&gt;What people want is exactly the first thing you said. They want a package manager that does the things that npm and bundler and pip+virtualenv and cargo and everything else do, but works for all languages and across all platforms, and also provides the functionality of a system package manager.<p>But Guix and Nix provide exactly this.  They just need to be ported to more platforms and processor architectures.  Language-specific packages all have giant flaws like not being able to handle dependencies that aren&#x27;t packages for that language such as C shared libraries, or duplicating dependencies on disk for each project bundle, or relying upon a single point of trust without the option to build from source, non-reproducible builds, non-precise package specifications (loose versioning), etc.<p>Nix and Guix come with tools that act as a language-agnostic virtualenv called nix-shell and &#x27;guix environment&#x27;, respectively.  For example, if a Guix user wants to build Emacs from source, they can spawn a shell with all of the needed dependencies with &#x27;guix environment emacs&#x27; and move on with their lives.  It can&#x27;t get much more boring than that.  This is precisely what I want as a user of a package manager: To spend less time worrying about dependency management.  Nix and Guix, using the functional package management paradigm, are the only projects that offer it.