>In any case - apt-get, yum etc are third party tools that just copy, extract files from some server and run some pre-made configuration scripts. Thats all they

>In any case - apt-get, yum etc are third party tools that just copy, extract files from some server and run some pre-made configuration scripts. Thats all they do. Third party to whom, exactly? Each major distribution maintains its own repositories and packaging system. Okay, so that's all they do... it works great. They also provide a central place for your system to download a huge variety of software that has been tested and approved for your specific OS version. >All the hard work of figuring out dependencies, avoiding cycles, etc is done OUTSIDE the OS by the repository maintainers. You can do that on ANY OS. You could, but they don't. The fact is that for years prior to the Apple App Store for iPhone or OSX, or the Windows Store, there existed a way to install a wide variety of Linux software automatically and easily from a central source. >Different repositories which the user ads can and do have dependency conflicts. One package from repo-1 can require a lib with version >= 1.0 while another package from another repo-2 will only work with version 0.9, etc. I have often had to add add other repos to get software unavailable in current repos. I have run in to these issues quite often. And I am not even getting into how brittle apt-get in general is. Sure, that's true. Personally I've always found the software I need on the main repositories for Ubuntu or Debian, and not needed to add external sources. When there is a package I need that's not in a repository, installing a binary or compiling from source has worked fine. So I haven't experienced the problems you mention or hint at in 10-12 years of desktop and server Linux use.