Comment by rcxdude

Ubuntu still suffers the same kind of breakage though. You can't take an moderately complex GUI application that was built on ubuntu 2014 and run it on the latest version. Heck, there's a good chance you can't even build it on the newer version without needing to update it somehow. It's a property of the library ecosystem around linux, not the behaviour of a given distro.

(OK, I have some experience with vendors where their latest month-old release has an distro support release where the most up-to-date option is still 6 months past EOL, and I have managed to hack something together which will get them to work on the newer release, but it's extremely painful and very much not what either the distros or the software vendors want to support)