That's the problem with frozen releases. Upstream just moves ahead with new versions, but the distro insists on keeping the same version and only backporting a

That's the problem with frozen releases. Upstream just moves ahead with new versions, but the distro insists on keeping the same version and only backporting a few patches. This might make sense for core packages that need to present a stable API throughout the lifecycle of an LTS release, but it creates a whole bunch of needless work for maintainers of other packages (who are often the same people who work upstream). Frozen distros are essentially telling them to create a frankenversion of their own program, one for each distro, based on some arbitrary version from several months or even years ago. Until a few years ago, most distros shipped a frozen version of Firefox and only backported important fixes. Ubuntu finally gave up and started shipping new versions of Firefox as soon as Mozilla releases them. I think they need to do the same with most of the packages in "universe", too, including the vast majority of GUI apps. No backporting, just pull the new version, build it, and run some tests. It would save a lot of duplicate work that every upstream is already doing, at negligible cost to the stability of the LTS release as a whole.