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Comment by adgjlsfhk1 | Hacker News Reader

the problem with this point of view is that for packages under active development, it creates an awful user experience. running into an issue that was fixed 2 years ago and you can't fix is incredibly annoying.

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If we're talking about server operating systems, yes, I commiserate with you. But the same principle is applied with Arch Linux, and I've never felt more joy interacting with a packaging system (or Linux community for that matter). Everything is packaged and up-to-date (again, sometimes too up to date). I use Fedora at home and it's at most months behind, but certainly not years, and usually strikes that sweet spot between stability and annoyance.

I take should try an arch variant soon. I'm on an Ubuntu, and I'm at the point where I've learned to live with the jank, but don't love it.

As someone using an Arch variant, I can say that the newness of the packages isn't really a problem. The real problem is that there's no package compatability bounds, so even if a new version of a package is known to be incompatible with something you have installed, it'll happily upgrade that package anyways. Plus, there's no easy way to request an old version of a package.

I just wish I could just Julia's package manager as my Linux Distro.

Probably what the guix[1] folks are trying to do, use a "more sophisticated" package manager for OS.

1: https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/

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