What feature are you dying for to come to your DE

Notice how none of these replies are “AI assistant”?

"AI assistant" just seems like a euphemism for "increased tracking".
- Open source locally run LLM that runs on GPU or dedicated PCIe open hardware that doesn't touch the cloud...
To be fair - people don't know what they want until they get it. In 2005 people would've asked for faster flip phones, not smartphones.
I don't have much faith in current gen AI assistants actually being useful though, but the fact that no one has asked for it doesn't necessarily mean much.
- To be fair, in 2005 a lot of people dreamed of "mini portable computers that could fit in their hands". They just didn't associate it to the form created with smartphones, and when the smartphones came to be, people were amazed by it. I don't see the same level of reception when it comes to AI assistants.
- faster flip phones
  I don't think speed was a complaint anyone had about phones right before smartphones launched.
  People were mostly concerned with cell phone plans. Talking used to be charged by the minute, texting was charged per text, and data was practically non-existent.
  Cell phones have come a long way, but I think a lot of people take for granted just how much cell service has improved. I pay $25/month for a single line that gives me unlimited talk, text, and data (Visible). Couldn't be happier.
What if it's a friendly purple gorilla
Would be a cool feature if it could be leveraged in a secure, private, efficient way that was more useful than 99% of the algorithmic monkey typewriter garbage that's on the market these days. I don't need a glorified Cleverbot rifling through my unspeakables.
- Local LLMs are getting better at a very rapid pace. Still a bit too resource hungry to have running in the background all the time, but for example Mistral-7b is quite competent for its size.

HDR

Its current work in progress from different companies and groups working together (Gnome, Kde, RedHat, Valve, etc)
immediately thought of that too
what's HDR?
- High Dynamic Range. Compatible software, computer and monitor can display a greater range of brightnesses.
That's Display Server level, DE is 2 levels higher. HDR in a DE sounds like a pain. You know, that flashing problem with the phone in the night?
- Well, yeah, but actually, no.
- Flashing problem?
Why does everyone like it so much?
- I’d tell you… if I had it!
- I think it's one of those things like freesync, high DPI and high refresh rates that you really have to see for yourself.
- Would be great for the tv screen with 4k and hdr that I have around for example.
- It's pretty great for media consumption and gaming, with the right hardware. Otherwise it kind of blows.

A more polished wayland with plasma 6 :)

Definitely. It improved recently (like 2 last versions) and was a big thing when the fractional support was added, since now some software can finally be usable. But I still have too many problems regarding speed, animations, different sizes of things in different places, mouse cursors being wrong, crashes or lock ups sometimes happen, etc.
But it's getting there and am really hopeful for next version and how good it could be.
Really want to finally be able to properly use my external monitor with the laptop monitor also connected at different sizes and fractional settings.
- It's interesting nowadays. My windows 11 navigation bar on my work computer now crashes 10x as much as plasma Wayland does. Completely reverse of years earlier.
  Along with dozens of other problems like invisibly disabling the microphones so the only way to unmute them is to use the audio troubleshooter, my windows laptop gets more unstable with every update while KDE Wayland gets more stable with every update.
- and was a big thing when the fractional support was added
  I don't get the need for fractional scaling. If you had bought nonsensical hw like a 4k screen in a 15" notebook, just change display resolution and maybe global font size?

A bunch of ai garbage and also some ads please! Maybe collect info about me and sell it to marketing corporations while you're there.

Yes yes! This is what I want! Can you also include a completely useless search bar?
- I'm fine with this as long as I can get candy crush in the start menu
this the only thing keeping me from moving from windows

I want the cube back.

Basically competent support for hardware for laptops newer than 2014. Proper thunderbolt, displaylink, trackpad, fingerprint reader, facial rec support.

tbf more often than not displaylink just sucks, no matter the OS.
- My company insists on buying these shitty Dell DisplayLink docking stations. They suck so hard they are just a stupid expensive 90W charger. Even OS X users hate them. The frustrating thing is, these things were supposed to allow us to plug our laptop in anywhere and get two working screens, keyboard and charging. The only bit that works reliably is the keyboard and mouse.
- Yes however on windows and mac displaylink "sucks" on linux it is practically unusable. I do agree Dlink sucks, but modern laptops have no alternatives to speak of.
- Really? I find displaylink awesome I alternatively use ChromeOS, Linux and windows with no issues even gameing on windows (lowers the FPS but fine for my abilities)
  Curious what HW you are using I have a couple of different Dell DL models
  Linux on displaylink was iffy but it has been great the last few years.
trackpads work fine on Wayland or wirh xinput2
- I wish Wayland had support for multi-finger gestures. I know my System76 laptop's trackpad supports them on Windows, but Windows is trash. I use them all the time on my Mac, but I just use a mouse on Linux.
That's fair.
I'm glad I don't rely on any of that, personally. Aside from the trackpad, which works as it should.
You want open firmware, so this is not a DE problem.

