If you could give 10 years of development time to up to 10 software projects, which would you choose?

I would give it all to BOINC !boinc@sopuli.xyz. I donate time and money to this project on a regular basis, but I wish more people knew about BOINC because projects like this give me faith in humanity. BOINC is a open source tool scientists can use to distribute massive computational workloads to the computers of volunteers. Any scientist can use it without institutional backing or approval, it's an open network operating on the petaflop scale. Users can choose which projects they compute for.

BOINC has been used for medical research, finding new asteroids, and identifying new particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Anybody remember seti@home? Ran on BOINC. BOINC was also used to make the first accurate 3D model of the sars-cov-2 spike protein and even helped lead to the design of a shelf-stable vaccine which was distributed to millions. Plus, the project Minecraft@home used it to find the tallest cactus. BOINC has resulted in hundreds of scientific papers that without BOINC would never have gotten funded due to the cost and complexity of the computation involved.

But there is some serious technical debt and usability issues and BOINC has a long-term trend of declining userbase.

Proton/WINE. I never want to have issues playing games without windows ever again.

Signal: Because I want better messaging, and somehow they already achieved some adoption.

Firefox: If Firefox can somehow make their browser miles ahead of chrome, I think that'd be just plain good for the world.

Gitea/Forgejo: I think Github is another one of these centralized platforms that's pretty ripe for disruption (and gitlab is just not gonna do it).

Lemmy: It'd be amazing to have all the kinks ironed out of lemmy.

Mastodon: Same thing as lemmy. Get social media out of the hands of big companies.

Mail-in-a-box: I want to be able to host my own email if I want to. Proton is great, but isn't email supposed to be an open standard?

Framework: Not exactly a software project, but man I'd love to see them get the time to push out a ton of great different products and really spark the right to repair movement. It's the first device I was actually excited to buy.

Linux Mint: I don't use mint, but it seems like one of the most user friendly distros. I would love for them to make everything perfect and create a seamless experience (and really make a year of the linux desktop). I also think it would be great to just have one clear frontrunner for new users.

Coreboot: Make firmware open source? Yes please.

Truly Open Source LLM: I really don't want this tech to be in just the hands of just a big company. I'd love for there to be an LLM that has not only it's weights open, but the full dataset, training methods and everything open.

I think when you just get 10 years of dev time, you get an opportunity to push a project ahead of all it's competitors. It is kind of interesting to get to pick and choose a project to be the frontrunner (even if they aren't currently).

For me it would be:

• Helix: Great editor but needs a lot of development
• Lemmy: 3rd party frontends would have a hard time to catch up with changes, but it's worth it anyway
• GNU: they could update some stuff and also hurd kernel looks really interesting
• Arch Linux: maybe they would improve wiki or write some software to make life easier on arch
• .NET: I know that microsoft bad but I really like .NET, and it's devs are doing really nice stuff. And it's FOSS
• LibreOffice: they could integrate LLMs into their apps maybe
• Wayland: why not?
• Firefox: maybe they will improve performance and catch up with some css features
• Hyprland: it's working fine at it's current state, but it always can be better
• Nouveau: it would be a nice alternative to proprietary nvidia drivers

Kubernetes so that it can peak already and then die off.

Disclaimer - I make a living on k8s based solutions and I’m over the stupid complexity for little benefit. It’s like expecting everyone to be a “10x” engineer or some shit when reality is that most of us are just over here sniffing glue.

If I’m thinking about projects that could benefit the most from an exponential increase in active developers:

• Wine/Proton (could have a fantastic windows runtime on every *nix platform)
• ReactOS (lot of potential for a windows 7/10 upgrade path)
• Mozilla Firefox (would help with API parity with chromium)
• GIMP (but only if they agree to change the stupid name)

The rest goes to package managers and other lower-level projects that don’t get enough of a spotlight, maybe Brew or Curl or something.

Some sort of new standarized runtime that would replace the clasterfuck of HTML, http, js and CSS. All privacy oriented, secure and open source.

An actually really good Linux CAD program.

Coreboot, NixOS, Firefox, Lemmy, Briar, Gemini, Calibre, Godot, MIRI (though admittedly that one is maybe less of a 'software project per se, so if that doesn't count i'll say 100 Rabbits just cause i think their stuff is neat) and i think i'll take the last decade for my own personal project(s).

