And the problem with this approach is of course the dependency management. Just because you have the file for package X doesn't mean it will work if you're miss

And the problem with this approach is of course the dependency management. Just because you have the file for package X doesn't mean it will work if you're missing some of its dependencies. And those dependencies have dependencies etc. Which is why now we use e.g. yum and apt to install stuff, and not rpm and dpkg directly.