I am a developer who had been working on such a cross-distro installation system. www.autopackage.org. You wouldn't believe the issues we had encountered. There

I am a developer who had been working on such a cross-distro installation system. www.autopackage.org. You wouldn't believe the issues we had encountered. There were technical challenges but they pale in comparison to the resistance we got from distro makers and veteran users. The resistance arguments boil down to (from what I can remember): - Cross-distro installation is only useful for closed source software. - apt/yum/$DISTRO_SPECIFIC_PACKAGING_TOOL is the ultimate packaging tool, everything else is evil and can break the system. - Different distros should be regarded as entirely different operating systems and hence shouldn't need to be compatible. Until the community accepts the notion of a cross-distro installation system, things look very bleak indeed.