A Debian base with something like Homebrew on top, so all the user-facing applications are always up-to-date, would be basically perfect. Which, I know there's

A Debian base with something like Homebrew on top, so all the user-facing applications are always up-to-date, would be basically perfect. Which, I know there's a Homebrew port for Linux, but it and its packages seemed rather more bug-ridden than than the Mac version, plus there were way fewer packages, last time I checked, probably because it has to support a whole bunch of underlying distros, Linux's culture around software packaging & libraries is... challenging, and there are simply a lot fewer eyeballs on it than on regular Homebrew. I think the distro itself would have to provide the separate non-system-software manager, specifically for that distro and close derivatives, for that to take off in Linux land. And it'd be a lot of work, to untangle that from underlying system software so the system packages could sit at a stable versions for months or years while the user-software updated on top of it. [EDIT] And, yeah, I know you can probably get a similar effect with Nix, but, ah, no. I tried it in a VM a couple years back, and it's a hard no. And I was a Gentoo user for years, so I'm not necessarily averse to some pain... but no.