I get the advice that you can use flatpak if you want more up to date applications but what if I want an up to date version of gnome? :/ as an UI UX nerd honestly I care more about getting to use the best version of the desktop interface I'm using.
I wish there was a good totally independent distro for my needs. Debian gives an old version of your DE and doesnt ship vanilla packages, arch is very roll-your-own and more likely to experience breakage than fits me, void has honestly been the closest. I'm just not really fit for trying to set up and maintain a minimal distro, and honestly with gnome building more and more sysd dependencies I dunno if they'll keep building work-arounds so gnome is usable. Sadly I'm very tied to gnome, in spite of the project being managed.... Differently from how I would like to see it managed 🥲