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GNOME Boxes Preparing To Deliver Much Improved Virtualization Experience
(www.phoronix.com)
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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If you’re shipping an out of date package with your own customizations then uses should at least be redirected towards your own bug tracking services instead of sending them to waste the maintainers time on bugs that either have already been fixed or aren’t present without the tweaks applied by the distribution.
You can't prevent people from using older versions. New versions need to be tested, by the time this process is finished, upstream already released a newer version.
If you use the talking point of "own customizations", did you get that from the mint thread and did you read it through? Software should come as is, but in some cases devs work slower or have other priorities so I understand bugs get fixed some other way. The whole pipeline from dev to user isn't as simple as you think.
I had read a blog post about this conflict a week or two ago (and I just pulled up an article by a gnome maintainer to refresh on details).
People are of course allowed to use older versions, but if a distribution, by policy, lags significantly (2-4 years) behind the normal release schedule of a piece of software it distributes, while at the same time leaving feedback pointed towards the original devs, it creates a completely unnecessary burden on the developers.
And regarding the “modifications”, it appears like mint had used the GTK4 library libAdapta instead of libAdwaita now several versions ahead of libAdapta. I don’t know how extensively this effects that app but the point is the user facing experience of the software is being modified by mint. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable for the maintainers to take the responsibility of handling bug reports and such, even if it just acts as a filter for relevant bugs to be reported upstream.