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.)
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Seconding a desire for a defacto RDP solution for Linux. Bonus points if it works on android
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, so accessibility options need to be supported.
As the population ages, people who have been using computers for their entire working lives are now 60+. It’s no longer the case that elderly people are completely computer illiterate.
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.
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 have given up on sleep long ago. Why don’t you just hibernate? With ssds the boot is really quick.
Edit: I got frustrated with ACPI and uefi issues on my laptops. I wish we had open source uefis for most laptops.
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) 😢
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Usually swap can be quite a bit smaller than RAM it might still work.
Edit: You might want to check out lvm if you do repartition. Also many filesystems support swap files on them.
I’ve read about LVM a few times, but it feels like I’d need a deep dive in file systems to get it.
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Hibernate to swapfile is possible you don’t need to repartition
Hadn’t thought about that! I’ll have a look. IIRC it’s not recommended on BTRFS, but maybe that changed.
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.
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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.
Hardware support, in particular:
- Better support for dual monitor setups (at first this was niche, but the ubiquity of laptops has changed this)
- Improved graphics cards support (curse you, nVidia)
- Better ARM and RISC-V support
The Arm support is there, its just not upstreamed because companies don’t like sharing
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Hey, I’m actually really big into audio development at the moment. I think you might appreciate this video.
There are lots of older KDE apps that could use some TLC.
Okular (a rather good PDF viewer) can’t save sessions (open files & positions) in non-KDE environments.
The issue has been open since 2018: https://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.
https://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’m sure a lot of folks would also appreciate better battery performance, thats a pretty universally appreciated area with laptops at least
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…
Second-hand Dell Latitude 5285. Not sure if it’s a hardware failure issue from age, or if kernels actually had problems supporting it.
It’s probably unrelated, but your comment reminded me of this since it’s the only time I’ve encountered it.
Easy ways to reset to sane defaults. I think Plasma has this, but I mean for the whole OS, especially systemd units and config files in system and home. In Linux , we are allowed to do all kinds of tweaks and modifications, but a way to rollback these configurations easily, I believe is not there. Now, please don’t talk about immutable distros or restoring snapshots, that’s not what I mean with “easy”.
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. https://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?
