> I like having software that is up to date and delivered direct from the developer.

I really think your argument against package managers on Linux is incorrect. Many linux distributions provide "some recent version" of common tools, but of course you can get the latest package directly from the developers.

Nothing stops you from getting the latest packages directly from the developer (assuming the developer provides packages in the first place). Some developers even offer their own repository you could add to the package manager so you can stay up to date regardless of whatever version you don't like in the OS repository.

> I like having portable applications that don't even need installation.

You can build from source and run without installing. That's probably not quite what you mean though.

> I like being able to put applications on different disks.

No problem here. You can mount disks to wherever you want and you can install using a prefix path to those locations.

> I like being able to have multiple versions of an application.

Prefix path to the rescue here too.

Edit: answered more of your concerns

> but of course you can get the latest package directly from the developers.

If you're willing to compile it from source, which I'm not since it isn't the 70s anymore.

>...

The rest of these are all the same thing: you can do these things as long as you compile from source. As I've already mentioned, I consider that a backwards and tedious way to deal with application installation. I mean ffs, getting build environments right is such a pain that many devs ship a docker container of a working environment. Not to mention it is only viable with OSS software.

Compiling most things is decidedly nontrivial. Half an hour of wasted time is not appropriate just to install something in a different directory.

A package manager really should be able to do prefixed installs on any package, but that's far from a universal feature right now.

> Compiling most things is decidedly nontrivial.

I've spent the past five years building a lot of things from source. I agree that there are definitely a lot of things that it's nontrivial for. However, I've found that the hardest part is satisfying dependencies. Once dependencies are satisfied, building is usually really easy. And the software that isn't easy to build after satisfying dependencies is usually not worth building in the first place.

Of course, that's just my experience as a C++ developer.

Gentoo can do prefixed installs, I'm reasonably certain alpine can as well. If you're on debian you can always just make a chroot with debootstrap.

AppFS is a package manager for Linux that exists and solves all these problems, except the "putting them on different disks", which it doesn't prevent you from doing but it doesn't really make any sense either.

http://appfs.rkeene.org/

If its one thing I have learned about software development, its that you must account for people doing completely non sensical things.

I knew a guy who had MS word 97, 2000, 03, and 07 all installed on the same machine, and he used all of them for various tasks. Insane? Most certainly, but welcome to humanity.

AppFS has no problem with that. The problem comes from keeping different packages on different disks -- since it caches them all into the same directory by default. It would be trivial to make it cache files from certain packages into different places as part of the configuration -- that's easy enough. The issues come into place for files that are shared (having the same SHA1) between packages, then you either have to duplicate the file or have some policy of searching for it.

A better approach, if you care about this, is simply to have a lifecycle policy where more recently used blocks live on the SSD and less recently used blocks move to slower storage (bcache can do this for you), or are deleted (this is a planned feature: http://appfs.rkeene.org/web/tktview?name=930821d0fb ).

>but it doesn't really make any sense either.

I don't need every program on my SSD. Makes perfect sense.

Aside from the obvious missing feature, there isn't even enough information to very your claims. Can I really have two versions of, say Krita, installed? Can I make a copy of that to take to an offline PC?

Yes. Since there's no explicit install step you can run as many versions as you want. You can of course copy the files to the cache of any system.

Sounds like AppImages would satisfy all your requirements.

Yeah, they do actually. I really like AppImage, it's a shame they aren't really embraced at all by the community. Good luck getting them to show up with icons in your file manager (even Nitrux, which supposedly embraces AppImages, can't seem to do it).

Occasionally, I still run into a piece of software which makes me yearn for the days when I built my own /usr/local from source. But as the repos have got better, this is getting to be a rare event. I still don't like the feeling of being boxed into the package management system. And the extra level of complication trying to manage issues from building software from source which reference package managed libraries and other dependencies.

There's no reason that they need to come from the developers. I'm maintaining over a dozen packages that build directly from HEAD that are all integrated with my package manager and allows anyone else to leverage my work and get my packages.

Nix is the package manager that does this. It literally does damn near everything that comes out of every HN discussion of package managers, ever, but very few seem to bother investigating it.

There's several reasons for that, like it still means building from source, or that nix is basically its own programming language you have to learn.

Also, if I understand how nix works correctly, it still can't create portable applications.

And then how do you find the software? Google? That’s fine until the top link is a third party that adds adware to the installer.

I like how homebrew cask does it, where each cask is a formula to download the app into /Applications . You get the reproducibility of package lists, the speed of just typing an install / search command vs searching a website and the connivence of normal app installation and management.

Snapcraft?

Not portable, can't install applications to different disks.