I understand the desire to stick with your distro's package management where you can (especially if you use Debian or a Debian-derived distro. APT rocks.) Howe

I understand the desire to stick with your distro's package management where you can (especially if you use Debian or a Debian-derived distro. APT rocks.) However "stomping on your distro's package management" is not a fair description of what rvm does nor how it works. rvm is very well crafted to stay completely out of the way of a package manager like APT. If you use rvm normally, nothing is installed at the system level (e.g. /usr/local), much less into /usr/bin (or somewhere APT expects to manage). Everything is sandboxed in $HOME/.rvm/ nice and clean. You can remove it at simply as `rm -rf $HOME/.rvm` and a quick edit of your shell's start-up files. APT is in no way "stomped".