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.
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.
