I dumped Windows when they clamped down on licensing when they released Windows XP. I&#x27;ve been running Linux ever since.<p>Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best contribution to Linux in years.<p>When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed packages are quite dated.<p>PPA&#x27;s are a workaround to get the latest versions of programs installed on a Debian distro. As an example: Jetbrains does this with the excellent PyCharm community edition IDE. On the other extreme, if you want the latest version of KiCad a schematic capture program, you need to compile it yourself.<p>Once someone comes up with an easy method for the users to install latest versions of software applications, Linux will start to make more inroads on the desktop.