I'd expect that like other OSes core dependencies would still be managed by the distributor. But these are nothing but the barest essentials to making the OS wo

I'd expect that like other OSes core dependencies would still be managed by the distributor. But these are nothing but the barest essentials to making the OS work. I count udev, and glibc, and zlib among these. Mac OS X does this. But these are very few in number compared to the number of total packages that are stored on, for example, Ubuntu's repositories. If the price of having apps that just download and work on any distribution is having a more complicated middleware system, then I'll take it.