For what it's worth, I develop almost exclusively on Ubuntu, but built-in package management is no panacea. You get one version of each package, and it is ofte

For what it's worth, I develop almost exclusively on Ubuntu, but built-in package management is no panacea. You get one version of each package, and it is often years out of date. If you need a newer version you'll have to install it yourself and then try to navigate how to get your projects to use your local version. For any popular package that is still undergoing a fair amount of change it is likely that eventually some project you want to build will need a newer version than the one your distro provides. So you still need a solution to the versioning problem separate from the distro packaging environment, at least for development.