Eh... It's absurd if you actually know how packages work or have ever built a package. A Linux end user, just starting out experimenting with different distros

Eh... It's absurd if you actually know how packages work or have ever built a package. A Linux end user, just starting out experimenting with different distros trying to install random packages they find online and not reading the right high-level documentation (like that debian link above) could very easily have the (false) experience that there are three kinds of Linuxes inside of which packages are largely interopable: RPM, DEB, and pacman . And to be fair, if they don't mind really messing up their system and bring enough different versioned dependencies in, this is kinda true, at least until they try to update. SUSE completely breaks this illusion. This thread brought me back to when I was first messing with Linux distros, I used some insane program called something like 'alien' to try to install .deb packages into Fedore Core, with no idea how wrong minded that whole enterprise was