Linux

Manuals or notifications written with lay people in mind, not experts.

Not offering a solution here exactly, but as a software engineer and architect, this is not a Linux only problem. This problem exists across all software. There are very few applications that are fully self contained these days because it's too complex to build everything from scratch every time. And a lot of software depends on the way that some poorly documented feature worked at the time that was actually a bug and was eventually fixed and then breaks the applications that depended on it, etc. Also, any time improvements are made in a library application it has potential to break your application, and most developers don't get time to test the every newer version.

The real solution would be better CI/CD build systems that automatically test the applications with newer versions of libraries and report dependencies better. But so many applications are short on automated unit and integration tests because it's tedious and so many companies and younger developers consider it a waste of time/money. So it would only work in well maintained and managed open source types of applications really. But who has time for all that?

Anyway, it's something I've been thinking about a lot at my current job as an architect for a major corporation. I've had to do a lot of side work to get things even part of the way there. And I don't have to deal with multiple OSes and architectures. But I think it's an underserved area of software development and distribution that is just not "fun" enough to get much attention. I'd love to see it at all levels of software.

I'm not sure whether this should be a "standard", but we need a Linux Distribution where the user never has to touch the command line. Such a distro would be beneficial and useful to new users, who don't want to learn about command line commands.

And also we need a good app store where users can download and install software in a reasonably safe and easy way.

Small thing about filesystem dialogs. In file open/save dialogs some apps group directories at the top and others mix them in alphabetically with files. My preference is for them to be grouped, but being consistent either way would be nice.

Each monitor should have its own framebuffer device rather than only one app controlling all monitors at any time and needing each app to implement its own multi-monitor support. I know fbdev is an inefficient, un-accelerated wrapper of the DRI, but it's so easy to use!

Want to draw something on a particular monitor? Write to its framebuffer file. Want to run multiple apps on multiple screens without needing your DE to launch everything? Give each app write access to a single fbdev. Want multi-seat support without needing multiple GPUs? Same thing.

Right now, each GPU only gets 1 fbdev and it has the resolution of the smallest monitor plugged into that GPU. Its contents are then mirrored to every monitor, even though they all have their own framebuffers on a hardware level.

Standardizing package management? Imagine everyone being stuck with .rpm