[mo_po2]

Going a bit of topic, Arch Linux does mostly the same, and thanks to it all of its users are direct testers/reporters of unpatched projects, with the exception of a few minor patches related to chore in projects that don't allow to customize it (mostly paths). I guess that this has probably improved the overall health of Linux beyond Arch itself during the last 2 decades for similar reasons to the ones provided in this article.

[jeremyjh]

Yes it’s great people use it and report issues. I found and reported a years old bug in Erlang that was exposed by a zlib update. Arch makes it easy to isolate and rollback dependencies which was helpful to isolate the change. On the other hand, Debian/RHEL users never had to know about this complete showstopper bug since they never ran a system that had the new zlib and the old Erlang at the same time.