Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is on the horizon and while we’re all hyped about the new set of wallpapers, here is my small wish list of technical improvements to have out of the box in the next LTS:
- NVIDIA On-Demand, something that has been working in Windows since iGPUs became a thing
- eGPU hotplugging-out to not crash the system
- Bluetooth codecs support
- Subpixel positioning in Cairo to be included as a patch in case Cairo doesn’t push out a new release in time
- Subpixel positioning to be fixed in Chromium so that it works by default in Chromium-based browsers and Electron apps
- Subpixel positioning to actually work in Firefox, as it currently does not, despite this ticket saying otherwise
- ClearType rendering to become the default in FreeType, since all the relevant patents have expired in July and current Harmony rendering, besides washing out all colors, is geared towards the ghastly autohinter
- Poppler to finally stop being the bad kind of “special” and render text like all the normal PDF renderers out there
- JetBrains and OpenJDK to stop forcing v35 font rendering. It’s an obsolete piece of technology and why they’d go back to it after all these years of working towards better rendering for Java on Linux is beyond me. Please, don’t let people who don’t understand fonts make fonts related code changes.
- Fractional scaling and mixed-DPI setups to work at least as good as they do on Windows, ideally as good as they do on Mac OS
Linux has come a very long way in quality of life improvemens since I started using it full time two years ago, during fall 2017. For many issues that I thought would never get resolved, qualified professionals popped up out of the blue and made massive contributions. This makes me very excited for the next LTS release.
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