I agree wholeheartedly. I develop in ruby and ocaml on ubuntu, which both suffer this problem (I assume all languages do). As a user, I have no tolerance for d

I agree wholeheartedly. I develop in ruby and ocaml on ubuntu, which both suffer this problem (I assume all languages do). As a user, I have no tolerance for dealing with dependency hell for things like a desktop pdf viewer or rss reader, and a decent gui frontend to APT literally provides a one-click solution to installing an application and all it's required dependencies. As a developer, I gave up on using APT as part of my development process long ago - I manage my own library of sources and binaries. It's just too painful to synchronize a development environment with the debian/ubuntu repositories that are being updated on their own schedule. From personal experience, I can say the worst case is having your development environment break b/c you updated your email client, which is easy to do if you use APT to manage your binaries, regardless of the languages involved.