Great news, there's a distro called Slackware that eschews centralized package management (besides optionally delivering updates for preinstalled packages). It'

Great news, there's a distro called Slackware that eschews centralized package management (besides optionally delivering updates for preinstalled packages). It's been around for ~20 years before you started using Linux. If you'd like to rid yourself of the curse of centralized package management in favor of running "./configure && make && sudo make install" like a real man, you should give it a try.