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Have new distro releases become meaningless?

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?

77 comments
  • Bring on the boring! Its what lets me daily Linux as a real alternative to windows. I love that my system gets constant updates, I get to pick when they install, it goes out of its way to NOT overwrite my preferences and settings, it maintains the look and feel I set it to, and it stays stable.

  • Honestly, when you say

    are these distributions doing anything beyond repackaging the latest software?

    — I have to wonder what you think is so trivial about keeping your system current with latest bug fixes and security updates?

    I don't need or want a distro to radically reinvent itself with every release. I had enough of that fuckery with Windows, way back when — incidentally, also a direct reason I quit that OS. And seeing "big changes" like Ubuntu deciding to functionally deprecate deb packages is... unappealing to me as well.

    There are probably sexier updates going on in DEs, but (insofar as a distro isn't wedded to one particular desktop environment) I'm fine to let them hog that glamour.

  • Hey, if you don't think distributions are doing anything, you can always use Linux From Scratch.

    Seriously though, most of the work done by good distros is specifically so you don't notice things. They make a bajillion independent open source projects work together nicely. That's something I'm glad I don't have to do myself.

    • As someone who recently switched to Arch (btw) I finally figured out how much work the distros were doing in the background. Between default applications and configurations, there was a lot of stuff I had to learn to do on the fly. I'm happy with my system now though, since it's just the way I wanted it to be.

  • When the initial rush of new Linux users arrived, experienced users had been trying to explain the same point for years: there are options like NixOS or CachyOS that offer unique experiences, optimizations, custom software or unique workflows, while other distros simply rebrand. But ultimately, most of them rely on the same underlying software, regardless of the distro. Having to explain this over and over in post after post became maddening. “What is the fastest distro” Posts on daily. With enough elbow grease my ancient Debian system can be willed into the latest NVIDIA drivers or other various bleeding edge packages. With a bit of suffering, I can compile a bunch of stuff months if not years before it shows up in the standard Debian repo. Point being, it’s all Linux.

    As for updates being “boring”—there’s nothing wrong with a simple update. What massive advancements do people expect these “mostly” volunteers to deliver with every update?

    • (Chris Titus Tech getting blowback last year marking a whole group of distros as “Pointless” when they did nothing more than a reskin or pre-install a couple in-repo packages)

    • @ @mfat The reason I gave up on Nvidia is they never keep their drivers up to date with the latest kernel.

      • I gave up on Nvidia is they never keep their drivers up to date with the latest kernel.

        I honestly have no idea what you mean. I’ve been using NVIDIA cards on Linux for well over a decade. Recently the last 5 years on bleeding edge everything to get the latest benefits to gaming and the desktop. I’ve rarely run into issues with the driver. Lack of features, sure. Installing the driver, no. One of my systems has been updating year after year without a problem. Did you not use dkms? If you use dkms, it just rebuilds the driver everytime a new kernel is installed. You don’t have to do anything.

  • Since I started using the Nix package manager and switched to NixOS, the notion of a “Linux distribution” faded into little more than “A bootloader + the Linux kernel + some userspace programs”.

    • The same happens with any of the new immutable distributions. It's just less effort as you do not need to do the nix configuration dance anymore.

  • It's kind of in the word distribution, no? Distros package and ... distribute software.

    Larger distros usually do a quite a bit of kernel work as well, and they often include bugfixes or other changes in their kernel that isn't in mainline or stable. Enterprise-grade distributions often backport hardware support from newer kernels into their older kernels. But even distros with close-to-latest kernels like Tumbleweed or Fedora do this to a certain extent. This isn't limited to the kernel and often extends to many other packages.

    They also do a lot of (automated) testing, just look at openQA for example. That's a big part of the reason why Tumbleweed (relatively) rarely breaks. If all they did was collect an up-to-date version of every package they want to ship, it'd probably be permanently broken.

    Also, saying they "just" update the desktop environment doesn't do it justice. DEs like KDE and GNOME are a lot more than just something that draws application windows on your screen. They come with userspace applications and frameworks. They introduce features like vastly improved HDR support (KDE 6.2, usually along with updates to Wayland etc.).

    Some of the rolling (Tumbleweed) or more regular (Fedora) releases also push for more technical changes. Fedora dropped X11 by default on their KDE spin with v40, and will likely drop X11 with their default GNOME distro as well, now that GNOME no longer requires it even when running Wayland. Tumbleweed is actively pushing for great systemd-boot support, and while it's still experimental it's already in a decent state (not ready for prime time yet though).

    Then, distros also integrate packages to work together. A good example of this is the built-in enabled-by-default snapshot system of Tumbleweed (you might've figured out that I'm a Tumbleweed user by now): it uses snapper to create btrfs snapshots on every zypper (package manager) system update, and not only can you rollback a running system, you can boot older snapshots directly from the grub2 or systemd-boot bootloader. You can replicate this on pretty much any distro (btrfs support is in the kernel, snapper is made by an openSUSE member but available for other distros etc.), but it's all integrated and ready to go out of the box. You don't have to configure your package manager to automatically create snapshots with snapper, the btrfs subvolume layout is already setup for you in a way that makes sense, you don't have to think about how you want to add these snapshots to your bootloader, etc.

    So distros or their authors do a lot and their releases can be exciting in a way, but maybe not all of that excitement is directly user-facing.

  • 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.

  • I mean that is kinda the point of a distro. If they’re good the work gets merged upstream and benefits everyone. They collate and bug test and conflict resolve (It’s more involved than that, but for the sake of simplicity)

  • Other than a few graphics, there is so little customization in Zorin that you can drop in the Ubuntu repositories and never notice the difference. And as far as from scratch goes, the first kernel I used as .98 or .99, not quite 1.0, cross compiled for Intel on a Sparc platform, then you had to spend another three days compiling the GNU userland, and then another couple of days for Xorg, at which point you had a mostly usable system.

  • I think distros at least do some stuff beyond repackaging the latest software, namely default configurations (or lack thereof).

    For instance, technically Debian has the packages to do SELinux, but it's Fedora (and OpenSUSE, I think?) that actually come out the box with them.

    They are also continually improving, if slowly, their package managers to improve the experience of sourcing new software, as seen with work on apt and dnf.

    You are right overall that new distro releases have little meaning any more. If anything, I think they are a good method for managing the upgrades to new software; when a release comes out, breakages can be addresses all at once and solved for a couple of years, whereas rolling release requires a person to be vigilant and repair breakages more often. That is not to pan rolling - I use Debian Testing on my desktop. As much as I like newer software, though, I am thinking of staying on Trixie after it becomes stable, as I get tired of applying updates all the time and then something breaking that is incredible difficult to diagnose.

  • No. Kubuntu now has a non-broken KDE Plasma. Fedora 41 has a slightly improved Plasma 6. CentOS Stream 10 with EPEL 10 will have Plasma 6 too, which is a huge step in "being something I could consider switching to".

77 comments