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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?

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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.

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What you're asking for is distributions to roll their own solutions instead of contributing upstream to make it better for everyone. Distributions and the organizations behind them frequently do things to make the user experience better, it's just that the preferred way to do this is by making the projects they use better...which will just look like a DE version bump by the time it makes it to a distro changelog.
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COSMIC is built from GNOME shell, it is 100% a GNOME desktop and not from scratch.
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I'm talking about the new one they made from scratch in Rust: system76.com/cosmic
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Yeah, imagine the torment of not being able to tell anyone you're using Arch!
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My point was that unity was innovative, not just gnome with extras.

Back then I actually liked mir (also unity) personally more than wayland.

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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.
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@LeFantome Even running a MIPS emulator in a 12-bit (4k) address space is a real good trick.
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ok, thanks for the precision. I am interested in those projects and was looking at system76's code. This new version is in a different repository named cosmic-epoch. I'll dig it more.
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Sorry, I don't know of a guide for other distributions.
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