[flomo]

No, there are definitely underlying economic motives beyond ideological "freedom". The only way to make money in the Linux Distro world is to sell 'stability' ala RHEL.

That practically requires that the free teaser product be 'unstable' (and therefore undesirable for paying customers). And the easiest way to do that is a top-to-bottom bleeding-edge system rebuild with each new release.

So it's not just a matter of "not enough QA", because there are very real scalability problems with re-QAing everything every six months to ensure that some random library or compiler flag change didn't break something.

Look at Debian for example - they very much get the idea of "freedom", but they also understand software deployment lifecycles and produce a long-term stable version. (One could argue with their management decisions, but the basic idea is correct.)