A consistent system settings app that actually handles all configs without requireing manual editing of config files.

Which DE? With KDE I don't think I've ever had to edit a config file. I do recall that being an issue with Gnome; it's been years since I've used it though.
- XFCE is really bad with this. KDE is much better, but still when setting up something a bit more complicated, you are quickly back to reading man pages. And man pages really aren't great.
- On KDE, if you want NumLock to start on at the login screen, you need to edit a file.
  Also, to remap mouse side buttons, you need to either mess with a config file or install something like Input Remapper.

Remote desktop working like it does in windows.

easy to setup and use
can remote into a system that has been recently rebooted. Without needing to make the user auto login and set the keychain password to be blank.
resolution scales to remote client interface

I love linux and it is really all I use but RDP support is severly worse than windows.

What do you need RDP for? I did everything i ever needed to do remotely via SSH (I mean this as a genuine question, not that we shouldn't have better RDP support)
- A lot of proprietary engineering software (CAD, MATLAB, etc) or GUI heavy programs have poor or no terminal interface to work with, so the need remote desktop solution is valid
- I should be able to use my system wirelessly without having to connect it up. I was running baduk (weiqi/go) simulations on the GPU and I wanted to see live output on the board instead of staring at some SSH'd numbers
- I dont know how to mount external drives on Bash without root privilegues. On the Desktop environment it can be done by just clicking without root password.
- I can do anything I "need" to via ssh. But I would really like the convenience.
  At work they monitor web traffic and block vpns, but they dont block ssh. So I use an ssh tunnel to rdp to my home system so I can easily look something up, navigate to the web interface of one of my self hosted apps, or get a torrent downloading at home.
Setting up vnc is not as easy as it should be. I really wish it as just send auth, if auth create virtual display and perf devices as user that actually sends it to remote client, user sees desktop env loaded.
- I've had various VNC systems fail to interoperate. Like you have to use the same server and client.
rustdesk it truly awesome.
- @FarLine99 @beirdobaggins
  It's great that on the download page they have a scam warning, all remote services should have this.
That's my biggest issue so far. With RDP I knew I could hook up my cheap Android Tablet on my private network and RDP my way to stuff I forgot to do or I needed urgently. Now I can do similar things with SSH but I still struggle to use VNC without it breaking my gdm, and not even to the full extent I'd wish for.
- Using RDP clients like Remmina is great. The problem is running a RDP server in linux.
  In order to connect you must already be logged in to the remote computer locally and have unlocked your keychain. If the remote computer lost power and rebooted you will not be able to get in unless you have set the computer to login automatically and have set the keychain password to be blank, which is not great for security.
  You can not use a different screen resolution in the client than you have setup in the server. This means that using "RD Client" on my Android phone to connect to my desktop computer with a resolution of 1920x1080 doesn't work. I need to use an alternate RDP client on my phone where a I can specify a custom resolution of 1920x1080. And then the user interface is tiny and does not fill my screen.
- Which server are you using on linux? How did you configure autostart?
Give https://remmina.org/ a shot. Solid RDP connection. I have been using it for a few years and works well with my work laptop (windows). I hated the VNC route.
- Isnt Remmina a client only? Or can it be configured to autolaunch a VNC/RDP server?
- I use Remmina and it is great as a RDP client. But that is not my issue.
  The issue is the way RDP is implemented at the server level.

HDR

You could use game scope if I remember correctly
- You need the game scope session, which there's only a package for Nobara and I think Arch too but don't quote me on that
  And the session will require you to log out, which can be a massive pain in the ass.

Kde, cast the screen wirelessly. The gnome app does work but it's not integrated in kde display configuration

How is the GNOME app called? I'm asking for a school project
- It should be gnome-network-displays

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.

