Well, there is; it's "regular" OS LTS.

Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).

But that means all the software on your system will be 5 years old.

I installed Libreoffice 5.3 on my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS yesterday, from their PPA. I kept up to date with LO for 4 years in the same way when I was on 12.04. Same for PostgreSQL. There are plenty of PPAs maintained by the developers of single applications and they tend to support the LTSrd for a while.

Yes...that's the downside of LTS. You can't get the new features because they may break the old ones.

If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.

I would be fine with not getting new OS features. The problem is that the repo system ties application software versions to OS versions.

I want to install SomeApp. My options are:

* `apt-get install someapp` and get v0.6.0.1abzrhotfix2 from 5 years ago

* Google to see if a third party repackaging repo exists, decide whether I trust the maintainer of that repo with root access to my machine, `apt-add-repo blah blah`, `apt-get update && apt-get install someapp`, hope that apt works and doesn't spit out a bunch of "Depends: blah blah but it is not going to be installed, you have held broken packages"

* Go to someapp.com, download someapp.deb if it exists

* Try to install it with the GUI, get an error, use dpkg -i instead, find out it has a bunch of dependencies, install them and hope they're abi compatible, also hope I don't get "Errors while processing:"

* Download source code, learn the flavour-of-the-month C++ build system, try to compile, fail, try to install dependencies, some fail because my distro only provides incompatible forked versions for political reasons, have to download the source for those too, have to either build statically or use LD_PRELOAD hacks

Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. It will probably work even if I have a rather old version of the OS, it almost certainly won't conflict with anything else I have installed, it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate, and I definitely won't need to google any command line flags. And when I do upgrade my OS, I probably won't be forced to upgrade the app too if I've found a specific version that works exactly how I need it to.

> Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it.

I much prefer the repo system to the Windows "I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe, and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad?"

> it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate,

Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security), with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists.

>I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe

Your first point is only applicable if you are downloading unknown, untrustworthy software from tophotfreeawesomedownloadsnow.com.

>and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad

I agree that this is a severe problem for non-technical users. For those users, there is a lot to be said for a walled-garden app store (which could take the form of a GUI apt wrapper, I suppose). More experienced users know what the link and download should look like, rendering those ads a mere annoyance. I doubt anyone reading hackernews has fallen for those things.

>Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security)

For what it's worth, I usually disable auto-updaters for any desktop app that isn't network-reliant. I manually update if I find a bug or want a new feature, knowing that I can always re-install the old version if I find the new one is worse. I appreciate that this has its own downsides (especially if the user doesn't keep themselves updated on security advisories), but the point is that I /can/ do this whereas it's pretty much impossible on desktop Linux. I would have to choose between several undesirable alternatives, as I detailed above.

>with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists

I don't have this issue with software I use. If I noticed it, I would try the following steps in order:

* Block network, if the reminders are fetched from the web

* Disable any reminder features in the app's own settings menu

* Revert to an older version of the app which didn't do this

* Consider alternatives, of which there are probably several

Your first reaction is probably "none of that should be necessary and there is generally no crapware on desktop Linux", and this is true. But as soon as you try to use anything that isn't the version in your distro's repo, you are in for a world of painful incompatibilities and package manager hell. For every app you want to do this with.

You have /less/ freedom to set up the system how you want it than you do on Windows/OSX, because even though you technically /can/ install whatever you want, it is horribly time-consuming and aggravating to actually do so.

There are some known-good sources of Windows software, ranging from Major Geeks to the Windows Store.

You can also use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows.

https://chocolatey.org/packages

Yep, it's bad.

On Windows I wind up using http://ninite.com/ for my "package manager" equivalent and hope the software I want is there.

Not exactly. Many patches are back ported but barely features thats true