[eigenspace]

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.

[djhaskin987]

Probably what the guix[1] folks are trying to do, use a "more sophisticated" package manager for OS.

1: https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/