap .
Fractional scaling. Granted i’m a diehard GNOME fan and I hear KDE is better.
BiggestBulb@kbin.social 11 months ago
Man, just the "normies" user experience in general.
I've had so many issues from the start, even on "beginner friendly" distros. Hell, I'm a software engineer by trade - I literally use WSL2 every day for my job - but there are some things the OS should just do.
Prime example: wifi connectivity (er, just connectivity in general - Bluetooth included). It seems like every distro neglects this part to some degree. I've tried Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Kinoite, countless others - but it seems like every one either has some form of Bluetooth connectivity issue (a la Kinoite not detecting my Bluetooth headphones) or a straight up wifi issue (like Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Linux Mint ALL not connecting to Panera WiFi on a wiped 2012 MacBook Pro - it was because Panera has a popup to accept wifi terms, btw, which is extremely common. Starbucks was broken too).
It's that sort of stuff that prevents people from staying on Linux. People DO go to internet cafes to hang out and surf the web. It's a helluva deal breaker that I need to turn on my phone's hotspot just to connect to some Internet and then deal with LTE speeds. And as for the argument of "well that's super old hardware" - it's prime hardware that people will try Linux on and get pissed off.
Also, Nvidia support. It's one of the most popular graphics card options - it's a deal breaker that it doesn't work out of the box on a lot of distros. Never ran into this myself, but just scroll here for a bit to see how prevalent it is.
I REALLY want to daily Linux but man, these issues prevent it (even now that I've moved on from the MacBook). If you really wanna help Linux grow, fix these problems and / or work on improving the "non-technical" user experience. You shouldn't need to know what KDE is to use your desktop, nor should you need to Google like 15 things to get thru the installer with certainty.
I know this will get a lot of hate, and I really really want to love Linux, but I've been burned often so I'm skeptical.
Petter1@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Yea, sadly, Linux can do nothing to support Nvidia better since they don’t support the community with opensource driver and actively add DRM do make our lives harder. It’s just sad. Right now, I try to get my MacBook pro 5,5 with deticated Nvidia GeForce 9600m GT to work with openSuse I tested and failed with tumbleweed twice now and I’ll try leap next.
kzhe@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
This is actually… Completely wrong. Open sourcing video drivers are getting really good a and, in a few years, they’ll be probably just as good, if not better than the proprietary ones.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I said it yesterday and got crapped on, but I’m gonna die on this hill: We need fewer distros, opening up the people working on them to focus on the actual software.
We have plenty of Ubuntu forks. Stop making distros and start make awesome GUI apps for Linux.
jelloeater85@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There is a magic url by Mozilla I use a lot to get on public wifi on Ubuntu. I can find it if ya want?
model_tar_gz@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Please share. It’s a very common problem.
BiggestBulb@kbin.social 10 months ago
I don't necessarily need it anymore, but I'm sure someone would find it useful in this comments section! Thank you!
KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m not giving you hate, but both problems you just described simply can’t be fixed on the Linux side.
When a company says “I’m offering a service based on closed source software, and I’m not supporting anything other than Windows” there’s hardly anything you can do except use the services of someone else.
Kethal@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There’s not exactly a shortage of things that don’t work well on Linux, but Bluetooth problems seem unfair to pin on it. Bluetooth doesn’t work anywhere.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 10 months ago
IDK about you, but bluetooth works great on both my Macs and my Windows PCs. Most of my issues with bluetooth come from the device turning off to save power and I have to wait a bit for it to turn back on and reconnect.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The “Open source or die” nature of a lot of enthusiasts and distros doesn’t help either.
If someone new installs debian on their machine and didn’t know their wifi card needs proprietary drivers then they’re kinda screwed unless they have another machine handy. Plus a lot of the time the open source driver will be worse for X but better for Y so now you have that conundrum.