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?
they shouldn’t. everything should be rolling.
For me distro’s role is to repackage things and then test them to check if they work together. Kinda like a premade sandwitch.
Some of them add bugs disguised as features, like Ubuntu’s snap
Funny, exactly what I mentioned in another thread https://lemmy.ml/post/21238446/14210360
Yes Snap is the bane of my existence. I actually had to create an ansible playbook for work that permanently removes the snap version of Firefox and then installs the official apt from Mozilla’s PPA. And on top I install other things my teams needs like VSCode and Chromium without using snaps. A nice repeatable process I wish I didn’t have to create but when certain clients insist on Ubuntu there is not much else to do
I guess if you want exciting new features you can just switch to a different distro nowadays or add them yourself. Why should distros add more stuff making them bloated or change stuff turning users away that like how things are currently? For general use you really don’t need a lot of fancy new stuff.
A boring release is the best kind of release. It means that most of the effort went into stability, compatibility, and bugfixes.
If you want updates to be exciting, install Arch, but only update it once every six months. You can even run bets on which system inroduces some breaking change that forces you to reach into its guts.
