2024, The road ahead
Thu 28 Dec 2023
As the year draws to a close, I felt it would be appropriate to look back on some things of note from 2023, and then look onwards to the future that awaits.
The road to HDR
Initial work began on HDR support in Linux, finally looking to bring that all important to feature to the platform, there was initial work from across the Linux desktop space, from groups including KDE, GNOME and surprisingly, Valve, makers of the Linux powered steam desk line of portable gaming devices.
Initial HDR support has, in fact been added to the Steam Deck for external displays, with the recently released OLED version looking to add that to the internal display as well.
HDR support with modern technologies is good, primarily being developed for use with Wayland, a project that has also seen numerous improvements over the course of this year.
The way to Wayland
Improvements to Wayland continue at a (somewhat) rapid pace with it quickly becoming ready to supersede X11 for most users, paving the way for a more secure and modern approach to graphics on the Linux desktop. Important things such as better support for NVIDIA GPUs that were previously holding people back from switching over to Wayland as their primary display server are now much less of a problem, with even official support from NVIDIA in their proprietary driver.
Most previously X11 desktop environments, and even some window managers are working on Wayland compatibility, if not having full support; With support from all areas, it's clear that Wayland is set to become the modern linux display server.
The adblockpocalypse draws closer
The deprecation of manifest V2, as early as June 2024 by chromium based browsers being pushed by google, seems to spell the end for many of the creature comforts we have come to expect in adblockers over the years, and forcing them to use a much more restrictive API with less control, meaning they will be less effective and easier for site-owners to defeat. Mozilla have said that they will continue support for these extensions in Firefox, but with Firefox users making up a minority of web users, this will only help so much. It has also become clear over the last year that large platforms are more hostile to adblockers than ever before, the widely publicised YouTube crackdown on adblockers being the most obvious example of this.
Return to the present
I hope everyone reading this has had a pleasant holiday, and lets all hope for a happy 2024. :)
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