Continued work on the gnome shell for desktop as well as phosh for mobile. I have no need for most apps on my phone, but I really need access to a stable interface allowing for basic photo, web, and maps functionality. IMO, phosh looks the best out of all the upcoming offerings.
Libcamera development is probably the most exciting thing for me. Phosh is pretty usable as is now and web browsers work fine on Linux mobile, but camera support is a giant mess with v4l2 and having to manually wire up the camera pipelines in a device-specific way. Offloading said mess to a library and having a standard API for applications to use for camera access should allow for easier integration of mobile cameras into apps that already support USB cameras (uvcvideo). I know the PinePhone has partial libcamera integration already (qcam works but not well) and the PinePhone Pro also has partial support as it shows cameras as available but have not been able to get a picture yet.
A foldable for mobile Linux would be amazing, I love my PinePhone Pro with keyboard case, but you could use a foldable as a mini laptop with a touch keyboard on the bottom half (maybe not the best experience though). Having a bigger screen for doing productivity stuff especially with an external keyboard would be amazing, but I don't want Android anymore.
Regarding the keyboard on the bottom, I can imagine some physical keypad accessory for the bottom half, like what Lenovo is doing with their foldable tablet/laptop thingy, just on a smaller scale.
That's basically what the PinePhone keyboard accessory is. The phone clips into the top half and the bottom half is a physical keyboard. It is essentially a pocket sized laptop. I'm typing on it now and I can actually type much faster on this than any normal touch phone keyboard since you can properly touch type on it.
Not what I'd personally have much use for (kinda like using phone in vertical an in-hand), but yea, leave it to small indie companies to come up with important things.
Ed: but I was referring to this where the keyboard can be attached right to the bottom screen.
ROG Ally. Finally a good device which lets me play any of my indie games on my commute. This is important to me as I'm the dad of a 7 week old girl, and my commute is the only time I have for gaming now.
It's not available in Norway, and probably won't be any time soon. I could have it sent to a collection point in Sweden and pick it up there, but then I'd have a lot of trouble dealing with a warrenty claim if something doesn't work.
I'd definitely have gone with the SteamDeck had it been officially sold here. A more console like experience and the trackpads would have been great for RTS games. Bought a steam controller from a colleague, so at least I can use that for RTS when connecting the ally to a TV.
I cannot overstate how much I love the trackpads on the steam deck, I never had a steam controller (I didn't like the idea of trading other inputs for touchpads) but I'm really happy with them on the Deck
It sucks that they still have so many places they don't ship yet though
I preordered one. I love my Steam Deck and am interested to see how much better it performs, but I plan on installing Linux (some form of SteamOS) because I really hate Windows. SteamOS is an amazing interface for a handheld and with the Ally running AMD, it should run Linux very well. ETA PRIME did a video on Linux on the Ally and it looks very promising.
ThirdParty support for managing PassKeys. Especially the password managers BitWarden and Enpass. Having a main stream pubkey based authentication mechanism will hopefully vastly improve security and reduce ugly attack vectors.
Less with Flatpak. It is, IMHO, the wrong solution to a real problem; I install n flatpaks and suddenly I have n+1 openssl, libpng, etc. library versions to worry about, and unknown capabilities and policies for responding to security issues in each of them. Give me Debian unattended-upgrades any day!
Seriously, Flatpak is nice as a "backup repository" for when your actual repo lacks a certain package, but it is a workaround rather than a true solution. It's the problem of "we have too many standards so let's create another standard". It just adds extra copies of dependencies on top of your system's packages. The thing that I loved about Linux's package management most when I first switched is just how damn efficient it all was. One package manager updates the ENTIRE system and dependencies all get properly shared. Why are we all clamoring to go backwards?
OnePlus was wonderful, it was just the kind of support (helpfully and covertly making apps slow down to increase battery life) that I needed to switch to Apple iPhone.
I switched to iPhone because the OnePlus brand-enhancements was the "last straw" of my experience with devices in the Android ecosystem. Other problems:
Updates. Major operating system updates maybe only lasted about a year. With OnePlus I think they even tell you that you'll get two major updates and after that, the "device" is practically "end of life" if you wanted to avoid security issues.
