Sure, but building everything from source yourself is a lot of effort to maintain. You can go with something like NixOS, but it's also a hassle to use because n

Sure, but building everything from source yourself is a lot of effort to maintain. You can go with something like NixOS, but it's also a hassle to use because nothing is in the "standard places". If you generally want the latest release of everything, then go with a rolling release distro. You can build old versions from source or through namespaced legacy packages. If you generally want year-old packages, then go with an incremental release and build your own version of those things you need the latest release of. I have found this to generally be more effort, but I tend to want the latest compilers and base libraries (not least because I want issues like reduced header promiscuity to cause breakage on my machine first instead of handling the support tickets when it breaks on a user's machine).