(I explain and link to the ones that I don't think everyone here would know about)

• Lemmy

• ActivityPub

• Firefox (Chromium should go the way of IE)

• Godot

• WINE

• Cinnamon (the desktop environment developed for Linux Mint, so we can get Wayland support)

• Box86/Box64

• Darling (macOS compatibility layer for Linux, plans to support running iOS apps when running on on ARM machines in the future, I want this primarily for iOS preservation purposes)

• Xemu (Original Xbox emulator, OG Xboxes are some of the most failure prone consoles and a game I want to play still has serious issues)

• Haiku (mostly for really nerdy shits and giggles honestly, but there's a part of me that thinks it could be a better consumer grade FOSS OS than GNU/Linux if it were more developed and had any actual software support. As it stands, like it's proprietary predecessor BeOS, it's just a toy. It's no less stupid than investing your theoretical time in Hurd IMO)

• AOSP(Android open source project)
• Linux
• designing one low level emulator
• making my own game engine
• reverse engineering and source code recovery of my childhood games.
• writing firmware for my personal laptop and phone so, it runs on fully on open source code.
• writing my own compiler and JIT runtime.
• making my own Standard C Lib.
• write my own minimal Desktop environment based on wayland without using graphics library like QT and GTK.
• i also want to write my own hypervisor.

• Linux
• Risc-V (I know it's not software project, but i have big hopes for it)
• OpenStreetMap
• Wayland
• Matrix
• Fediverse
• i2p for censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting network
• KDE so we can have plasma on our risc-v FOSS phones
• Coreboot
• NixOS it's also on mobile

Whatever underfunded, underappreciated project this xkcd is referring to: https://xkcd.com/2347

Imagemagick? GNU privacy guard? OpenSSL?

Matrix, its clients, and Revolt. I'm sick of there not being a featureful Discord alternative the most.

I'd use it to kill platforms.

HTML5 is a fine executable format. Electron sucks because it bundles a browser with each webpage. The technical hurdles are smaller than the mountain of usability issues we'll have to sand down, to make "web apps" Just Work. Native apps will always be better, but we've accidentally done a Java with write-once-run-everywhere, and it's ridiculous how poorly we've used that.

On the back end, we have nearly-invisible translation layers like WINE and fairly efficient emulators like BOCHS, so there's no reason Windows apps shouldn't run on everything. x86, ARM, RISC-V, whatever.

SPIR-V should already let you treat the GPU like a zillion-core CPU. Nvidia's CUDA bullshit has gone on too long.

And then drop in some not-quite-emulators for consoles, since they're just PCs anyway. End the charade.

Linux kernel

OpenBSD

Gnu Hurd

Debian

Tor

Fdroid

SteamOS

Vulkan / DXVK

Wayland

Firefox

I've got a few that are similar to other posts in here, but what I'd really like is an open source game similar to The Sims. Specifically, one that tries to achieve the goals of Sims 3.

Sims 3 could have been an amazing game, but EA half-assed it making mediocre content and not fixing bugs.

If the game was open source, all those bugs would be fixed, the game would be optimized, and it would still be relevant today. But while open source is great for maintaining and improving big software projects, it's not good for creating them in the first place. So that's where I'd put ten years of development - creating an open source life simulation game.

The next four Zeldas, the next Metroid, the next Mario, the next Smash Bros, the next three Elder Scrolls

I'm going to start with a couple projects that don't already exist.

• Something like the AUR but for non executable content like movies or books. I'm imagining something like;
  (program name) -m (medium, eg. Book, magazine, article (or "print" for any text document) Show, Movie (or video for any video document) and so on) (search term)

• A project that allows a full installed-in-place Linux installation with grub and all, no USB drive required. If that's a two stage thing where it partitions a section of the drive then installs an installer there, then reboots to that installer, or some other thing doesn't matter. No, not whatever Ubuntu used to do, I mean a proper installation.

• A program that tricks lan games into playing in side by side couch coop. I've figured out a method for doing this using multiseat on swayWM but it's pretty complicated and touchy.

• An open source car computer software. Not for the infotainment.

• An open source printer that works.

• A liquid democracy voting system

Things that actually exist:

• Minetest, specifically creating tools to help existing Minecraft mods be ported over.

• GIMP

• IPFS, try to get it in use in more places by default (AUR seems promising?)

• Wine

• MorphOS (as someone who is a fan of Amiga)

• SuperTux Advance (much better than plain old SuperTux in my opinion)

• Even though I'll probably never end up even starting it, I'd love to see my idea for an open source clone of Vib Ribbon for PC to happen (game name under debate)

• Krosmaga (I love this card game and would love to see new cards or even new deity classes to play as like Pandawa or Osamados)

• Steam Proton (just to see a much higher percentage of Steam games work on Linux/SteamOS if possible)

1. KDE Project
2. Wayland
3. Open source drivers (especially Nvidia)
4. Lemmy
5. Mastadon
6. Scribus
7. Nextcloud
8. Firefox
9. Tutanota suite
10. Wine

Nextcloud and nc integration apps. The integration to android ls so much further behind the windows desktop / web experience, using nc in a browser on android is often better than the app (due to lack of features, not because of bugs those are fine in my experiance)

Honestly, there's a lot of great answers in this thread. Personally, I'd love to see a FOSS ttrpg manager. Talking a complete library of monsters, races, classes, etc., along with an optimized pipeline for homebrewed stuff. Tools for encounter, battlemap, NPC and campaign flow creation.

