[nathanielksmith]

Though I really like the concept, I'm concerned by package availability (or a lack thereof). It's frustrating to have to take a big detour when developing to circumvent my linux's preferred way of package installation in order to get some newer version of a library.

On the other hand, I've almost just as many headaches with outdated libraries in the current Ubuntu repo (like anything Ruby, which is all for 1.9.1 and older, iirc).

I went with Arch for a while, but missed a lot of the conveniences of Ubuntu. I stick with Ubuntu since of all the distros I've used in 5 years of using Linux, it's given me the least friction when I just want to get stuff done.

[junkbit]

I use PPAs (personal package archives) in Ubuntu to have a semi-rolling release. My browser, compiler and other select applications are updated daily but the underlying system is stable.