Yes the churn is an issue especially in desktop environments but relatively painless all things considered. I don't think there has been a single inflection po

Yes the churn is an issue especially in desktop environments but relatively painless all things considered. I don't think there has been a single inflection point for me there has been steady incremental improvement. If you want to think about how far things have come I started using Linux in 2001 with Mandrake. Around 2.2 -> 2.4 kernel switch. So much has changed since the bad old days. I don't want to throw out a "back in my day we walked up hill in snow both ways" style rant but... -All we had was EXT2 and we liked it... -You had to manually configure modelines for your video card changing display resolution was more or less a crapshoot -Apps would exclusively lock the sound card which typically meant the first thing you opened would be only thing capable of playing sound. But you could pipe things to /dev/dsp and have the speaker emit random beeps that was kind of cool -window manager used to crash a lot and you'd lose all the title bars for all the windows this happened fairly often - cntrl alt backspace is still in my muscle memory years later. -Printers were basically impossible to configure. People complain about changes like ASLA, pulse audio etc but I think there is a lot of rose tinted glasses being applied to how things were before. Sure some things aren't perfect but neither was their predecessors and on the whole they fixed more things then they broke.