Which of the other desktop OS has a stable AND consistent base system?

Microsoft is backwards compatible to an insane degree. Which gives you stability but not consistency.

OSX is consistent but Apple throws out backwards compatible features every other year, so not really stable.

OSX is at least predictable and therefore from a developers perspective it is arguably stable.

Linux is fine for developers as well.

But for users, it doesn't help if you bought a tool last year and it gets non functional because Apple removed or tightened down a function in their OS.

You can only hope than that the developers are still around and update it if that's even possible.

Linux could really use a "It just works" solution for desktop apps.

I think its significantly holding back desktop and laptop adoption. Besides all the distros and multiple desktop environments, all these permutations seems like its holding back applications. I use a cluster compute environment but my client is a mac. If apple can make a "unix" that runs applications well, why can't linux. (I can't code it but I would buy it)

I don't want a separate vm or container for each app I run.

I have my fingers crossed for snap packages. I've only installed the spotify 'snap' and it works flawlessly. I haven't mucked about with any other packages yet

Ugh. Snap is so f'ing over engineered. Linus chose AppImage for a reason. It's only a slightly over engineered implementation of Application Directories, which is the simple solution to this problem.

Well some breakage is the unfortunate inevitable consequence of progress.