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 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 tiling concept that was shown off some time ago for GNOME looks amazing

Yeah really looking forward to some innovation!
Gnome right now feels like they are polishing a door knob forever, getting all the icons and the views exactly right and clean. But not much innovation.
Tiling...GNOME...? 👀
- I think he means this article, which imho looks awesome!
  https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-window-management/
Homie, they're working on that.. but, there are extensions :>

I really want to have better tiling and window management in Gnome. Ubuntu has an add-on released with 23.10 that I haven't got around to test yet. And I know that Gnome has that feature in the works, but it annoys me that Windows 11 has better management of windows with window-snapping than my DE of choice.

I'm not a Gnome user, but I'm geniunely hyped for the new tiling feature. If KDE doesn't get something similar soon I might change DE just for that.
- Which new tiling feature?
Like Material shell?
I use the forge extension, about 80% satisfied. Only issue I have is that all windows open on my second monitor and I have to move them.
- I find I have that issue in Windows 10. There's not much consistency between applications in terms of which monitor or even desktop they'll launch in when I open them.

Ctrl + alt + shift + meta + L hotkey to open LinkedIn

Accent. Colours. Now. (I'm looking at you, gnome)

As a Gnome user I approve of this comment, some more colors would be awesome, especially if they are standartized through xdg!

TTS & STT, tightly integrated. And perhaps language translation.

Oh man I was playing with Mycroft and Mozzilla's Deepspeach back in the day just for this. Though honestly a free desktop supported API that apps could integrate still seems like the best way for this. The next one would be getting Voice User Interface (VUI) support into major frameworks so it's just native to apps built with major frame works. The latter makes more sense AFTER the desktop API starts getting standardized.
This

I want a tiling WM like hyprland to become a full DE with all the softwares installed together at once, some presets and settings instead of config files, so I don't loose any more time tweaking it forever.

@visnudeva perhaps look into the EndeavorOS Sway community edition. It's pretty sweet!
- Will do, i used archcraft, great distro too.
This with Nvidia support :(
- I used hyprland for a year with Nvidia support without tweaking it.
Keep an eye on Pop's Cosmic desktop. Even the current customized gnome version is a nice tiling DE.
- Yeah, it is gnome with tiling, it is not the same as a tiling manager.
Yeah, I tried Hyprland but never really felt alright coming from KDE because I don't have the skill learning all config apps like eww or wayfire Panel etc.
A community workshop thing like KDE does would be even more awesome.
- I used hyprland for a year or so, made config files (which are on GitHub) and I loved it but it takes so much time and effort. So now I am on KDE and it is alright.
Have look at nwg https://github.com/nwg-piotr/nwg-shell
- Here's an imaginary award for you, thank you.

I love the cover photo bro

I'm on KDE.

Wallet sync with Android.

Wayland crash recovery.

General support for Wayland screen sharing in flatpack apps.

Swap between KDE and GNOME without restart.

Not for me but selecting different premade layouts for KDE on install.

App by app file backups that integrate with cloud storage.

Context menu of application dock shows Application window settings (otherwise only accessible via main settings or titlebar. (very niche)

Casting the whole screen to Android TV built in.

Option to remove PPAs that error via gui.

Move window to an activity shortcut.

Native support for installing webapps (think Samsung installing a website) so I don't have to use a separate browser window or an unsecure electron package.

But if I'm being completely honest the amount of use cases I have that are covered by KDE is completely insane. These are the ones I want for "1-2 times per day saves 10 seconds" or "1-2 times per montt saves a minute + standing up". If it were not for these I'd have to list "Interact with my IoT devices via laptop and KDE connect to make me coffee without standing up". Love KDE.

Swap between KDE and GNOME without restart.
It's easy on lighter on DEs like XFCE or Sway, by using TTYs. Press Ctrl+Alt+F3, Ctrl+Alt+F4 etc. and start the DE with their start command (like startxfce4).
On KDE or GNOME it should be too, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Not a DE user, but I would like Cosmic to be stable.

(Plus, mouse-keys.)

Have you played with keynav? https://github.com/jordansissel/keynav
- Thanks. I use Warpd.
  I meant I would've like that option in a DE like Cosmic.
  Gnome has this option already, or at least had it.

Better Wayland support across the board, but also more Wayland compositors and window managers from which to choose. I'd make my own but I know so very little about Wayland right now and it would take me a while to learn.

