PHP was always simple to setup and use, the system package manager has all the extensions. Sorry if I misunderstood what you're trying to say but this makes no

PHP was always simple to setup and use, the system package manager has all the extensions. Sorry if I misunderstood what you're trying to say but this makes no sense to me. It's still the same simplicity to install PHP. But what you do with the package manager is not the same thing as what you achieve with composer. PHP extensions != PHP libraries. You can also use the package manager to install python, ruby, perl, etc. What you generally don't do is use the package manager to install random 3rd party libraries (unless it's a really big project that's been packaged. e.g.: phpmyadmin) Surely you wouldn't want php library maintainers to also create deb's and rpm's of their projects and host their own repositories, deal with distro release politics and other hindrances just so you can use apt or yum to install them?