It is fine to have preferences for certain installations method. It is linux, it is all about freedom here. However, every distribution and installation method has its own advantages and disadvantages. Since this issue of old and new packages in different distributions comes up occasionally, I think there is a misunderstanding of what different distributions focus on.
The advantage of using an LTS distribution like RHEL or Debian Stable is that once you install the OS, updates are less likely to break a normal system. It only gets security updates instead of version updates. This is very important for business use. Rocky 9 (based off Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is supported until around 2032. Debian 13 got its packages frozen between March and July of this year, but Gramps 6.0.2 did not get released until June. That is why Gramps is old in Debian 13 and is not likely to get updated. Debian 13 is in Stable phase now. Browsers will stay old too. trixie Freeze Timeline and Policy That is the downside of using a stable or LTS distribution like RHEL or Debian. Debian does have backports for old releases like Debian 12, but that introduces potential incompatibility issues. The Red Hat world has RPM Fusion, but it has the same drawback of introducing instability for business. So Red Hat came up with Flatpaks as a compromise between system stability and having the latest packages. Snap is the competitor.
AppImage is another way to package newer apps, but if it pulls old packages from a stable distribution’s repository, the app could be unstable. Pulling in newer packages from third parties can introduce instability to your entire system. Still, if you prefer system installations then that is a good way for some people to get newer apps on old distributions. Another alternative is a source install. Source installs are still available for linux. Before Flatpaks and Snaps, unless there was a deb or rpm we had to either put up with old versions of apps or do source installs.
There are other distributions with newer packages, like Fedora or Debian Testing. So they have newer apps in their repositories, but the disadvantage is that not all the bugs are worked out of the new packages. Thus the “testing” status. Recently, Fedora 43 removed xorg when upgrading in place from Fedora 42 and apps like the official minecraft launcher stopped working. This kind of thing where apps stop working after an update is much more common for testing distributions than stable, in my experience. Then there is an extreme like Arch Linux. Arch Linux developers don’t release a GUI installer because the people who can’t install an OS from command line probably can’t fix or workaround inevitable bugs from a bleeding edge distribution. (Here is the obligatory “I used Arch Linux but didn’t like it. I had no problem with the updates causing crashes, I just didn’t like it. Really.” 
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Ubuntu was a nice compromise between having the latest packages with their instability and still using the proven old packages when possible. Ubuntu 24.04 was based on Debian Testing at the time (Trixie), but it tries to provide some package version updates that have a low chance of causing incompatibility with other system packages. So Ubuntu occasionally gets some browser and other app version updates when feasible. Still, as a compromise, Ubuntu won’t typically have the latest apps, but it will occasionally get a few more bugs than Debian Stable or RHEL. Canonical seems to have agreed with Red Hat that a containerized app update system made sense for introducing newer versions of apps with fewer bugs for the entire system, so they made Snaps. A lot of people like me got fed up with Canonical for various reasons, and so there is Linux Mint. Linux Mint has all the advantages of Ubuntu, but without being annoyed by Canonical. It’s great in my opinion.
Now here is the issue for app packagers. Just as browsers and other apps like Gramps need updates for new options and fixes, so do the dependencies require updates for bug fixes and new options. Sometimes, the dependency updates will cause apps like Gramps to get new bugs after release. Then a new version of Gramps has to be released. (One example from this year is that Gramps 6.0.2 included a bug fix for a gspell 1.14.0 update inducing an error in 6.0.1. https://gramps-project.org/bugs/view.php?id=13795 @Nick-Hall Debian Trixie repos have gspell 1.14.0-4 and Gramps 6.0.1+dfsg-1, in case someone makes a bug report. I don’t know if Debian ported any fixes to gspell to avoid that error, or if the combination of dependencies in Debian prevent this from being noticeable to users.) That is why dependency versions are sometimes the difference between an app package working or crashing. Also, in some cases it might be better for LTS or stable distributions to stick with the older app versions since they can’t install the newer dependencies that newer app versions require. Deb installers are used by Debian 11, 12, 13, Testing, and Bullseye, Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 25.04, and 25.10, Linux Mint 21, 22, LMDE 7, and any other debian branches. So there are old distributions getting phased out and new distribution versions with the latest packages still getting released. Some apps use dependencies which did not change much so for them one deb installer might work for most distributions. However, I suspect that making a Gramps deb installer that will work on all debian branch distributions currently being supported has got to be difficult. So do they focus on a certain distribution? Which version? How many deb installers need to be made and then tested? How much time to put into these packages? (I think I remember reading that the answer to these questions is actually that the latest Ubuntu LTS is the first priority but I am not 100% certain.)
So this is where we need volunteers. I am sure that Nick would be happy to have someone volunteer to make a deb installer, even if it targets their own version of Debian instead of all debian distros. I don’t know him personally, so I can’t say he will jump for joy. However, I am certain he will be grateful and willing to give some guidance if there are problems. I will add a link on how to make a deb installer for Debian below. DebianInstaller/Build - Debian Wiki
