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?
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.Why would that be innovation? libc is stable and ubiquitous. Ironically, Gentoo would probably pull it off but it’s not for the distros to do, but rather upstream.
Alpine for example uses musl, and Gentoo offers it as an option.
I don’t completely understand the benefits, my own programming experience is several layers away from inner workings of an OS, but at least some distros claim there is space for improvement.
This compares GNU’s libc with musl (aims at POSIX conformance and being lightweigth), uClibc (size) and dietlibc (size but has no full support?).
It leaves out Google’s bionic, used in Android, which is not compatible with GNU’s libc… go figure…
So most alternatives aim to be smaller and some also focus on standards compliance (GNU’s libc is not fully POSIX-compliant AFAIK).