Thanks for the information. So I assume Ubuntu now also allows parallel multiarch devel packages?<p>I&#x27;ve never tried Debian, and my experience with Ubuntu is very limited. I guess my comment on reboots was off-base, and maybe more of it. I meant that packages aren&#x27;t densely interconnected with dependencies. (macports has it really bad, seems every time I want to upgrade python I need to recompile gcc or something.) Anyway, the simplicity makes it easy to modify packages. E.g. last week I fiddled around with lua packages to allow parallel installing multiple versions (lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 are incompatible languages which are often mistaken for the same language by distro maintainers). However I realise creating .deb files is also easy, so I guess I could do just the same there. Also, Slackware&#x27;s multiarch support is a very simple hack using a small script that works 100% of the time as far as I&#x27;ve seen. It&#x27;s telling that Debian still only supports 80% of packages after who knows how much work put into it.