Coupling base OS updates and user programs together sucks, but nearly every Linux distro does it. Probably in part because the way Linux's GUI (and media genera

Coupling base OS updates and user programs together sucks, but nearly every Linux distro does it. Probably in part because the way Linux's GUI (and media generally, including audio) stack works makes cleanly decoupling the OS, including the GUI desktop portions, from programs, difficult. The distros that do rolling-release introduce a different problem of fiddliness and frequent risk to system stability, by making everything update faster and usually assuming you're running latest or near-latest of everything (and you're on your own if you're not). It's the cost of so very much choice and of having 500 entities all separately defining what "the Linux desktop" means at any given time, though I'm not sure it's always appreciated just how steep the price is. For fairly a broad category of "nice things", it's literally why we can't have them (in Linux land). IMO it's the core reason we still haven't seen the "year of the Linux Desktop".