Also, I have always wanted desktop environments to be more like Emacs, i.e. to be fully programmable in a Lisp language like Common Lisp or Scheme, where you can just whip-up a GUI app for anything you want in a few minutes with a few lines of code. Operating systems like that existed back in the 1970s and 80s, but went extinct when Windows and Macintosh took over everything, which were never designed to be programmable by end users. It sucks because there hasn't been anything like it ever since.

To see what I am talking about, check out the historical preservation projects for Lisp Machines like the InterLisp Medley desktop environment or the CADR ZMacs editor.

A better "desktop as an IDE" experience would be killer to me too. Even if it's not for everyone, I think as an accelerator for FOSS designers of Linux desktop apps it would be cool
- Maybe Arcan will be a thing to experiment with.

Seamless transition from X to Wayland

For that to work Wayland has to be just as broken as x

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.

KDE: When using multiple monitors, being able to configure their relative position on start up. Right now, it just does who knows what, but they're out of order. Also, I only need 1 logon screen in total, not one in each monitor...that happen to be out of order anyway.

I thought this was fixed in the more recent versions by remembering placement based on hardware ID.
- This seems a problem for the login manager and kernel framebuffer before plasma/kwin even gets involved.
I think this was fixed on Plasma 5.27.x onwards. There was major rewrite of display configuration handling, that fixed these issued for me at least.
Also, I only need 1 logon screen in total
Never quite understood this complaint tbh. I use Windows at work and I find the blanked out screens look weirder than just having the login screen everywhere
- I wouldn't care about something showing on all monitors, if it wasn't that it somehow insists on focusing the wrong monitor altogether. I have a stacked setup (2x23" on top, single 34" UW on the bottom) and it keeps focusing my top right monitor. Right now it just kind of throws its hands in the air and goes "welp, here's three times the exact same clock and set of inputs, figure it out yourself" and that's it.
- It's just slightly confusing because (1) I don't know what screen the cursor is on, and (2) since they're out of order, trying to use a specific one is a little confusing.
I've never had this problem. At least not with my Thinkpads (T480 and W540). But I never used the nvidia card on them.
- Yep, I'm using an NVidia GPU

XFCE with polish/feature parity of Gnome (with Dash-to-panel), and Wayland support.

AFAIK Wayland support is in the pipeline
- Yeah maybe it'll be ready by 2030 lol. I don't know why XFCE development is so incredibly slow

Zero unrecoverable freeze events per month

That’s weird… I never freeze. Do you run out of memory?
- No, in fact I struggle to use more than 6 out of 16gb. If I knew how to use dmesg (or any logging functionality) I would pursue it further.
Same but I guess that's just what happens when you basically beta test i915 (i use fedora)
This sucks, it happens to be when my system runs out of swap and memory usage spikes

Honestly nothing. Im pretty happy with it for a few years now.

This is going to my wallpaper collection

- I don't understand. The penguin is wearing some kind of goggles?

Wayland being a true improvement over X, with things like Barrier working and having a true session lock instead of just drawing over everything.

As a Gnome user, a expansion of that background apps think that properly replaces Appindicators!

