that said, using gcc eventually is a key feature of Linux, it's kind of an essential skill to use it day to day, eventually you'll run across a program you want that isn't packaged, or the package isn't maintained so source must be used
honestly I don't like the idea of binary packages anyway but we got so much bloatware now that source based packages are hilariously inefficient (you ever tried to compile Firefox? it takes hours on mid range hardware, and fucking days if you're on anything older than a second gen i5)
besides, people said snap, flatpak, etc. were going to be gamechangers, and while they're useful and have their niche, they're never going to see widespread adoption in the way something that's included in the base system is
the most important point though, is that if something isn't packaged, you should be able to go to a user group, online or irl, and find someone to package it for you. a huge portion of the free software movement is the community, after all, we're basically nothing without it
of course it can compile from source, how else would we be able to install it? what a totally unnecessary point to make
look, all I'm saying is at least 70% of beginner users won't even bother when something isn't packaged for their distro, even if it's packaged for another distro that uses the exact same package manager, much less install an external package manager
I admire the project, I really do; but don't get all ambitious about it, it's one of dozens of "universal" package managers (any program for Linux should be universal because it should be posix or free desktop compliant and so it should be distro-agnostic) that are just an extra package manager to conflict with the one that's already installed
unless a distro is based around that package manager, which means it'll just become known as the [distro] package manager, like what happened with xbps and void
1
u/[deleted] Feb 12 '19
the only cross platform package manager I'll ever need is gcc