Linux

The RedHat and Canonical oligarchs are well underway in achieving their windows-like linux desktop through systemd and flatpaks and what not, so we may see a small but highly deployed number of immutable distros becoming the forced de-facto standard.

Microsoft continues their new approach at EEEing linux through WSL Azure, and everyone's happy about it.

Torvalds will eventually die, as will Stallman, so all that'll be left are the communities, which unfortunately don't have that much strength/voice.

Hyper convergence between phones, desktops, storage and networking. I think there has just been awesome progress in all of those fronts to the point that have a home server(s) that serves out the home wifi, shared storage, desktops (for gaming, school, and personal use) to the sharef human interfaces of choice. Even more so treat them as one giant multiuser machine, instead of a dozen separate devices.

TLDR: The future are linux hardware vendors, governments deciding to use linux, and RISC-V+ARM.

There are already a few linux hardware vendors out there and my favorites are Tuxedo Computers as well as Starlabs and Slimbook (the guys who make the KDE laptop. Not to be outdone by linux phone vendors like Pine64, Purism, and Volla. We need more of them.
Hopefully they will have the funds to start marketing and ad campaigns to change the image of linux from "just for geeks" or "only if you have spare time" to something like "better for privacy", "the only option for true freedom", "cheap but classy", "subscribe to nothing", etc.

Linux has no problem providing a fluid experience with RISC-V and ARM, while windows struggles - especially due to the amount of proprietary and legacy software that exists on it. Windows might be able to prepare for it and provide a translation layer or VM for those things, but probably not with a good experience.

Finally, governments. I thank Trump a lot for this: getting China to start accelerate ditching Microsoft. The EU is also wary of Trump winning again to start a tradewar + there is an EU level decision to use opensource. Countries are slow to implement this decree, but I only see it accelerating and countries wising up to international collaboration to create either their own distro (e.g EULinux or something), or paying emergent opensource vendors to write solutions for them.

I don't believe this will be done before 2030, probably 2035 we might see ~50% of government desktops and laptops on linux, but the future is very difficult to predict.

We are the future already :)

I couldn’t find a single gui resource monitor on xcfe that I wouldn’t have to build from source.

I just want it to become more popular and easy to use while remaining free (like to buy, hot take I know) and libre.

I want it to be something I can endorse to all my friends, even the friends that almost never use computers and barely know what a filesystem is

my hope is that after this point of it being popular and accessable, FOSS principles will start to gain more traction in spaces like mobile phones and car head units. there will always be proprietary OS's and software, but in my ideal world FOSS is at least an equal competitor, not just a a niche thing that only super involved computer people get into

FWIW I'm still very much an advocate of the Mark Shuttleworth Convergence vision. It's the Holy Grail that makes sense to me.

I want it to be accessible enough that people can realistically use it as a transition from mobile to PC

Better at gaming than now.

Honestly Linux should keep going in it's direction (standardization) and hopefully software support will get better over time.

I'd be happy with the destruction of copyright and patent laws.

FEX-emu / box86 / qemu-user let ARM machines run x86 binaries with minimal hassle.

I want a future where platforms matter about as much as image formats. Some will be better. Some will be worse. Some will be closer to what your setup expects. But the idea your system won't open it, at all, is absurd.

I'd settle for Microsoft 365 offline apps + trouble free miracast

A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it’s now your desktop computer.

Mobile apps are shit for that. Sure, my phone is powerful enough to browse internet, play video and music but on desktop with mouse/kb it's just weird and funky. And I'm not even talking about any productivity software which is straight impossible.

I hope selfhosting becomes even more convenient. It already is for tech savy people, but I mean 'buy a Pi and press a button'-easy. It would take away the power of so many big companies.

El futuro de los pcs sera importante para Linux solo si los fabricantes de hardware apuestan por Linux o las leyes oblligan a publicar sus drivers como software libre. Mientras esto no suceda, veo dificil el futuro de Linux, al comprobar como la gente renuncia tan facilmente a su privacidad a cambio de la experiencia de usar windows, google,...

I think stability is a huge factor. Just yesterday, my laptop shit off without any forewarning. There is still too much random issues that seemingly have no reason.

I just want ubiquitous Libreboot support along with more FOSS drivers

An immutable distro with working gpu passthrough for vms (or whatvere that's called). That's the dream