This. Distro packaged applications are almost always woefully out of date, because they're frozen before the distro is released, and then you use the stable rel

This. Distro packaged applications are almost always woefully out of date, because they're frozen before the distro is released, and then you use the stable release of the distro for months or years. But even if distros adopted some kind of half-rolling-release model so applications could be updated quicker, developers either have to manage N different packaging systems (apt, rpm, etc.) or rely on other people to deal with packaging for different distros, and lose control of a crucial part of their user experience. Then there's dependencies. Linux distros go to one extreme (no bundling), while the popular approach to developing applications is to bundle most libraries so that you know exactly what version you're working with. There are arguments for both approaches, but it's another source of friction between developers and distros. Distro packaging works for computational infrastructure that's widely used and not changing much, but it's a poor fit for what users and developers expect for actively developed end-user applications.