Do these announcements belong here? I mean, those interested in learning about new releases of Debian, Ubuntu or some other software can just subscribe to dedicated mailing lists.
Do you think the world runs on Debian? What if everybody started making announcements about his/her Linux distribution of choice? And what about other major pieces of software? Since you got 15 upvotes so far, I guess that would be really appreciated.
My unscientific impression is that the distributions of choice among active HN users who follow up the development and progress of their distribution closely are largely limited to Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS. News of pretty much every milestone release of these distributions is submitted, usually upvoted, and seems to be appreciated, before falling off the front page in less than a day in the most extreme case (final releases). The disaster scenario of this being the case for 43985 different distributions seems outside the realm of possibility, thus there's not much cause for concern.
I didn't mention just GNU/Linux distributions, though, but all major pieces of software (languages, frameworks, etc.). Of course, if there is something special about some news, we'd like to know. For instance, when Debian started building on FreeBSD kernel, well, that's news! Instead, recently Debian got frozen... so what? If you already follow the development of Debian, you'd already learned that from other sources, and reading it here wouldn't add any value.
It's about keeping an high signal to noise ratio. Recently, I feel HN is becoming noisier. Maybe I just overreacted because that annoys me. Well, it seems I'm the only one who's annoyed by this "noise", however. Or I just picked the less offensive source.
Thanks for listening.
HN people might hear about it elsewhere, but this is probably where they would prefer to discuss it.