Wayland support. I use Cinnamon

At this rate xfce will get Wayland support before cinnamon does
- MATE, too. It's genuinely getting close
- Xfce already had Wayland support merged, no?
I am pretty new to Linux and have mostly been using Ubuntu. The few times I have read about Wayland, it was mostly Ubuntu users blamimg it for things not working. Can you tell me why you are looking forward to using it?
- The most basic and obvious thing is that external monitors with different DPIs than the laptop screen will finally work correctly.
- It supports things like multiple screens with different DPIs and refresh rates which X11 supports badly, if they work at all.
  Wayland still has some use cases that the devs are chasing down and Nvidia were dragged into things kicking and screaming, but it's mostly complete now.
- Here's the basic rundown: Most if not all desktop environments for Linux have used a component called X11, which is the window manager. X11 is exceptionally old; it's been around since the 1980's. Computer display technology - and what we expect computer displays to do - has changed drastically since X11's creation. X11 is old and busted, there's stuff it just outright can't do that we're beginning to expect computers to do. But, because it has been around for so long, a lot of software is written with X11 in mind, sometimes software that isn't actively developed anymore.
  If X11 is old and busted, Wayland is the new hotness. Wayland has been in development for approximately ten years now; when I started getting into Linux in early 2014 I heard whispers that there were a couple projects working to replace X11, Canonical was working on their thing, Mir, and there's this other thing called Wayland.
  Wayland is actually out and in service, and it can do some cool things, but also it breaks a lot of things, especially for users of Nvidia GPUs if my understanding is correct. We're still not at a point where we can kick X11 in the head and standardize the whole Linux world on Wayland yet.
  Cinnamon - Mint's signature DE - hasn't even begun to try to switch over to Wayland. I'm a Cinnamon user, I'm extremely still using X11, I don't even know if I've ever run Wayland on my current hardware, so I don't have much practical experience with it.
- Personally, I'd like to use Gamescope for my games. In addition to super low latency it has a number of nice features like being able to force games into borderless fullscreen and therefore be easily minimized, being able to use FSR to upscale any game, setting a framerate limiter, etc
- It's modern and faster, has more features, and supports X11 apps. If your hardware is friendly with it, it's pretty much a straight upgrade. Problem is not all hardware supports is well.
- 𝔚𝔞𝔶𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡 ℑ𝔰 𝔒𝔲𝔯 𝔏𝔬𝔯𝔡 𝔄𝔫𝔡 𝔖𝔞𝔳𝔦𝔬𝔯 𝔄𝔫𝔡 ℑ𝔱𝔰 ℭ𝔬𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔚𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔐𝔞𝔨𝔢 𝔈𝔳𝔢𝔯𝔶𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔄𝔩𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱

Theming, controlled one central place.

This goes for both Gnome (GTK, Qt, Gnome Shell) and Sway (GTK, Qt, Sway, Rofi, Waybar...)

Still waiting for a DE that's looks and acts like i3/sway but takes care of everything under the hood like monitor config, shortcuts for brightness, volume etc. Essentially everything Gnome or KDE does.

Apparently you can configure KWin (the WM for KDE) to act like a tiling WM. It's very customizable. Also, you can replace KWin with a TWM, such as i3. I remember doing this a long time ago, can't remember how, though.
- I'm currently doing this with xfce replacing it's window manager with i3. Sadly that doesn't work on Wayland anymore because the concept of a window manager doesn't exist anymore. Your DE is a compositor now.
I think you've just described the EndeavourOS i3 installation.
- But then your still using i3 + lots of custom scripts. I don't find the time anymore to maintain all this custom config. I want to switch to Wayland but I don't want to invest all that time with sway again.

KDE with GNOME design or GNOME with KDE functionality.

Consistency between all elements, apps and other things.

Heh, I actually really like the way you put that.
To be fair, though, KDE is pretty unified. Not as unified as it could be (or gnome), but it's close.

Actual proper touch support, which includes a decent built-in keyboard (looking at you KDE...).

I love 2-in-1's, but I do wish touch support would go all the way. It's like... 70-80% there, with Gnome having a good keyboard and KDE having the better touch support overall. But it just needs to go the final stretch to make it a good experience.

Completely agree. Like you, I found Plasma to be a much better DE with a touchscreen than GNOME (ironic, isn't it?).
maliit-keyboard is not bad even now (responsive, fast and beautiful). But there are still problems with the fact that it does not work everywhere (some sites, Signal Flatpak).

Well to wayland work with nvidia

Dunno, KDE Plasma has it all. I would not mind some design improvements, but that is what Plasma 6 will bring. I just need to wait :)

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.

Well this isn't a DE thing but I would like good ray tracing and the new frame gen support for my AMD GPU.

Tabbed windows like Haiku has. I love that feature so much but I've only ever seen it on tiling WMs on Linux

I think the Forge extension for GNOME has that feature
KDE has this.
- Does it? I've never been able to find it
- I think it had at one point and was removed.

As a new linux user, I would like KDE to fix their trackpad gestures because they suck. Please copy Windows or macOS. And I want fractional scaling in GNOME without everything looking blurry.

Doesn't Gnome 45 have improved scaling (haven't tried it yet)?
- Idk, it wasn't there on Fedora 39.

Configurable touchpad gestures on Plasma. And a non-nonsense gesture to open the overview effect (waiting for Plasma 6, already done :)

Working Screensharing from first boot lmao

All the Wayland stuff related to gaming in GNOME.

I'm on a tiling WM. If I want a specific feature, I make it happen.

do hdr
- Funny, but I'm on a tiling wm for a reason. I like things simple and effective. I don't need or want HDR. :)
Gives me ratpoison nostalgia

Ability to run Android apps.

