Conda manages this pretty well and the community ran “conda-forge” channel works. It’s language, platform and architecture agnostic. It only supports distributi

Conda manages this pretty well and the community ran “conda-forge” channel works. It’s language, platform and architecture agnostic. It only supports distributing binaries which can be a benefit or downside when compared to Nix’s “build the world with caching” approach depending on your needs. Personally I find conda’s approach to be more pragmatic for working with unprivileged systems and how packages expect to be used. Though I do hop the Nix-store like model continues to grow in popularity as it’s much better than the classic posix install layout. In conda, packages are installed into “environments” which are just folders like Python’s venv except language agnostic so you can install specific OpenSSL/Clang/GCC/libWhatever versions and have one environment per project you work on. It’s also the only package manager I’m aware of that can provide a good experience across Windows/Linux/macOS for x86_64/arm64/ppc64le. One issue with conda is that the ecosystem of tooling is a little fragmented. The classic “conda” package has performance issues but there is a second implementation “mamba” which fixes this at the cost of minor changes in behaviour and attempts to merge mamba into conda seem to have stalled. If you want to try it out Id recommend using the “Mambaforge” distribution and using “mamba” for everything except “conda activate” (which is actually a shell function).