He's got a point on the whole stable base but wanting some up-to-date apps. The experience with Debian's backports repo is pretty good, I always check that first in this situation. But there's only some stuff in there, so you have to do a bunch manual compiling or whatever otherwise.

I guess flatpaks are supposed to also fix this, but there's a ton of bullshit with this. First of all, flatpak downloads one or more mega base packages, basically a full on distro, when I've already got a perfectly good stable distro here.

Then I've had a bunch integration bugs, and you always have to make an alias or script so you can actually run the thing.

Supposed sandboxing benefits are complete vaporware and by my reckoning Linux desktop app sandboxing will kinda work by 2035. Maybe.

But the biggest problem: I don't trust upstream developers not to be dipshits. Will they actually update their deps when there's a security issue with one of them? Are they going to push unstable bleeding edge crap on me with no testing? Try to spring user-hostile anti-features on me?

The Debian package maintainers (and that whole process, really) are like a shield that protects me from this sort of shit. Sidelining them is going to have lots of annoying consequences.