Funny because I only care about Linux on the desktop and I don't have this problem, either. He talks about a state explosion of packages and libraries, but in

Funny because I only care about Linux on the desktop and I don't have this problem, either. He talks about a state explosion of packages and libraries, but in practice, I don't see that it matters. Yes, there is technically a state explosion, so you can't test every possible combination of packages. But you don't need to because they don't interfere with one another much in practice. I won't pronounce that as universally true (I suspect some people would strongly disagree), but that's been my experience.