Just a reminder that it doesn't have to be this way, and the Debian problem is mostly self-inflicted and caused by decades of backwards compatibility. You don't

Just a reminder that it doesn't have to be this way, and the Debian problem is mostly self-inflicted and caused by decades of backwards compatibility. You don't have to suffer it if you control what's running on your machines. Let's see how btop (mentioned in the article) is packaged by other distributions. Alpine: one very transparent and easy to understand shell script with about 20 LOC: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/community/btop/APKBUILD https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/c... Arch: same thing (there are a couple more files there, one of them is for an optional new version checker, the other is automatically generated): https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/btop/-/blob/main/PKGBUILD https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/bt... Void Linux: unlike the previous two, this uses a declarative language; it's still very short and easy to understand (though I prefer the imperative approach): https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/master/srcpkgs/btop/template https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/master/srcp... Chimera Linux: same as Void: https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/blob/master/user/btop/template.py https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/blob/master/user/bto... I often write Alpine & Arch packages, and it's honestly a joy. For most programs it takes just a few minutes, how the result works is obvious to anybody even moderately familiar with Linux.