This is my experience with any linux distro I've used, I'd prefer a smaller, regularly updated repository instead of my (2023) distro being shipped with ancient versions of, e.g. node, python, openssl, etc...

> oh this version is ... Full stop.

The weird contradiction is that you would have a better impression if things just stopped there.

E.g. the most current release on windows is broken. You grumble and give up. Heck, for apple stuff you would probably give up before even thinking of trying to fix anything.

As far as users are concerned, linux would be better if it simply said "No!" more often.

The fact that you treat "fighting" and "compiling" as options and then complain about it being tedious already shows a bad image. All other OSs simply say "Nope. Tough luck" and you are happier for it.

> ... current release on windows is broken ... You grumble and give up

No, you just scroll further down on the GitHub releases page (or whatever) and grab an older version that does work, same as every other platform.

For yt-dlp in particular, on a recent x64 or ARM64 kernel you could grab the precompiled Linux binaries and skip the compile the same way, if you wanted. They ship self-contained static linked binaries on Linux.

This software is written in Python. You don't have to compile it.

Yes, I know; they use pyinstaller to distribute binaries. You can get the source but setting up a working Python environment is the same problem that OP is complaining about; they don't want to do that. You can avoid it by taking the self-contained release build just like Windows users do. yt-dlp does a really great job on this.

Compilation isnt really my issue on linux, is more that I have to go and dig through how to set up the project rather than just use it (like you would from a distro package).

Maybe I have to install some prerequisites, maybe I need to set nonstandard specific environment variables and paths, maybe I need a specific version of a library, maybe I need to edit a make file...

This is fine for a few programs, but the annoyance really adds up when it happens repeatedly.

On Archlinux that problem doesn't exist, everything is a recent release

Hence I am running CachyOS on desktop, and Clear Linux on a little server :P

I don't mind Ubuntu as much on servers, as stuff is often done through containers or manual downloads anyway, and its not as prone to breakage as desktop software.

Or there’s an AUR -git equivalent

Or you can create one yourself by writing a short pkgbuukd file

Unironically, using Gentoo resolves this. If a package isn't up to date, you can rather easily define a new up-to-date package.

A CLI tool is something trivial to get from Nixpkgs since greater integration with OS’s GUI isn’t required.

Why not become (or help) the Debian packager of youtube-dl? Debian packaging is not especially difficult and the whole thing runs on volunteers. You don't have a right to demand that Debian or Ubuntu keep particular packages up to date.

Even if I did, I'm not sure that would be possible? I thought the idea was to ship stable versions of packages for each major release.

yt-dlp, in particular, provides static linked binaries for Linux x64 and ARM64. You can just download the latest binary off their GitHub releases page. It's a breath of fresh air.

Docker for things like this always feels like such an overkill to me