Consistently broken (with each new release upstream, in other words, not "broken at all times") is kind of the norm in the Linux world. While MS goes to great lengths to keep Windows backwards compatible every which way, the various Linux projects regularly break APIs and backwards compatibility.
I don't think things are as bad as you say and certainly not as bad as they were; and I think it was libc6 that was responsible for a lot of problems about 2.x > 4.x times. There's also an issue with config files specifying a far newer version of library than is necessary - you can find a situation where config will throw out a number of complaints but the program's author has a downloadable binary that runs perfectly well on the same system that won't compile it from source.
What you miss is that a huge amount of stuff is packaged with the distro. You don't have to worry about applicationx from vendorx will fail because dependencyy has changed and vendorx, if they're at all bothered, will want ££s for an update - applicationx and dependancyy both come from the distro and if a dependency gets changed then the maintainers, at least for stable distros, recompile against it and fix breakages. If, however, you insist on running on the bleeding edge...
None of my comments apply to systemd-land, of course. That's just an attempt to bring the ?joys of Windows to Linux.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
