Nice podcast! I do agree and (although you alluded to it) I think you didn't explicitly mention how really *every application* and programming language also has it's very own package manager (Firefox, LibreOffice, Perl, Ruby etc.).

I've run a fair variety of distros in my time too and this is a problem that also bugged me. That, and the fact that packaging systems often make life difficult. You may need to wait months for the next release until you can install the latest version of an application, or be forced to run an entirely unstable version of your distro even though you only care about one of two applications. Also, if something goes wrong, you can't easily jump back to a working system.

While I agree that there are already too many packaging systems out there which do roughly the same thing I've found a system which truly fixes a lot of problems for me and it uses a very different and radical package manager. Amazingly, you didn't mention it in your comprehensive listing, but it's not surprising really. I think people are feeling the same fatigue you present and just aren't interested in yet another system.

I 