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Have new distro releases become meaningless?
(lemdro.id)
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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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 -
libcalternatives. The C standard library is one of the few core packages in a distro that can't really be replaced by the user.