I was more resigned than surprised. Annoyed, perhaps. Anyway, an LTS release would be guaranteed not to work with newer software, from my experience with them. Apologetics centering on users being prepared for normal updates to break random things do not forward Linux, in my opinion.

It's not clear to me that there's any way to get the level of polish needed for a major desktop OS without at least an army of (very critical) testers and developers, and maybe without forking most of the packages in the distro. Nevertheless, if OS X continues down the apparent path it's on, I'll be switching back again in a few years.