[kitsunesoba]

The thing that gets me about Linux package managers is how easily they can wreck your desktop. Granted mac package managers aren’t perfect here either but I think it would make a lot of sense for there to be some way to designate things like audio systems or your DE as “system” packages and as such be protected and very difficult to accidentally screw up with e.g. dependency resolution gone awry.

I’d also not be opposed to a package manager more geared towards making sure things work without fuss than trying to reduce redundancy. I don’t really mind if there’s multiple versions of whatever lib installed if that’s what it takes. Storage is cheap, my patience isn’t.

In theory flatpak and such should meet that need, but the implementation is so much more quirky and troublesome compared to e.g. Mac application bundles.

[smoldesu]

> some way to designate things like audio systems or your DE as “system” packages and as such be protected and very difficult to accidentally screw up with e.g. dependency resolution gone awry.

I do this on NixOS (and used Nix to do the same thing on MacOS). It's really great, but the up-front work of configuring everything can be a bit steep. The end result is pretty nice though - your environments are all sym-linked together from a common package store, and you can group together certain environments/package sets to update independently of one another. The icing on the cake is the rollback feature, where you can go back through the generations of your environment (until the packages get GCed).

It's not perfect (and it would test your patience), but Nix is an interesting commitment to the philosophy of using as much disk space as possible. I'm hopeful that someday it will be the de-facto package manager for Mac systems.