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?
For me distro’s role is to repackage things and then test them to check if they work together. Kinda like a premade sandwitch.
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.
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
You seem to be comparing a distro release to a new game release. It’s not. A distro is not always exciting because their top priority is having a working system. This means dealing with all the boring stuff.
It feels like there’s a shortage of meaningful innovation
You can look at this in another way: Linux distros are getting mature
are these distributions doing anything beyond repackaging the latest software?
You’re saying it like packaging the latest software is a trivial task.
typically featuring little more than a newer kernel, a desktop environment upgrade, and the latest versions of popular applications
If you don’t think these are meaningful to you, I don’t know what is.
Try phoronix.com if you want a more cutting edge reporting. They’re quite opinionated, but they’re usually on point about the exciting stuff.
Linux distros are getting mature
I think this is exactly it. Back in the early days of Fedora and Ubuntu a new release often meant major bug fixes, new software, and possibly a significant qol/usability changes and performance changes. Now, its all new versions of stable software, which all behave roughly the same. Which is exactly what you want in a daily driver OS. Stability.
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
