[acabal]

I want what Windows does: Stable core, independent apps. The entire concept of "LTS" is a red herring. It's a byproduct of the distro mindset. To put it another way: There is no Windows LTS. You buy one version of Windows and it works for a decade--a DECADE--and your apps are kept updated for as long as the developer cares to do so, often automatically in-app. (There's no Windows "app store", but as Apple demonstrates it's a matter of will, not technology, to make one.)

That is simply not the case with Linux today no matter how you frame it. And for some reason too many Linux supporters are totally blind to that because they think package managers are flawless gems of convenience. They mistake package managers for convenience when in reality they're a band-aid for a situation that shouldn't exist in the first place, and that other OS's have solved better. The OP calls this out perfectly.

[saurik]

Please do not blame "package managers": Windows Installer is a package manager in many ways comparable in scope to dpkg, which given your premise immediately disproves that they are the cause of the problem you are talking about; the issue is not package managers, it isn't even centralized package distribution systems like APT: it is that the ecosystem of libraries and protocols that make up the Linux desktop have horrible binary compatibility issues that distributions seem to make even worse through the usage of "rebuild the world and update all the dependency relationships while we are at it" policies.