<i>A simple package system without dependency tracking has had many advantages for me.</i><p>Are you equating &quot;simple package system&quot; with &quot;per-package  service isolation&quot; here? Because otherwise I don&#x27;t see how your example about upgrades not requiring a reboot ties in with the package system. Debian has probably the most extensive package system, yet it still allows you to do upgrades without reboot. The major exception to this is dbus, because it still can&#x27;t do stateful restarts. But I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a problem that Slackware is able to avoid, unless it avoids dbus completely.<p>Also: since Wheezy, Debian allows parallel installation of many development and shared library packages from all (10!) arches, for example to facilitate cross-compilation. It&#x27;s still a work-in-progress, but I believe over 80% of the archive (not including packages with binaries) should be co-installable now.