The problem is a lot of 3rd party software requires a 'mainstream' distro, especially commercial software. Regardless, my point isn't that it's not possible to

The problem is a lot of 3rd party software requires a 'mainstream' distro, especially commercial software. Regardless, my point isn't that it's not possible to solve it, which it potentially is with enough work, but the out of the box experience of the most popular Linux distros is very poor for software management for desktop/fast moving software. This really hasn't improved much in the 20+ years I've used Linux.