No, I think that this is simply Ubuntu providing exactly what they promise: an up-to-date system that is also stable. If you don't think it's up-to-date enoug

No, I think that this is simply Ubuntu providing exactly what they promise: an up-to-date system that is also stable. If you don't think it's up-to-date enough, I suggest trying out CentOS or Debian for a while. It simply isn't easy to provide a stable system without some kind of release cycle. How would they gracefully upgrade something like Python or Perl or that have wide effects on the system? These kinds of changes are not trivial. It's not that Linux software installation is that bad. It's that they've solved the "dependency hell" problem that well. Now they have to handle the implications of all of those dependencies and the complex interactions of all of those version changes. I mean, it's easy to just roll the bleeding edge version of a package out if it has no dependencies. But it's rarely that simple. If you know of a solution to all of these problems, I suspect you'd be able to make a lot of money building a distro to compete with Ubuntu.