Many Linux distributions, including mainstream ones like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, openSUSE and others have built-in “core” features that no one knows about.
To be precise, some people do know about them because they are written in official release notes. However, the dominant majority of users do not read these release notes, leading to a situation where it sounds like all these Linux distributions are similar to each other, while in fact, they are not.
For example:
Debian (and by extension every distribution built on it such as Ubuntu) ships an ancient version of Mesa libraries. Mesa is a set of 3D libraries which enable different graphics API to access hardware drivers for various tasks (video encoding, rendering… etc). You can think of it as the layer between hardware drivers and the software API that programmers use to write 3D-supported applications. Other distributions such as Fedora ship the newest (stable) versions of Mesa, allowing better performance in video encoding, gaming and many other areas than Debian-based distributions. But if you were to check the official Fedora homepage, you would see nothing of this matter, as if they don’t consider it a marketing point at all.
Pop!_OS comes with zRAM support out of the box, and the settings are even more optimized and tested to give better performance than the default settings on other Linux distributions. They don’t mention this at all on their download page.
openSUSE has been using Btrfs filesystem by default for many years now, and its default package manager zypper is quite good as well. After each time you run a zypper command on a package, a “snapshot” is created for the system before your zypper command is applied. But it doesn’t end here, a boot entry in GRUB2 will be created for that system snapshot automatically so that in case you broke your system because of a zypper command you can roll back instantly to the snapshot from the GRUB2 boot menu. In this way, you will never be locked out of your system because you broke it accidentally.
Linux Lite (which currently ranks #9 on Distrowatch) plans to use Zstd compression algorithm for its packages and package updates by default, leading to a smaller package size and update size than other Linux distributions, which should help users with slower internet connections a lot, and even benefit the modern ones because packages sizes are smaller. This is a planned change of course, but it will never be out of the release notes page either.
We could go on with many more examples, but you got the idea.
Linux distributions should treat their homepages as the #1 source of user “conversions”. The page should include all relative information on what changes are applied to this distribution, and why should anyone give it a try? You don’t need to go too technical, but at least explain the effort you have done compared to other distributions.
Sadly, all Linux distributions are bad in this regard; if you were a new Linux user and deciding which distribution to try first, they all would sound the same to you but just with a different package manager, while in fact, there are many changes at the core and “hidden gems” that could affect your decision.
Perhaps the developers of these distributions consider it enough to just post about these changes in the release notes? But very few people read release notes of new versions, and new users may never read them at all.
If you are involved in any Linux distribution development effort, then consider sending a shoutout about this to your webmasters!
Last Week Open Source News
We follow open source news from all over the Internet so you don’t have to.
Version 4.0 of the open source gaming engine Godot was released, with tons of improvements and new features.
ffmpeg 6.0 was released. Probably the most important feature is AV1 hardware encoding support. Multi-threading is also now used by default for CLI usage.
Linux Mint team is preparing to release version 21.2.
Interesting Stuff from the Web
These discussions and articles might be interesting for you, all related to either Linux or open source software:
Some cheap media outlets published fake news this week that Linux kernel 6.2 can now run on Apple Silicon. The Asahi Linux project published a clarification about this misleading news.
This is an interesting article on how OpenAI promised to be open source and transparent to accelerate the future of AI, but instead, ended up being yet-another-greedy-corporate that makes nothing open source at all.
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