I used to like apt, but then I kept running into situations (which I'll admit ought to be more rare than they are in my situation) where I needed to install sof

I used to like apt, but then I kept running into situations (which I'll admit ought to be more rare than they are in my situation) where I needed to install software packages for which some of the dependencies had since disappeared. I looked at the source and determined that the dependency was not necessary, and that I wanted to proceed without it. I could either rebuild the package myself, (which is not always trivial if the package maintainer did a lot more than just build and install the source), or ask the package manager to let me make the decision. Apt provides no option, and if you attempt it, it will not allow you to do anything else to the system unless you remove the package with the missing dependency, requiring you to then re-install the same file every time you make a change to the system. Zypper shows you a large warning about the consequence of installing packages without their dependencies. It then asks you if you would like to cancel the transaction, try and find the dependencies, or proceed at your own risk. It then honors that choice. The latter is perfect! edit: I'll agree that this is bad practice, but this happens a lot with projects that were built back when Oracle JDK was legal to distribute that way, and they require that package. I can install the correct version of Java in all the ways the package expects - but then I need to create an empty package with the name it wants. I think that's a worse work-around than explicitly overriding the dependencies.