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Why Linux wound up with system package managers

Chris Siebenmann wrote a nice article explaining some of the early reasoning behind Linux package managers:

The abstract way to describe why is to say that Linux distributions had to assemble a whole thing from separate pieces; the kernel came from one place, libc from another, coreutils from a third, and so on. The concrete version is to think about what problems you’d have without a package manager. Suppose that you assembled a directory tree of all of the source code of the kernel, libc, coreutils, GCC, and so on. Now you need to build all of these things (or rebuild, let’s ignore bootstrapping for the moment).

Building everything is complicated partly because everything goes about it differently. The kernel has its own configuration and build system, a variety of things use autoconf but not necessarily with the same set of options to control things like features, GCC has a multi-stage build process, Perl has its own configuration and bootstrapping process, X is frankly weird and vaguely terrifying, and so on. Then not everyone uses ‘make install’ to actually install their software, so you have another set of variations for all of this.

This is good, but it does miss the biggest reason package managers exist: dependency hell. In short, imagine you’re installing a Linux system in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. You’d like to play music from your CD player, so you download a package and try to compile it, but realize that it’s missing a library. So you download the missing library and realize that to compile the library, you’ll have to upgrade an existing library in your system, so you upgrade, compile the library, and compile the music player application. Great, now you’ve got your music playing in the background, but now your web browser won’t launch because it depended on a specific version of the library you upgraded.

I’ve had this happen, and it was maddening. Having a centralized place that manages all the dependencies of a system was a godsend.

On another note, Chris' blog is excellent, I’ve been following it for a while. But the styling is so minimal it almost looks like there’s no css at all. In fact, I had to right-click and view source to verify. Turns out, Chris is using his own publishing system he calls “Dinky Wiki”, which I quite like.

LLMs have made simple software trivial

I was out for a run today and I had an idea for an app. I busted out my own app, Quick Notes, and dictated what I wanted this app to do in detail. When I got home, I created a new project in Xcode, I committed it to GitHub, and then I gave Claude Code on the web those dictated notes and asked it to build that app.

About two minutes later, it was done…and it had a build error. 😅

But it was a simple fix, I fixed it, and the app was running on my phone. And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn’t perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I’d say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run).

If we could figure out how to do this without consuming the power equivalent of New England in the winter, I’d be all for it.

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How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash

What you can control, though, are small iterative things that make you feel better on a human scale, in little ways, when you can. You can help yourself maintain perspective, and you can do the same for those around you who share your values, and who care about the same personal or professional goals that you do.

A lot of us still care about things like the potential for technology to help people, or still believe in the idealistic and positive goals that got us into our careers in the first place. We weren’t wrong, or naive, or foolish to aspire to those goals simply because some bad actors sought to undermine them. And it’s okay to feel frustrated or scared in a time when it seems to many like those goals could be further away than they’ve been in a long time.

I do hope, though, that people can see that, by sticking together, and focusing on the things that are within our reach, things can begin to change. All it takes is remembering that the power in tech truly rests with all the people who actually make things, not with the loudmouths at the top who try to tear things down.

Lovely essay by Anil Dash, and besides his abstractions he does include some very actionable advice. Like building expertise and investing in relationships.

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Accepting friction - listening without a streaming subscription

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick remembers the “homework” we used to do as music fans – reading reviews, seeking out the opinions of music critics – “all in the service of purchasing music.” Now there’s a pre-made playlist for every moment; we no longer need to spend hours curating playlists for ourselves if we want a different mix for working out, for writing, for cooking dinner. Streaming saves us a lot of work… but, ironically, people like things better when we have to work to find them. Being served music instead of seeking it out for ourselves makes us into consumers moreso than listeners. Fitzpatrick continues: “This passivity makes us as audiences, as people, less engaged with what we’re doing.”

Being more mindful, present, and engaged with whatever I’m doing is in line with this year’s theme of Getting Real1. I’ve been thinking more about my personal music collection, and how important music used to be to me. I remember doing a presentation for one of my clases on how impactful music can be back in 8th grade. I’ve even started building up a vinyl collection, and have really enjoyed the ritual and intentionality of spending time “listening to music”.

I’m not ready to cancel my Apple Music streaming account, my entire family uses it. But, I think it might be fun to sign out on my MacBook and rebuild my personal, curated, and beautifully organized mp3 collection again.

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  1. Not to be confused with the Basecamp book of the same name. ↩︎