this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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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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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?

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[–] [email protected] 106 points 2 months ago (1 children)

For me distro's role is to repackage things and then test them to check if they work together. Kinda like a premade sandwitch.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I'd rather the distro be as boring as possible while the exciting stuff happens upstream.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I think it is a sign the Linux ecosystem is mature, boring is good in software in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Yes, absolutely. When you look at the innovations happening to Windows recently like Copilot integration and Recall I'm glad that Linux is "boring"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

comparing a distro release to a new game release

  • pay a LinuxGem each time you open a terminal
  • Flatpak is only available as a paid DLC
  • use your LinuxGems to purchase randomized LootContainers with a chance of winning a Jellyfin install
[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

@Max_P @mfat I don't like picture oriented Desktops, just a lot of shit competing with workspace, rather have simple drop down menus which is why I stick with Mate. Although a Doc like in MacOS isn't bad, and Mate does support this, it still eats up space I'd rather use for work.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Some of them add bugs disguised as features, like Ubuntu’s snap

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

(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)

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

No.

Get dopamine from social media, not release notes.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Since adopting a Flatpak and containerized workflow, the choice of distribution matters a lot less to me now than it did 10 years ago.

The majority of apps that I use everyday can be run from any host. And I can install fedora, arch, debian, or whatever I want as a container, whenever I want it, without any thought to my host system.

Ideally, Flatpak's UX will continue to improve, and upstream app devs will continue to adopt it as an official support channel, which will improve overall security and confidence of the platform. Image-based, atomic distros will be further streamlined, allowing for even more easily interchangeable host images. At that point, traditional distros will be little more than an opinionated collection of command line tools and programming environments.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Short answer: yes, and that's a good thing.

Slightly longer answer: it's a sign of maturity for the most popular distributions and of the platforms at large. Innovation tends to happen in the fringes. Being it free software, someone can always fork the software and add their new ideas to the mix.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

This exactly. It is a good thing that these distros have matured enough that the updates are boring. I can only speak for the recent Fedora releases, but I've noticed quite an awesome amount of attention brought to accessibility and usability improvements that we've been waiting on for years. Speaking of Fedora, the next release (Fedora 41) the DNF package manager is getting a major overhaul with it moving to DNF v5 after some delay.

I don't see updates being boring as necessarily bad since that could mean they decide to dedicate an entire major version to focusing on stability as an example. I get the sentiment and I think it's healthy for us to engage with. I just don't think I agree with it at the moment though.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

A distro is composed of:

  • an installer
  • base system (bootloader, filesystems, service runner, DE, basic apps, settings)
  • packet manager and packaged software
  • an updater between releases

The biggest things you notice are updated packages. Many of the base-system differences aren't even pushed to updated installations. Most of what the user sees as °the os° is the DE anyway.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't know, I use Arch (btw)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

there's a special level of hell reserved for people like us

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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”.

https://lemmy.hacktheplanet.be/pictrs/image/c6430d79-204f-44ad-b2e9-1e0547332437.jpeg

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

You should use Arch, btw

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I think you are looking at work horse distros, like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.. That by now are heavily used for productive work, not personal use. So they favor stability and minor quality of life improvements over shiny new updates.

There's plenty shiny new cutting edge distros out there that are innovating, e.g. Nix, Silverblue, VanillaOS, all the container focused ones CoreOS, Container OS, Flatcar Container Linux and probably dozens more newer ones I am not aware of .

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

There are 2 kinds of distributions. Ones that are on customization side and those on stability side.

For example Debian, Fedora, and arguably Arch are on stability side. They are intended for people that want things to work predictably and software to be packaged and shipped as the developer intended it. Customization or lack of it is up to the user.

Distributions like Manjaro, Zorin OS, Elementary OS, LMDE or even Linux XP are have a given goal to a particular customization. Either a set of tweaks, a particular look or even their own desktop environment or set of software they develop themselves.

This means that the first kind would have the most boring update, as they just ship new and correctly integrated software. While the second kind would provide very nice customisations or patching of their own to their environment.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

a shortage of meaningful innovation

Well... a distribution IS a selection of packages and a way to keep them working together. Arguably the "only" innovation in that context is HOW to do that and WHICH packages to rely on. For the first, the "latest" real change could be considered immutable distributions, as on the SteamDeck, and declarative setup, e.g. NixOS. For the second... well I don't actually know if anybody is doing that, maybe things like PrimTux for kids at schools in France?

Anyway, I agree but I think it's tricky to be innovative there so let me flip the question, what would YOU expect from an innovative distribution?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The role of a distribution is to curate packages - select the right combination of versions and verify if it works together. Providing package repositories is also a big one, imagine if you had to compile everything on your machine yourself on every update (khm gentoo khm).

Other than that there isn't really a lot of space for innovation. After you have a kernel, some base packages, package manager, and maybe a DE, you can install everything else yourself.
The main point of differentiation these days in on the package management side - do you want a rolling release, or a more conservative approach.

There is one point of innovation left, but it highly technical and somewhat risky for everyday users - libc alternatives. The C standard library is one of the few core packages in a distro that can't really be replaced by the user.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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.

Debian still has to ensure SELinux works if and when the user decides to install it.

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