Ability to pin applications to the taskbar depending on which virtual desktop/workspace you are in. For example, I'd like a coding desktop that just has an ide, browser, and terminal.

Kde has Activities where you can group apps in a similar way.
- That sounds amazing. Checking it out now!
Isnt that possible under Linux Mint, or am I wrong?
- Not that I'm aware of. Cinnamon is based off of gnome which I believe lacks this functionality as well. happy to be corrected though
Sway allows you to assign apps to workspaces.
- yeah any wm or de has or should have that capability. Windows and mac allow that as well. I'm talking about specifically which apps are pinned to your taskbar. which sway and most wms that I'm aware of don't have

Nightmare GNOME screenshot
- cmon man, that's not necessary

Why's there an AI image attached to this question?

I'm just mostly waiting for Plasma 6 so I can use all the Wayland goodies it comes with.

Another thing I'm looking forward to is Wine-Wayland to be ready.

a better on screen keyboard for gnome

What is wrong with it? (I have no clue, never used it)
- its very small and the backspace deletes every second character for some reason

Just install it and not have to care about anything system related. Just keep out of my way and let me do what I need to do. Linux, Windows, MacOS, the operating system should not be an end, but a mean.

If you need to update, just do it and don't bother me. I plug something, just show it to me. Something is proprietary? I don't care, just want it to work...

Something is proprietary? I don't care, just want it to work...
Kinda hard when noone can make it work or even know how it works besides creators of that propietary program.
Did you try out the immutable Linux systems (Fedora Silverblue / openSUSE Aeon)?
They look very promising, do updates in the background (So, you are one reboot away from updates instead of waiting for the package manager.)
Windows for you chap /s
- For me and everybody else by a long margin. So this is a post where we can say what we expect from a Linux desktop so you can point us to Windows?

wayland on xfce & cinnamon
not exactly DE, but wayland greeter on sddm

Better support for gaming laptops with both igpu and dedicated gpus like in windows so that I can stop having to reboot when I want to go from portable mode to gaming mode

Idk about amd but I do know Nvidia has Optimus on Linux that works as it should, maybe your talking about a laptop with a mux switch? Which you have to reboot no matter what when seitching

Desktop per monitor.

Explain
- I think it's a feature of some tilling window managers that allow to put each virtual desktop assigned to each different monitors. So instead of the normal thing where when connecting an external monitor it extends the area of the virtual desktop, you could have the virtual 1 on the laptop monitor and the external with the desktop 2, so you could easily switch desktops that could have different windows, for example changing laptop monitor to virtual desktop 3 and keep external monitor with desktop 2.
  I've never used it, but after hearing about this for the first time some time ago it made so much fucking sense compared to the chaotic way that normal window managers behave that I really want to experiment with it.
  Assuming that I'm describing this correctly.

In KDE, proper secrets handling.

Is it not proper enough now? How could it be improved?
Oh, I like these topics and was until recently frustrated because kwallet didn't implement secret service, but nowadays it does so most things should be working correctly.
I've recently been trying to change my usages to use keepass, so I've been disabling kwallet, so, what are your current problems with kwallet?
- Maybe I should take a look once again then.
  That was something that frustrated me a lot back in the days as I had to constantly log in Minecraft launcher each time I wanted to play, same with XIVLauncher, and some other games I forgot about.

Working and well-integrated "run this on that rendering GPU", with unused GPUs being switched off (laptop use case).

The ability to easily resize scrollbars, KDE.

We had them right for so long.

I want to be able to see true integration between Apps and the WM. I saw a lot of good stuff with the way that Instant Messengers, Downloaders and IRC clients and various accounts could be made part of the normal interface. Now everything is web apps, or worse, Web Desktop Apps, which is also a big huge Electron apps that are more Isolated from each other than ever.

The only things apps share today are notifications, and I could definitely have less of those.

Trackpad gestures, KDE (like 3 finger swipes customisation). THEM TO STOP MOVING AROUND THE SETTINGS.

You can install touchegg to customise touchpad gestures, I learnt it because I also needed it!

A locally run, self hosted AI assistant that can do everything ChatGPT can do, where you have control and ownership of the model and can mix with open models that are updated automatically, - and a mechanism where it can be instructed to design widgets as well as other simple desktop features that adhere to system wide privacy and security policies on request...

...yes.

