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
  • rastilin@kbin.social
    202·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • rastilin@kbin.social
        6·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • sudneo@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 year ago

          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!).

      • TheEntity@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • hottari@lemmy.ml
    161·
    1 year ago
    • 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.
  • binboupan@lemmy.kagura.eu
    151·
    1 year ago

    Wayland on Plasma (sure, it works but still work in progress)
    Lapce (like vscode but native)
    Proper keyboard and screen sharing for Wayland

    • nicman24@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      it sucks that bcachefs cannot be run as a dkms as it cannot be run as a module (only built-in)

        • trougnouf@lemmy.world
          4·
          1 year ago

          All the advantages of btrfs + the ability to combine SSDs and HDDs in a way that maximizes speed and space.

            • trougnouf@lemmy.world
              1·
              1 year ago

              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.

            • trougnouf@lemmy.world
              1·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
                2·
                1 year ago

                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?

                • trougnouf@lemmy.world
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  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.

  • DarthSpot@feddit.de
    7·
    1 year ago

    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

  • vettnerk@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 year ago

    Pretty niche, but:
    https://github.com/canboat/canboat

    Allows me to interface a PC to a canbus in an efficient manner. I wrote an autopilot in perl using that, but I would like to see the project mature to the point where it is stable enough for production environments.