2 things: - distro developpers put a lot of work in making distros easy to use and thus why yum install pandoc is simple and easy. we often take this for grant

2 things: - distro developpers put a lot of work in making distros easy to use and thus why yum install pandoc is simple and easy. we often take this for granted. - when people create new apps they very, very often think they can do better than others and suffer from the NIV/+1 standard. Hence multi libs, multi package managers and 203939megs of bloat. Programs that are proud of make install vs make + make install generally have this behavior obviously. In our case id recommend testing with some recent version of Fedora. its pretty close to CentOS but much newer. Of course that means you'll have to go through distro update more often.