Proper HDR support and AMD to put in better HDMI 2.1 support on the open drivers.

Cinnamon has this but I wish KDE had it. The ability to right click an application in the task bar and have the option to "move to other monitor."

Desktop as a service. With the latest feature being worked where apps can be handed off to another compositor, I want the next stage where my compositor and desktop can be swapped with my intervention or notice. Wanna do redundancy? Running the backup live as a hot swap. Wanna do live updates with no interruption? Start the next compositor, try and loads the apps, if nothing breaks, swap the user, if the user doesn't hit the notification to revert kill the last session.

Add in better remote compositor support and it can get really cool. Allowing for a distributed DE across your devices. Making high availability more possible as well, but that might actually be overkill.

read "as a service" and was immediately turned off tbh.
edit: as in that phrase immediately conjures up thoughts of subscriptions. Might want to call it something more appealing
- I wasn't sure what to call it either. I'm not a subscription fan either...
That's actually on the way with Plasma 6...

Gnome mobile shell

Not a DE, but I'm really waiting for tearing on sway so I can play games without a second tty 🥲

Desperately waiting for Gnome Nautilus to not suck major ass (type ahead search, faster performance... hell, just make it like Dolphin, pretty much).

Nautilus 45 supposedly comes with very large performance improvements especially to search

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!

GNOME desktop icons that aren't an extension that isn't as good as something native.

Couldn't you just use the overview?

Sliding Tiling Window Management akin to PaperWM for Gnome.

KDE's VRR and XWayland fractional scaling implementations are pretty dope. Wlroots pls

Some kind of easy notification system and panel/dock/taskbar notification emblems. The support for stuff like that is incredibly spotty right now and is one of the final things preventing me from switching off windows.

EDIT: Have found a decent solution to this via Dash to Panel. I have been running Zorin OS for over the last month now on my main PCs!

Literally just button remapping support for my MX Ergo.

And for the fool who always comes into these threads to tell me again that I must not have tried in several years, I tried last month. Talked to the Solaar dev, tried to reach out to Logitech, literally nothing to be done.

GNOME mouse navigation + I3/Sway keyboard navigation.

Sounds like GNOME with a tiling extension such as Forge.

XFCE, press f4 to open a terminal pane at the bottom of the file manager, like in KDE.

OMG I can do that? Yes I can do that!
I keep discovering these things about Dolphin, like remote filesystems through SSH using "fish:// and now F4.
- KDE is full of little things like this, it is great when it works :)
I mean... you can already open a terminal to the current directory. But I'm not sure why I would want the terminal to be opened inside the file manager?
- Sometimes I just need to type one or two quick commands, maybe at the current path. I don't think this is necessarily to do a lot of work, it's just to give some more flexibility. I can see myself tapping F4, typing "chown blabla something", tapping F4 again, or similar because it's quick and easy.
  Nothing wrong in having options that some might find useful sometimes. As long as it doesn't bother those who don't use it.
- Why waste desktop use lot window, when few window do trick?
- Why would you want it outside the file manager? Why spawn a separate window if it isn't necessary?
- HOW? I looked all over the menus, pop up menu too.
  Re. Why, it's convenient for a quick task, and reduces clutter.

There's not much I'm "dying" for in Cinnamon; it's very complete.

I wouldn't mind if the Nemo Actions system got a GUI editor. I think it's such a little known feature...if you go to ~/local/share/nemo/actions, you can add config files that can add items to the right click context menu, including but not limited to shell scripts. I have a few basic ImageMagick scripts that allow me to do things like edit images or convert them from one file format to another just by right clicking a file.

Wayland on Cinnamon would be great
- I trust Clem and his team to roll it out when it's genuinely ready for prime time.
- Let's hope they can pull it off soon, XFCE really surprised me with the speed at which they transition but it's a huge project for any DE and we are slowly getting to a point where it's actually neccecary!

Wayland needs stacking window managers that aren't just KDE and Gnome. I want more things like openbox. There's labwc but that's it.

And also Wayland needs more customization programs designed around stacking window managers. Waybar, yambar, and others are all only designed for tiling window managers.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Stacking

I already have everything. I use Sway... :)

I saw the cool feature of ChromeOS Desktop where you can save all open Window states inside a Workspace and resume them on another day again. Never used it on ChromeOS as I am not sure how but this seems easily possible soon with Plasma 6 where you can hibernate or rather store the current state of your Window.

