> (1) I get mired in packaging low level transitive dependencies and things which seem like they should be easy end up being nearly impossible this is most pai

> (1) I get mired in packaging low level transitive dependencies and things which seem like they should be easy end up being nearly impossible this is most painful, because a lot of packages do tons of tricks that make it very difficult to get reproducibility. Like downloading dependencies at build time, non standard places of installing things hardcoded paths etc. If you are tried cross compile arbitrary packages it might be familiar. A lot of projects don't know how to do things correctly, or doesn't care and just want their code to work. To that, other environments have their own quirks. For example the way most nodejs applications work they do expect their dependencies in current working or parent directory. All those things require some patching. If you can get the patch upstream that's awesome, otherwise you'll have to maintain it. What is great about other distros, is that if you try to use some exotic library, you can just try things randomly until you get it compiled and installed in /usr/local :) Imagine if you had RedHat installed, and it would impose that you can't run anything unless it's packaged in rpm. If you would have to prepare a .spec file and run rpmbuild command. I bet experience wouldn't be far off. Unlike RedHat Nix does force this and this is a double edged sword. It creates this pain, but on the other hand it forces some kind of order. BTW: if you want it hard enough you can still install packages the traditional way (but likely would have to specify --prefix to somewhere inside /home than /usr/local)