Actually, they're moving towards having many more applications updated and added for stable releases. Ubuntu's developer portal now has a system where developer

Actually, they're moving towards having many more applications updated and added for stable releases. Ubuntu's developer portal now has a system where developers can upload their own apps to the software centre, separately from the Ubuntu release cycle. It's still a work in progress, though - they've had some trouble scaling it up. Traditionally, distributions have been responsible for packaging 'upstream' software, which quickly becomes a bottleneck as more software is created. The key is getting developers to do the packaging themselves, aided by automated systems.