[j1elo]

It's fun how one's own perpectives and opinions change and adapt with the experience of facing real-world problems over years of professional (or otherwise any kind of) experience.

I was contrary to the idea of 3rd party software repositories, and was of the opinion that one should strive to depend as much as possible from system provided packages.

But the same experience that you mention now, is what gave my point of view a 180 degree change, and now I'd rather install something from pip or NPM. I can just pin the desired version, and they more or less have the policy of holding past versions in a frozen state, so if I know for a fact that version 1.2.3 is exactly right for my needs, I'll keep using that one regardless of system.

The weak point of packaging systems (my experience is Debian and Ubuntu) is that normally there are not many (if _any_ at all) alternative versions offered for the same software. They are built with the general assumption that you should use the latest ones, and of course they don't even attempt to offer a history of versions of every package. So every time you upgrade, it happens what you say, "divert attention to the tool's problems instead of using the tool to solve problems" (very good wording by the way, I liked it a lot)