GNOME:

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.

A GUI to build these EWWidgets I suck at making. The only reason I'm using them is the fancy animations, otherwise xfce4-panel or tint2 would be fine.

I want the ability to play all my steam, gog, origin and play natively, all this in a nice shiny cool looking desktop.

bonus if they add android app support

WMR support, I would ditch Windows in a heartbeat

bspwm - i do miss alt-tab from time to time.

I know there is a few sxkhd entries that sort of mimics it, but I miss something like gnome or cinnamon alt-tab

Custom per-folder themes in Nemo with drag/drop templating like os/2 had. Extend to all apps, actually.

That would be really cool!

Nothing. But once Wayland supports xscreensaver or vice versa I’ll switch.

For me it's the ability to screenshare at work on Wayland.
- How come it doesn't work? Which compositor are you using?

CardDAV in the built in contacts app without installing Evolution, just to configure functionality that is there without Evolution. People have been begging for years, and submitted unaccepted code, but Gnome devs are going to Gnome dev.

evolution-data-server is light enough, you don't need full Evolution.
- Yet this supposedly user friendly desktop environment won't let you use the Online Accounts tool to configure sync using open standards.

GNOME, turn off screen backlight dimming?

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.

wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1

Or ext-screencopy-v1 if it gets merged

A linux vpn gui that connects to a universal api for all vpns that reports load and location to allow automatic switching for fastest VPN speeds all the times. Possibly with the ability to multiplex the packets to two or more VPN providers for better obfuscation. And with a nice GUI that has presets for popular vpns

honestly I'd just want a DE that isn't bugged and has all the basic functionalities. So far I couldn't even find one.

That's xfce.
Which functionalities are you missing exactly? I've found xfce to be very stable and customizable.
- wish I could say for sure but it was like 2 years since I last used xfce.
  I think there were some long-standing bugs that the devs said were not their problem
Yeah screw Nvidia
Did you try KDE?
- There were UX bugs though it's been some time so I don't remember all of them.
  One of them was that when I pressed the windows key and searched for an app sometimes it just wouldn't react at all, and I had to press it multiple times or use another way to launch an application.
  Also the default file manager would often hang up for no apparent reason.
  The desktop widgets would change their position every single time I logged in and would even disappear.
  Edit: just remembered a hilarious one that took me a lot of time to figure out what was happening. If I had my second display turned on while logging in, the visual scale would always set itself to a ridiculous value like 1% or something and everything would be too small to do anything. I had to turn off the display every time I would log in. Before this I didn't even know the PC could detect whether a display is turned on or off.
  No matter what I set the scale to in display configurations, it would get fucked if I logged in with a second display turned on.
Just use the command line, I dont think youll ever find it.

Driver manager like the one on windows and ability to install driver with just inf files, so I can install windows driver on Linux

oh no fucking ai "art"

Open source AI assistant in GNOME... that can generate "art"...
...so I can generate images of Elon Musk getting mistreated at the workplace as a programmer...
...for reasons...

for them to admit that wayland is just not ready. Get feature parity first, then switch.

X is not ready. I am running X and it doesn't do vsync properly on the desktop or browser
I use Wayland on the daily and don't have any issues with it. What problems are you having?
- it crashes daily (I have nvidia, true, but so do the majority of people, so i expect it to work before being forced on me). As a user, I do not give a fuck whose fault that is, (LOTS of fingerpointing going on there) but if it's not stable, then don't force the switch to it yet.
  Does it have soome new features? Yes it does, but what really affected me is the features that are removed, by design. Some apps don't work properly on wayland because it does not allow them to do what they need. And if you complain that something does not work, you'll be told that you don't need it and you will like it.
  Also, far too much stuff is "not wayland's responsibility". Which means that one cannot just write an app for wayland, but rather for kde on wayland, or for gnome on wayland, etc. So if, as a dev you ask, for example, "how do I take a screenshot on wayland" you get the response "that is not something wayland does, check your de, compositor, one of the bunch of incompatible implementations", for functionality that had been seamlessly available and taken for granted on every single os I tried (including linux, with x).
  And I hate being told you can't do that because it's not secure. It's my machine running my code. Stop forcibly protecting me from myself. Turn some functionality off by default? that's fine. cater to the average user. Promising to never implement the functionality because I might hurt myself if I don't know what I'm doing in not ok