Neverending Story

For some, package management under Linux is an absolute knockout compared with Windows. For newcomers, however, despite all the undeniable benefits of a consistent package database, the unfamiliar concept of software installation on Linux is often an insurmountable obstacle.

With at least three incompatible package formats or package management systems and the ability to build software from sources that can also have diverse archive formats, installing software can be formidable. Therefore, for years efforts have been made to spare beginners the details of the individual package formats and implement a kind of metapackage format along with a corresponding tool that would work under all distributions.