In Gnome: Proper calDav integration in the gnome “online accounts” section. Smaller titlebars. Nothing else please. No dock, dash or whatever, no stupid clutter, just nice and simple like it is currently.
In DWM: Nothing needs to change, use the default setup every day on my laptop.
I am very excited for Pop OS to get the new Cosmic desktop. Not really a specific feature but an entirely new DE that is quite different from the others and built from the ground up in Rust. Hopefully the first version won’t be totally broken and full of bugs!
Better trackpad support on KDE on Wayland. I use multi-finger gestures all the time on my MacBook, and my System76 laptop supports them on Windows, but the only gesture that works on Linux is two-finger scrolling.
KDE has multifinger gestures on wayland but present windows is 4 fingers down and present workspaces 4 fingers up. 3 finger gestures are to slide around workspaces. For whatever reason there is no way to customize this.
Have you tried GNOME Wayland? Your System76 laptop should support Fedora Workstation. As long as the hardware in your System76 laptop is capable, it can so pinch to zoom and 2-3 fingers scrolling for workspace switching, revealing the overview, etc. 1:1 gestures like a MacBook, too.
I know the switch from KDE is daunting. I’ve done it too. But GNOME Wayland is simply above everything else right now
I’m not willing to switch to GNOME. Having to install a bunch of extensions to get a halfway usable experience that the GNOME devs can and will break on a whim isn’t my cup of tea.
Really? I’ve been using three and four finger gestures on Plasma for a while now. Three fingers to change desktop and so on. Are you on an old version of Plasma?
It does yeah, but not for applications running in XWayland. For example, I’m running a secondary 4k monitor with 1.5x scaling so it matches the other 1440p monitor. For native wayland applications, everything works just fine, but running an XWayland application on the 4k monitor will make it render at 1440p and become a blurry nasty mess. In KDE it will render in proper 4k (as if it was native a Wayland window), because they’ve somehow worked around that issue.
support tags in all applications and have combined search for them (e.g. let me tag e-mails and files, and when I search for my tag the tagged emails and files show up) (AFAIK GNOME developers already said, this will never come, because it would confuse GNOME users. Apple and Apple users have this feature for years now.)
Bring back F3 dual pane views in the file manager, having two windows side by side is not equivalent
Integrate and polish dash to dock or dash to panel, I don’t care which one just make it work perfectly OOTB.
Please inbuilt on screen keyboard. For the love of god windows on screen keyboard is miles ahead of any Linux alternative and on Wayland the scene is even worse.
One thing I hate about the Linux desktop is the sheer lack of interest for supporting new hardware until it’s too late.
Before you jump at me: I know it’s not really anybody’s fault. The contributors didn’t switch to new hardware yet, and someone has to do the work.
But that does not excuse the passive aggressiveness. GNOME’s stance on fractional scaling was, for years, “never happening - fractional pixels don’t exist, so we do integer scaling only”. A few years later, hidpi displays are becoming the standard and all premium laptops ship with them. Very few of them work fine at 200% scaling. One thing the Framework Laptop 13 reviews mention when testing it on Linux is that there is no optimal screen scaling available, just too small or too big - and that you can enable experimental support for fractional scaling, but it’s a buggy mess and it’s an option not exposed to the user for very good reason. Only now that it’s too late and Linux is already buggy and annoying to use on modern laptops because of this we are beginning to see some interest in actually resolving the problem, including GNOME rushing to work on implementing support for it in GTK and Mutter, after years of bikeshedding. Somehow, things that are impossible and never happening suddenly become possible and happening when the writing that had been on the wall became true, and the hardware that a minority of users had been calling attention to for years is now common place and oups! That gives the Linux desktop some very bad exposure and first impressions.
Touch screens were another problem area. Initially the common stance was that nobody really uses these, convertible laptops suck anyway, etc. fast forward to now, more and more premium laptops offer touch screens, and stuff like 360 degrees hinges and convertibles that are actually decent are starting to surface. And, of course, everyone on Linux desktop wakes up and starts admitting that touch screen support is actually in a problematic state when it’s already too late, and (prospective) owners of these devices have to pick between a very buggy experience that feels like Alpha state on Linux, and just using Windows.
It goes on. HDR support? Color correction support? FreeSync support being spotty and completely missing in GNOME Wayland?
I’m a heavy Linux user. I will nuke my dual boot when my next laptop ships so I’m going all-in after all these years. But I also own a 4k FreeSync monitor, a MX Master 3 mouse ane my next laptop (Framework Laptop 16") will require fractional scaling and VRR support to use comfortably. Having tried all these things side by side on my dual boot, I am somewhat jealous of how well Windows seems to handle these things compared to Linux. All this “nice stuff” has either taken a lot of time since my purchase to work nicely, or still doesn’t work nicely at all. Ignoring contribution / manpower issues, this constant critical attitude towards new hardware and the unwillingness to try and properly support it is actively keeping us in the “Eternal 90% there” stage. We will not get out of it, because customer tech will keep evolving, and we will keep accepting new trends only when it’s too late, and we’re 7 years behind Microsoft in implementing support. It’s not a secret that where Windows still obliterates Linux is niche use cases like HDR and colour accurate work, and support for new customer hardware, that usually lags 5-7 years behind on Linux.
I just hope GNOME’s developers would stop being so insufferable. Lots of Wayland extensions and FreeDesktop portals unimplemented on GNOME because of the developers’ stubbornness. These also adversely affect to other DEs and WMs and Wayland’s evolution itself because other DEs would have less reasons to support a standard if one of the largest DEs themselves don’t support it.
I really love GNOME because it’s polished, but if KDE would be just as polished I will immediately switch. I know KDE works really hard to make the DE and the apps in general as polished and modern as possible, but I can’t still help but feel better at GNOME.
One example is the color scheming protocol by FreeDesktop. You can now make your apps look greenish or purplish or whatever color you want regardless of the toolkit they’re made with. Right? Well no, because the insufferable GNOME developers keep blocking the proposal because they want the colors to be hardcoded by the DE. They were offered a compromise where a DE can just offer a limited, curated color picker to the user when they go to the theming settings and allow any arbitrary color hidden behind commands, but the insufferable GNOME developers said no. And the proposal, last time I heard, is still stalled because of GNOME.
I think the reason Gnome is good is the same thing that makes them insufferable. They believe there is a right way to do things, sometimes those are things you like, sometimes they aren’t.
Yup hard agree on this. Switched to gnome a little more than a year ago and not planning to switch back because the polish and stability is too good - but this is a major issue.
The one that got me with them was when they banned third party screenshot tools from using the default screenshotting hooks. They cited security concerns, which is valid as it stops malware from hijacking this, however rather than adding the ability to add to a user controlled allow list (or any other potential workaround) they just rejected working with anybody on fixing this issue. Instead it came off as a transparent attempt to push their own screenshotting tool.
Isn’t that hook used by Zoom for screen sharing? IIRC Zoom on Linux only worked on GNOME because Zoom’s screen sharing implementation was to call GNOME’s screenshotting hooks 30 times per second
I did not know that about Zoom, but would make sense given how stubborn the Gnome lot are that such a terrible bodge is required rather than them working with others.
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