I'm not sure if it would address his needs, but NixOS takes a different approach. The package manager, Nix, can run in a Linux environment or even macOS. GNU

I'm not sure if it would address his needs, but NixOS takes a different approach. The package manager, Nix, can run in a Linux environment or even macOS. GNU Guix is another variant of it. I've played around with it and really liked it, but it's mostly been false starts when trying to do anything serious. I understand why there's a DSL, but I had trouble groking it enough to build my own stuff.