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?
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.
@LeFantome Even running a MIPS emulator in a 12-bit (4k) address space is a real good trick.