&gt; Maybe it&#x27;s because I use a Macintosh, and thus have never been subject to the joys of apt&#x2F;yum&#x2F;pacman et al, but I&#x27;ve never been comfortable with the idea that I could install some binary or library and it&#x27;d be puked into the system execution context.<p>I don&#x27;t use a Macintosh. Is their OS system not built out of binaries or libraries? How are those managed, if not by a package manager? I was under the impression that Apple called their package manager &quot;the App Store&quot;.<p>&gt; I use homebrew, which has its problems no lie, but I can upgrade my own versions of software that might conflict with system level stuff without fear.<p>It&#x27;s true that some systems&#x27; package managers don&#x27;t support separation of each user&#x27;s packages from each other, or from system-wide packages. For example, I&#x27;ve used dpkg and rpm which don&#x27;t support that. However, some package managers <i>can</i> handle user-specific installation (e.g. Nix can), so I don&#x27;t see how using a combination (e.g. using Nix for user-specific packages, in a Debian system managed by dpkg) is any different from using homebrew alongside whatever-the-Macintosh-package-manager-is.<p>I&#x27;ve found that using the same package manager for both makes life easier though; e.g. it avoids having two copies of something installed, since one PM didn&#x27;t spot that the other had already installed it.<p>&gt; I&#x27;d like the distribution to stick to its knitting and leave the decisions about my personal world of versioning and dependencies to me.<p>Personally, I consider myself to be in charge of my computers, so my personal decisions about versioning and dependencies apply to both user-specific packages <i>and</i> the whole system; e.g. if I want to test on different versions of Python, I should be able to; if I want to have my kernel built with different compiler flags, I should be able to.