Not op here, but: I think the philosophy of ports and packages (shared with other BSDs) has an upside over dpkg and rpm in that you can customize options when y

Not op here, but: I think the philosophy of ports and packages (shared with other BSDs) has an upside over dpkg and rpm in that you can customize options when you build from source. The downside is that building from source takes a long time. If you follow Debian testing or sid, you will experience a lot of dependency breakage that I've never seen on a BSD, but that may not be dpkg or apt's fault so much as ongoing package maintenance causing those issues.