“Distros don’t matter anymore” is a bold statement for someone who is paid to work on a Linux distro to make. Fortunately, I’m not making that statement. At least not exactly.

Distros still matter. But it’s fair to say that they matter in a different way than they did in the past. Like lava in a video game, abstractions slowly-but-inexorably move up the stack. For the entirety of their existence, effectively, Linux distributions have focused on producing operating systems (OSes) with some userspace applications. But the operating system is changing.

For one, OS developers have been watching each other work and taking inspiration for improvement. Windows is not macOS is not Linux, but they all take what they see as the “best” features of others and try to incorporate them. And with things like Windows Subsystem for Linux, the lines are blurring.

Applications are helping in this regard, too. Not everything is written in C and C++ anymore. Many applications are being developed in languages like Python, Ruby, and Java, where the application developer mostly doesn’t have to care about the OS. Which means the user doesn’t either. And of course, so much of what the average user does on their computer runs out of the web browser these days. The vast majority of my daily computer usage can be done on any modern OS, including Android.

With the importance of the operating system itself diminishing, distros can choose to either remain unchanged and watch their importance diminish or they can evolve to add new relevance.

This is all background for many conversations and presentations I heard earlier this month at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. The first day of FOSDEM I spent mostly in the Fedora booth. The second day I was working the distro dev room. Both days had a lot of conversations about how distros can stay relevant — not in those words, but certainly in spirit.

The main theme was the idea of changing how the OS is managed and updated. The idea of the OS state as a git tree is interesting. Fedora’s Silverblue desktop and openSUSE Kubic are two leading examples.

So is this the future of Linux distributions? I don’t know. What I do know is that distributions must change to keep up with the world. This change should be in a way that makes the distro more obviously valuable to users.