UX jank. Even if you had infinite major Android updates, Android itself was perpetually moving goal posts with how applications "looked." This was most prominent when you tried to assist someone with a different (older or newer) version of Android. "Where things were supposed to be" for settings etc was always different between versions. If you asked them which application they were using for a function, you invariably got a "blank stare" because they did not in fact know because they were using the default...
Shovelware. Every phone came with uninstallable applications which were nearly always crap, but somehow essential and were configured to be the default for messages, calling, contacts, etc.
I'm not going to say that iPhone does not also have these kinds of issues, but combinatorially iPhone has less of them because you are not multiplying configurations with different screen resolutions, microprocessors, Android versions, manufacturers, carriers and promotional rate plans. I won't buy locked devices, because for me, it is better to consider the mobile phone as a tool you buy, and not a flavor-of-the-season vessel for a carrier's service plan. The prices of unlocked devices are closer to the true value of the device.
Oneplus is dead for me since der Switched their underlying OS to ColorOS. On month after the update my device bootloped and the only option was to wipe all the data. I don't rooted the device everything was stock. Second thing is I got only 2 mayor Android updates on my Oneplus Nord.
I want to love a smart watch but i just don't feel like they're worth it tbh
I have the Samsung Watch4 and it's cool and all but the battery life sucks (lasts like a day max) and i don't get any really useful information from it that is accurate enough for me to use
I just ended up using it to see notifications and changing the music but i feel like i could have done that for a lot less than $250.
Is there a use case that i might be missing out on? What do you use them for?
I have a Fitbit versa 3 that I also use for a very limited number of things, but those things are critical for my day to day:
notifications: my phone is always on vibrate, id never know when I was getting messaged or called without it.
alarm: I wake up before my partner, who has sleep issues, so it's perfect for that, reliable and unintrusive.
sleep tracking: I'm not sure I trust the specific numbers (although generally I do think it's pretty accurate), but it is helpful for establishing a baseline and informing me if the reason I feel like garbage is because I didn't get enough sleep or not.
And actually I think that's it. I thought there was more, but that pretty much covers it. Oh also, sometimes helping with calories tracking.
Pebble was one of the good ones. I've gotten an inexpensive one running Android Wear, but I find myself seldom wearing it compared to my dumb watch. I wore my Pebble every day since it could last a damn week or more without charging, and the screen was very pleasant to the eyes.
I really don't think it will come out in 2023 though. Overall the PCVR tech seems to be stagnating at the moment. Which is a real shame because I am on the lookout for a headset but all the available ones don't work for me. Basically I just want the equivalent of the PSVR2 (OLED screen, decent resolution, eye tracking) as a PC headset
The HTC Vive Pro can be retrofitted with eye-tracking and has decent OLED screens. But the real problem is that there is very limited software support for eye-tracking on the SteamVR side and that will probably only change once Valve releases something new with eye-tracking support.
The expansion of the more robust mobile gaming handheld sector. Systems like the ROG Ally and Steam Deck are an awesome new direction for gaming and I'm pumped to see that sector expand and mature.
Just a crazy thought. Have you watched WWDC? The new development tools for conversion to native metal is so exciting. I was just thinking that I would totally buy a hypothetical M1 steam deck passively cooled huge battery. That’s s just a dream though haha.
I haven't seen it but the shift to ARM for heavy computing really excites me from a mobile gaming standpoint. Do somewhat worry about how emulating all our existing game libraries on a new architecture is going to work though.
Anything about porting games to Apple APIs is completely disinteresting to me. M1 is a great chip, but MacOS is a terrible OS (and I say that as I type on an M1 Mac Mini I use as a TV PC) especially where gaming is concerned.
Much more exciting IMO is the work being done for Asahi Linux. Getting the M1 to run proper OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan along with the work being done on Linux X86-on-ARM emulation (box64 and FEX) is a much more promising direction for gaming on M1. I hope we also see other ARM chips from other vendors with the same amount of computing and graphics performance that could actually find their way into gaming handhelds not owned by the worst company for consumer freedom in tech.
I was considering pre-ordering an Ally, but the battery life on it is a little underwhelming. I know it's a similar capacity to that of the Steam Deck, but it packs way more computing power than what the Deck offers.
I wonder if they put such a small capacity battery in it so it'd weigh less than the Steam Deck. I know ASUS was citing it's weight as a selling point.
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