[muuh-gnu]

And you can't get new versions of apps without upgrading the whole OS (including every other app) every few months.

Ubuntu 12.04 is nice, but it is already "abandoned" in the sense that new versions of apps that came out after 12.04 dont generally offer 12.04 packages.

You can get Windows exes which work on 12 years old XP, but there is no binary for an Linux OS that was published 4 damn months ago.

Until that _fundamental_ flaw with Linux software distribution is fixed, Linux as an end user OS is going nowhere. No sane user is going to install an OS, or even worse, buy a computer with an OS, for which there is no standard way to update or upgrade apps other than reinstalling the OS.

[takluyver]

This is slowly changing - apps submitted through Ubuntu's app developer site are updated separately from the OS. And new Firefox versions are pushed out automatically to stable versions.

It will take some time to adopt this model, but I think that's what Ubuntu is aiming for.