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?
Short answer: yes, and that’s a good thing.
Slightly longer answer: it’s a sign of maturity for the most popular distributions and of the platforms at large. Innovation tends to happen in the fringes. Being it free software, someone can always fork the software and add their new ideas to the mix.
This exactly. It is a good thing that these distros have matured enough that the updates are boring. I can only speak for the recent Fedora releases, but I’ve noticed quite an awesome amount of attention brought to accessibility and usability improvements that we’ve been waiting on for years. Speaking of Fedora, the next release (Fedora 41) the DNF package manager is getting a major overhaul with it moving to DNF v5 after some delay.
I don’t see updates being boring as necessarily bad since that could mean they decide to dedicate an entire major version to focusing on stability as an example. I get the sentiment and I think it’s healthy for us to engage with. I just don’t think I agree with it at the moment though.
Maybe I’m just old, but I thought a distribution is literally just a package delivery basically, just like you speculated. Making software work together nicely is actually already hard enough IMO. I don’t think anything is wrong. Valid question though
I was thinking that exact thing lol. I’m like, yes ‘distributions’ are distributing new softwares with the new kernel.
And the improvement in desktop environments does feel like a good improvement considering the user is interacting most with it.
Or maybe I’m just apathetic to these things because most things I care about my distribution are that it provides me a good package manager for external and self made programs. And everything else is just programs installed through said package manager.
@thevoidzero @gencha What I like about GNU/Linux is precisely it’s configurability, I can use whatever desktop I want, whatever greeter I want, whatever kernel I want, whatever applications I want for a given purpose, on damned near whatever hardware I want, I mean someone recently even got Linux to boot on a 4004, it took three days but it booted. I am curious how they pulled that off without an MMU and I can only imagine the amount of paging involved with it’s 12 bit address space, but point is what you can do is almost infinitely variable. Some may use a distro because it makes software work together well, but I use it as a starting point and modify it to my needs and wants. With Windows or MacOS, I got one Desktop, one provided kernel, a more limited range of supported hardware, and close to zero customization options aside from very basic things like desktop background and color schemes.
The “ran Linux on a 4004” through emulation. The 4004 was actually running a MIPS emulator ( that emulated an MMU ) and Linux run on the emulator.
I wouldn’t know, I use Arch (btw)
No.
Get dopamine from social media, not release notes.
I think it is a sign the Linux ecosystem is mature, boring is good in software in my opinion.
wouldn’t think so. automatic upgrades is as essential feature for desktop systems, yet they are nit really here. I can’t appear at the dozens of my friends (significant amount of them elder) to upgrade their systems every few weeks or a month, or when e.g. firefox gets a critical vulnerability fix
Automatic updates are there with the right distro. Which highlights the need to look around for the right distro for the use case.
Example being Opensuse Aeon - automatic updates - doesn’t even tell you it’s happening, just pops up “your system was updated” out of nowhere
Automatic rollback - if an update broke something you would never know, at boot the system will pick the previous snapshot with no user intervention
As far as the user is concerned you just have a working system; that it is the entire goal of that distro
