> There must be some way to _unify_ this proliferation of software update mechanisms. There are many ways. The problem is there are many different environment

> There must be some way to _unify_ this proliferation of software update mechanisms. There are many ways. The problem is there are many different environments who all use different methods for different reasons. To a solo developer with personal control over the entire stack, the Operating System is merely one more tool in the toolbox. That dev can pick any distro he wants and then install and configure anything he wants(as root). To a postdoc researcher in a lab using the University's shared compute cluster, leveraging the OS might not be such an obvious and easy choice. Then of course there is the whole issue that Wordpress, ruby, system software, and IDEs are all developed by very different groups of people. But back to your question: configuration management tools can help with this problem. They do require some end-user investment at this stage, in no small part due to the reasons I identified above (there's not yet an ideal default that works for everyone). Generally, configuration management tools encourage you to declare your software, modules, packages, requirements in an abstraction layer and then have the config management tool handle the messy details of whether to use apt or yum or gems. The catch right now is that you will typically have to do handle those decisions (to some extent) yourself. Ansible: http://docs.ansible.com/gem_module.html http://docs.ansible.com/gem_module.html http://docs.ansible.com/apt_module.html http://docs.ansible.com/apt_module.html http://docs.ansible.com/yum_module.html http://docs.ansible.com/yum_module.html Puppet: https://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html#package-providers https://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html#pack... Chef: https://docs.chef.io/chef/resources.html#gem-package https://docs.chef.io/chef/resources.html#gem-package https://docs.chef.io/chef/resources.html#apt-package https://docs.chef.io/chef/resources.html#apt-package https://docs.chef.io/chef/resources.html#yum-package https://docs.chef.io/chef/resources.html#yum-package