When I read through the release announcements of most Linux distributions, the updates seem repetitive and uninspired—typically featuring little more than a newer kernel, a desktop environment upgrade, and the latest versions of popular applications (which have nothing to do with the distro itself). It feels like there’s a shortage of meaningful innovation, to the point that they tout updates to Firefox or LibreOffice as if they were significant contributions from the distribution itself.
It raises the question: are these distributions doing anything beyond repackaging the latest software? Are they adding any genuinely useful features or applications that differentiate them from one another? And more importantly, should they be?
Pop_OS! is about to drop a whole new desktop environment (COSMIC) made from scratch that’s not just a fork of Gnome. Canonical tried that as well a while back with Unity although it was mostly still Gnome with extra Compiz plugins.
A lot of cool stuff is also either for enterprise uses, or generally under the hood stuff. Simple packages updates can mean someone’s GPU is finally usable. Even that LibreOffice update might mean someone’s annoying bug is finally fixed.
But yes otherwise distros are mostly there to bundle up and configure the software for you. It’s really just a bunch of software, you can get the exact same experience making your own with LFS. Distros also make some choices like what are the best versions to bundle up as a release, what software and features they’re gonna use. Distros make choices for you like glibc/musl, will it use PulseAudio or PipeWire, and so on. Some distros like Bazzite are all about a specific use case (gamers), and all they do is ship all the latest tweaks and patches so all the handhelds behave correctly and just run the damn games out of the box. You can use regular Fedora but they just have it all good to go for you out of the box. That’s valuable to some people.
Sometimes not much is going on in open-source so it just makes for boring releases. Also means likely more focus on bug fixes and stability.
Unity was envisioned to become mir based eventually. So they invented a whole new display protocol when wayland was there, vastly immature though :)
Wayland was entirely unusable and mired in politics. (Still is mired in politics tbh.) So Canonical took the things they wanted, added things they needed to get it working, and called it Mir.
When Wayland finally became functional, they also made mir a Wayland compositor.
Some of the Wayland Frog protocols stuff is stuff that originated with Canonical trying to make Wayland usable before they took their ball and went home because the giants of the industry didn’t want to talk to a company of under 1000 people.
COSMIC is built from GNOME shell, it is 100% a GNOME desktop and not from scratch.
I’m talking about the new one they made from scratch in Rust: https://system76.com/cosmic
