[kop316]

> start calling themselves "nightly" distros

It's not a "nightly" distro, it's a "let's take patches that are unfinished, release them into the wild onto unsuspecting users, and let the upstream developers deal with it" distro.

[worthless-trash]

I believe the term is 'cowboy' distros.

[Spivak]

Which, to be fair, is pretty much what all upstream developers have been asking for for years and years because getting bug reports for 50 different builds of 15 different versions of your software all with different disto provided patches is exhausting.

The software that actually has good release hygiene pales into comparison to the software that is actually more stable by just pulling from main.

[crest]

No. They asked distros to ship their latest release as default version instead of recreating Frankenstein's monster holding onto end of life releases for ages backporting random patches without understanding the code they're messing with and blaming the upstream projects when their patches inevitably introduce more regressions and less features than any well maintained upstream project.

Of course this is a very one sided view. I've been on the receiving end of reckless upstream projects far too often not to understand why distributions which are expected to maintain compatibility with releases for years dislike a fast moving upstream for anything too important.

Manjaro Linux is accused of something different far less justifiable: forking upstream projects in all but name by shipping heavily patched packages without supporting them and even worse putting the support burden and blame on the upstream projects when things break (and oh boy do they break).

[MartijnBraam]

It is generally not a problem, distributions are doing absolutely great things and I like working with distributions a lot more than dealing with something like flatpak.

It's just that some distributions make a huge mess of it, don't want to work with developers and actively push off all the work to the developers for patches that have not even shipped, not even been merged or most painfully: not even been reviewed yet.

[hulitu]

> Which, to be fair, is pretty much what all upstream developers have been asking for for years and years because getting bug reports for 50 different builds of 15 different versions of your software all with different disto provided patches is exhausting.

Then don't do 15 different versions of your software. I ask again: Why do i need GTK1, 2, 3 and 4 on my system ? Why KDE 5 is not compatible with KDE4 ?

[detaro]

Versions != major releases