You're right. It's just that the people who manage packages for those distros are actually sane. I can't believe people are still on kernel 4.4, or nodejs 0.10,

You're right. It's just that the people who manage packages for those distros are actually sane. I can't believe people are still on kernel 4.4, or nodejs 0.10, or whatever. Although there is something special about the PKGBUILD ports system. Here's how a well-behaved open source package is built: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/calibre https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/.... And here's how Arch Linux's kernel is built: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/linux https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/P... It's pretty fantastic. And it means that if a package isn't available in the repos or on the AUR, you can package it yourself in less than an hour.