&gt;The language package manager can have so much richer information than the system one, is the thing.<p>This is simply not true.  Language package managers cannot describe the entire dependency graph of a piece of software because they can&#x27;t handle things that aren&#x27;t written in that language.  For example, there are plenty of Ruby gems that require a C compiler and C shared libraries in order to work, but those dependencies cannot be encoded in that system.  System package managers can describe the entire graph, thus providing richer information.<p>&gt;Finally most system package managers won&#x27;t let you have multiple versions of a library installed at all, which makes using more than 2 programs at the same time virtually impossible (because they usually want different versions of some dependent library or other).<p>Yes, this is a big issue with the status quo system package managers.  Fortunately, there&#x27;s hope on the horizon in the form of functional package management.  Functional package managers such as GNU Guix and Nix allow for an arbitrary number of variants of the same software to coexist without conflict.  Additional benefits include unprivileged package management, transactional upgrades and roll backs, reproducible builds, and no central point of trust for binaries (anything can be built from source).<p>Language package managers are good for quickly sharing code written purely in that language with other developers, but unacceptable for anything else.