IMO distros shouldn't be packaging the world anymore, anyway. Base system from the distro, everything else from a separate, probably cross-distro package manage

IMO distros shouldn't be packaging the world anymore, anyway. Base system from the distro, everything else from a separate, probably cross-distro package manager. The trouble, of course, is that this is hell for a Linux desktop system, because you can't cleanly put the GUI stack in either "base system" or "everything else", especially with all the shared libs and such.