<i>Managing software packages on Unix has always been, to put it politely, a giant pain, and most Linux distributions are built around the different ways we’ve all been trying to alleviate that pain</i><p>Ubuntu (Debian) seems to do this very well in my opinion.<p><pre><code>  sudo aptitude update; sudo aptitude upgrade
</code></pre>
And with 9.10, to add a repository you can just do<p><pre><code>  ppa:$repository
</code></pre>
To add Wine for example,<p><pre><code>  ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa</code></pre>