Except this really has nothing to do with rolling releases, or the amount of software the vendor ships in the official repositories. Switching to Debian won't s

Except this really has nothing to do with rolling releases, or the amount of software the vendor ships in the official repositories. Switching to Debian won't solve the problem either. There is no distro today that provides packages for all the software you will ever want, or the specific version that you need. At some point, you will resort to installing software from outside the officially-supported sources, whether from experimental or user-maintained package repositories, or from a third party in binary or source form. Until recently, this was an operation that wasn't guaranteed to be easy or straightforward or risk-free. In the worst case, it could even screw up your system in ways that are time-consuming to diagnose and fix. In the example you gave, I would conclude that OpenOffice didn't package their RPM well, because it ended up driving RH6 users down the rabbit hole. At the very least, they could have unpacked all the files under /opt and provided static binaries, or included all the libs in the archive. Many packages still do that today, such as Vagrant, which installs under /opt/vagrant and includes its own Ruby interpreter there. Nowadays there are efforts underway to make installing custom software safe and easy, projects like: flatpak, OSTree, appimage, and snap. Hopefully we can reach a point where you can install whatever version of whatever software you want without breaking anything.