Happy Holidays As We Wrap Up 2018, Looking Ahead To An Exciting 2019

As Linus summed it up well when he released Linux 4.20 this weekend, "have a Merry Christmas or other holiday of your choice." 2018 was certainly great for Linux and open-source at large while 2019 should be even more exciting.

Looking back briefly at 2018 there was a lot to be thankful for with some of the highlights being Valve's introduction of Steam Play / Proton for vastly stepping up the Linux gaming experience, the continued maturing of the open-source Linux graphics drivers, a plethora of improvements made to the Linux kernel, both GNOME and KDE doing a damn fine job polishing their desktops, and a number of really great software releases.

For next year we're certainly eager to see what else comes of Steam Play / DXVK / Proton, are certainly excited to see more Vulkan-powered Linux games releasing, can't wait to see what else comes to user-land, GTK+ 4.0 should make its maiden voyage, we'll see what Canonical is pushing ahead of their big Ubuntu 20.04 LTS cycle, the Fedora project is likely going to undergo a big shift where we may only see a F30 release next year, the Wayland desktop support will hopefully continue maturing, AMD FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync will finally work off a mainline open-source kernel, it will be interesting to see the AMD Navi open-source support, Intel will likely begin pushing their Linux graphics driver support for Xe discrete GPUs due out in 2020, and a whole lot more especially in the hardware space.

What more do you hope to see for Linux/FLOSS in 2019?

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