Closest thing is 5e Companion App but it doesn't have a PC client, isn't FOSS, has a lot of weird limitations and UX/UI issues (like multiclassing could be simpler, and its really frustrating that you can't level down a character after all the work you did, forcing you to do it all over again just to change classes and spells). Also DnD next but getting source books for a whole player session is expensive.

Lemmy, Firefox, Proton/wine, KDE, GNOME, Wayland

Baldur's Gate 4 through 13.

Dwarf Fortress, and then the other nine I'd have to think about.

llama.cpp

Matrix chat

the Fediverse

and some self-hosting framework

(and maybe just for shits and giggles to buttplug.io just to see what amazing thing this will become)

• Mesa
• Noveau
• Wine
• Proton
• RedoxOS
• GNU Hurd
• KDE Plasma
• Kdenlive
• LibreOffice
• Nushell

Edit: There are even more projects that need some development like Linux, Wayland and some BSDs

figure out a way to slam all 100 years into cybersyn related projects. kill pinochet with a mech made out of bakelite and woodgrain paneling

If I truly had this power, I'd somehow get far more engineers on ReactOS then use all 10 uses on ReactOS. ReactOS is honestly the thing that is going to replace Windows if anything does. Linux is just too different and not user-friendly. People can argue it is now or it's growing that way but realistically the underlying Linux ethos is that "you should know your computer." Ain't no one wants to know their computer. They just want to use it. ReactOS is just 50 years behind Windows at this point.

Permanently Deleted

• Linux

Obviously

• Wayland

So we can finally say goodnight to X

• XFCE

For low-end devices and people who don't like bloat, we can still have a modern desktop.

• Nouveau / NVK

Nvidia are currently dominant, so new users probably have Nvidia GPUs.

• Open-source AMDGPU stack.

Why not? I'm only five items in.

• Blender

I want fast fluid simulations and RTGI in eevee.

Blender, FreeCAD and Godot! Amazing pieces of software, that I can't wait to see what develop into.

• Godot Engine
• OnlyOffice
• Appflowy
• Affine.pro
• Debian
• Forgejo/Gittea
• Blender
• Linux Mint
• Postgresql

DarkTable

GIMP

KDE

Kdenlive

Whatever enables me to boot different OSs from my phone or arm devices including dual booting and booting from external storage without missing drivers

I'd throw all the development time into EMACS. It's a great operating system, but lacks a good text editor.

Linux kernel, Gnome, KDE, Wayland, box64/86, wine.

Proton wrapper Gadot or similar Cura slicer Linux mint Kenshi 2 New stalker AMD Drivers

Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch, Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Touch.

Can I give two projects 50 years each?

Linux, Wayland, Firefox, kde, proton, Pipewire.

Nobara, kden live, free cad, only office.

Something for all the business people who demand MS Exchange and get them to shut the hell up.

Bring DJBDNS up to modern standards, rewritten in Zig, optional ability to integrate with systemd.

Enterprise Arch Linux

A program written in Crystal that allows you to define computer networks in a DSL and generates diagrams, basically UML but much better.

GNU Hurd

Plan 9

Firefly iii

Nextcloud

And 8 others

A game engine designed around efficiency so that developers can focus on mechanics, graphics, etc

Edit: alternatively a reverse engineering AI which can reverse engineer anything from isa to video games and more

10 years of development is insane, and I feel like some projects will be limited by the hardware and other software that isn't being updated. You'd have to spread out the 10 amongst projects that can help each other.

Would this also depend on who is currently working on it, or would the project also get a stable number of developers working full time?

GNOME Calendar, Lemmy, Thunderbird, Firefox

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, x10

Docker

TeamViewer

Spotify

WeMod

Heroic

Steam

CPU-Z

VLC

GitHub desktop

Aladin

I would also add baldurs gate 3 🚀🚀🚀

TLS Notary

Godot Linux Matrix

These would be a great 3 to start with

• A CUDA-accelerated JPEG-XL library
• An AMF-accelerated JPEG-XL library
• A QSV-accelerated JPEG-XL library (can you tell I hate AVIF and HEIC?)
• Godot
• Godette
• 5 projects developing quantum-proof cryptography

• Jellyfin
• Proton (mail/etc.)
• Cinnamon DE
• Actual Budget
• A project that lets you access your financial data from all your US banks programmatically
• Tandoor
• Immich
• A crypto that combines XNO and XMR
• Rhasspy
• Home Assistant

Sounds too impractical 😂