[joshvm]

Or it simply has a name you don't expect. A lot of the problems I had in Linux, before I got used to it, was simply not knowing what I needed to install.

I'm used to being able to do, 'brew install foo' and not needing to worry if I needed libfoo, libfoo-dev, libfoo3-dev or just plain foo.

[microtonal]

  apt-cache search foo

Done :). But I see your point. There's usually the library, the development headers plus static link library, and possibly some command line tools.

And usually the headers aren't that big (with the notable exception of template-heavy C++), so it's much simpler installing everything.

But such splitting primarily occurs in the Debian family.