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”.

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?

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.

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no*, no, and no.

*not the ones i’m interested in using.

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.

No.

Get dopamine from social media, not release notes.

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.

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

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 .

the deployed architecture of linux is still evolving right now and there are lots of distros experimenting with different approaches

• how the basic core OS is structured - immutability, A/B partitions, versioned rollback
• how third party applications are executed - containerization, compatibilty, virtualization, bare metal
• how software is updated and stored - package management (apt, pacman, nix, flatpak)

i’m sure i’ve missed other features of new linux distros. this is all really important stuff but has nothing to do with the apps you actually use day to day

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.

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.

You should use Arch, btw

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.